Resurrection

I’m up to my cerebral cortex in pastors, I’ll tell you. Can’t seem to swing a pointed locution without lacerating one. Cringe sometimes as I’m writing this. When some words feel like they've cut someone.

Conversation with a guy. Well let’s just say of the many pastors I hobnob with, he’s the one I most enjoy. I don’t know if you’ve ever read Women in Love. D.H. Lawrence. Berkin and Gerald. Not that either of us is like Gerald.

But the kind of elemental friendship those two have. A friendship between men that goes deeper than most men allow. Allow as possible. Mostly.

Topic: Resurrection.

An appropriate time to have it, too. What with Easter coming up.

We talk. How shall I say this. We talk about this because we’re Jesus freaks. Because we can’t seem to stop talking about him. Can’t seem to leave the poor son of a God alone.

We talk and talk. It’s a long conversation. Too boring to replicate here. But not for us. Pure excitement. God coming out of the woodwork. Per usual when we talk.

The I AM’s lightning bolts firing up the sky and all the inward spaces. Hearts quickening. Minds racing like a couple of Dodge Chargers up the street. Up Woodward Avenue.

And where we get to is this. We don’t know what the nature of the resurrection. What the nature of a new earth and a new heaven. Will ultimately be. What new vistas will open once we close our eyes for the last time.

Is there a parallel universe? Is there a replacement of this earth with a new one? Is this one destroyed? Or is it transformed? What would a new heaven look like? What is the current heaven like? Are we humans no longer human? Are we something else? If so, what else? Are we matter? Are we the sort of matter we are now? The same tissues? Or is there a different physics? A different biology? A different chemistry? A different spirituality? A different relation between matter and spirit?

What would one do all day? The same kinds of things one does now? If different, how? Would we converse with other orders of being? What would other orders of being look like? What would we say, for example? What would we think and feel, for example? Would we get to speak with God? Would we get to converse with Jesus? Would there be football? Would there be drag racing of the mind? What would the women look like? Does Marilyn Monroe live there?

We aren’t provided answers. Only a few hints. A few suggestions. Several visual images and metaphors. That’s all. And people.

Some people make up vast imaginative landscapes. Tolkien-like worlds, where everything’s worked out. But as I say. Lovely imaginative exercises. But really quite off the point. Quite definitely off the beam.

No. The real thing for us. The only bit worth this sort of elaborate mental focus. Is the I AM himself. The living God himself. Looking for him. Expecting him. Searching for and finding him here. On this earth. In this life.

Finding him in this world. Enjoying him now. Following him here. Opening our hearts to him in this defeated looking winter’s end time. This bare sticks and mud and lingering and dirty great mounds of snow time.

Because we can’t know more than this. Can’t know more than him. He hasn’t told us, after all. Only winked. Only tipped his hat in a general direction. And asked us. Look ladies. Look here gentlemen. Be satisfied for now with me. With what we may do together. With how we may love one another today. In this world. This place that yes.

Yes. Is ragged looking now. But wait. Be patient. It won’t be long. And it will all blossom. It will all unfurl. It will all open again into promiscuous color and smell and sound and celebration.

Trust me. Follow me into this moment, where everything is possible. Even here. Even in this place of trouble. Where there is also paradise.