SNC

For the Hope of Heaven

I'll make you happy, baby, just wait and see

So much discussion of Christianity, and of religion in general, is based in the afterlife. On the one hand, the fear of Hell is felt to terrify into submission; on the other, the hope of Heaven is felt to lure into obedience. I have heard as much from traumatized ex-vangelicals, from dissenting liberal Christians, and even, as regards the utility of the fear of Hell, from church fathers such as in Augustine's statement, "They that have felt in any degree the sweetness of wisdom and truth, know how I say, how great a punishment it is to be only separated from the face of God: but they that have not tasted that sweetness, if not yet they yearn for the face of God, let them fear even fire, and from Catholic doctrine see the concept of imperfect contrition. Many people accuse the Christian religion of using Hell to terrify people into piety, and many Christians openly agree, arguing the fires of Hell are very real and very scary. I have even heard universalist theologians argue, "Universalists Should Warn People About Hell Too." The issue, then, becomes whether Hell is real or not.

I have never been greatly moved by these hopes and fears. I did not grow up fearing Hell and desiring Heaven; I grew up fearing the annihilation of my consciousness and hoping for its survival through a kind of secular panpsychism. So I can kind of understand what people mean by how growing up with the hope/fear dynamic of Christianity affected them, but only by analogy. The difference was that I never had any belief in any real "afterlife": my fear merely related to whether my consciousness was tethered to my physical existence or to the existence of all things. I knew I myself as an individuated person would be gone in the end, and I was at peace with that, so long as it did not effect a kind of reverse creatio ex nihilo, a creatio nihil fit. That, of course, is the one thing Christian children are assured is not going to happen.

Nevertheless, I did grow up with sorely-felt fears and hopes, and so I was affected by Spinoza's arguments against an eschatology of terror. Spinoza, in the Ethics, argues that hope is not a valid basis for true and lasting human joy, because the underside of hope is always fear, whose basis is suffering, which always reduces a person's powers of existence and so is antithetical to their joy, which increases their perfection. His approach to death is one in which a person, by dedicating themselves more and more to the thoughts of God and of eternal things, no longer has any reason to be afraid of death, as much of the activities of their minds are eternal and not reliant on their bodily existence. The pursuit of these eternal modes of life is synonymous to the pursuit of virtue, the intellectual love of all things and solidarity with humankind. It is for this reason that Spinoza writes, "Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself." We discover our eternal life, which is not an "afterlife" because it is not in time, in our virtues, which are immortal. "For righteousness is immortal" (Wisdom of Solomon, 1:15).

This approach to death was, to my mind, satisfying. It taught me not to fear death and not to want it—because there is nothing desirable about a death which is, in the end, illusory. But then, in January of this year, I began to go to an Anglican church in which the Nicene creed is regularly recited, ending in the words: "And I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen." How was I supposed to recite this when I did not look for those things? It was not that I was like what Paul rebukes in saying, "If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied" (1 Corinthians 15:19). I did look for eternal life in the face of God, because I did believe that one's mind exists under the aspect of eternity as well as under finitude. But I did not look for everlasting life, or for a second life. The eternal is not the everlasting, as the eternal is outside time, while the everlasting is unbounded in time. I felt no need for the latter.

My hope for Christianity was this: that it would teach me to love my God and to love my neighbour better than I did. I did not care for the reward of Heaven, because to practice those virtues in this life was enough of a gift for me. And I did not care much about the threat of Hell, because I accepted that God might do whatever the will of God was to me, for good or ill, and so, like Marie de l'Incarnation, "I saw that I was deserving of hell and that God's justice would have done me no wrong by casting me into the abyss, and this was acceptable to me if only I were not deprived of friendship with God." This last fear, of separation from God, did scare me. But even Paul seemed to advise against letting it trouble me: "Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God" (Philippians 4:6). "The scripture says, 'No one who believes in him will be put to shame'" (Romans 10:11).

However, I didn't want to merely pick out whichever clauses of the Creed I liked and throw out those I felt I didn't need. You wouldn't toss out a key proposition of Spinoza's Ethics just because you didn't like it, because so much might be built on it that you could not approach the system as a whole if you did. I felt that the Creed was beautiful and compelling, and so I did not want to lobotomize it. So I decided I must learn to have some hope in Heaven, and in a world to come which has no end. And there were only two problems: first of all, that I had no reason to believe that this was real, because I did not see why everlasting life was more in concord with the love of God than atemporal life; and second, that I did not know how to hope without also instilling fear. And Spinoza had really and truly convinced me fear was an unsound foundation.

For every kiss you give me, I'll give you three

Of the allies of the resurrection of the dead, I had never expected to count Adorno as one of them. However, in his "Theses Against Occultism," he compares occultism unfavourably to religions which preach the resurrection. "The great religions have either, like Judaism after the ban on graven images, veiled the redemption of the dead in silence, or preached the resurrection of the flesh. They take the inseparability of the spiritual and physical seriously. For them there was no intention, nothing 'spiritual,' that was not somehow founded in bodily perception and sought bodily fulfilment. To the occultists, who consider the idea of resurrection beneath them, and actually do not want to be saved, this is too coarse." Unlike the redemption which Spinoza describes, which is of the mind but is not of the body, it is the corporeality of resurrection which appeals to Adorno as a dialectical materialist. The resurrection of the body implies that the innumerable and agonizing contraditions and mortifications of an actual human life are not swept under the rug forever. They remain an issue which has to be redressed, forcing salvation to speak to the real conditions of life, not merely to its mental reflections. The messianic Marxism which Walter Benjamin describes, in which the resurrection of the dead is able to coincide so easily with dialectical materialism without truly erasing the religious character of the former, may have been what Adorno had in mind. Dialectical materialism and the resurrection of the dead make a problem of the complete history of human barbarism. The latter need not be approached as an escapist device.

"Either make the tree good, and its fruit good; or make the tree bad, and its fruit bad; for the tree is known by its fruit. You brood of vipers! How can you speak good things, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. The good person brings good things out of a good treasure, and the evil person brings evil things out of an evil treasure. I tell you, on the day of judgment you will have to give an account for every careless word you utter; for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned" (Matthew 12:33–37).

What I like about blessedness in the account of the Gospels is that it cannot, fundamentally, be about you. If you feel God thoroughly in yourself, and apply your mind to the thoughts of God, you may feel that you are saved. And indeed, it seems this faith does save: "If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved" (Romans 10:9). Nevertheless, the proof of this faith cannot be in oneself, but must be in another, and so we will have to give account for everything we have done to each other, all our triumphs and all our failings. I particularly enjoy the glorious passage in Matthew 25:31–46, where Christ surprises the righteous by saying that what they have done for the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, and the prisoner they have done to him, and where he shocks the wicked by saying that what they have not done for these people they have not done for him. I especially like the surprise and the shock here, because neither group has truly realized that what they have done was done to Christ. When we treat God, or Christ, as a conception in our heads, and do what we do for God's sake as we know him, we risk making God a part of ourselves, and so being faithful only to our imaginations. We thereby relate to unresurrected Christ, who lives only in our minds and only says what we believe him to say. But when we love others, and strain to find Christ in them even though we cannot see him, and when we love them all the more for our inability to see, then we relate to a resurrected Christ, who is not in our imaginations (for we fail to imagine him) but is with us in the world. From an imaginary Saviour comes imaginary salvation; from a resurrected Saviour comes the resurrection of the dead.

Here is a path out of an imaginary Heaven and an imaginary Hell, and with it, out of a hope whose counterpart is fear. We begin with love, by accepting the charge to love God, and to do so by loving one another as God has loved us. And then we move to faith, to bind ourselves to this love at all times by remaining faithful to God and to others, even when God's presence is nowhere evident to us, even when the presence of Christ in the other is completely invisible. And then, only then, do we move to hope, placing our hope not in something we imagine but in a faith which endures in the absence of everything we can imagine. We secure our faith not by imagining its fulfillment, and thus not by confident anticipation, but by acting in a manner which demonstrates our willingness to put our hopes in our faith—even when we cannot banish doubt, even when we cannot understand, even when we do not know and are not given a sign. Hope secures faith, which calls out greater hopes: the activity of hope is loving action, and the promise of faith is given to love. There is no way to merely believe in this process. It has to be acted out.

I believe this hopeful action is well-represented in the Parable of the Talents. When I first read this parable, I felt it was one of the more obscure parts of the Gospels. Jesus's teachings aren't exactly sound investment advice, generally speaking: to give without any hope of receiving a return, to allow yourself to be stolen from, to give up anything and everything to follow him. So what is here meant by investment? Well, the first key is that nothing the servants invest (or don't invest, as it may be) is their own. All they give they understand to be given to them, and the fear of the servant who does not invest and merely gives back the talent he is given is not of squandering his own property, but that of his master. There is, then, no contradiction between giving up what you have and this kind of investment, for those who invest are not those who themselves own anything. The second key is Jesus's descriptions elsewhere of giving away as a kind of investment: "'Truly I tell you,' Jesus replied, “no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life'" (Mark 10:29–30).

What we give up into Christ's service, we recognize not to be our own to keep, and at the same time, receive a return on investment of it which benefits us. We have cause to hope, because we have a promise of gain, and we have nothing to lose, because we give up nothing of our own. We have cause to hope, but have no need to fear—but this fearless hope can only come about if we have faith that our Master is returning, to our reward. Moreover, this fearless hope is impossible if our faith is not in our Master's love. The servant in Matthew's account of the Parable who does not invest knows his Master is real and is coming back, and knows that what he has is not his own but is his Master's—but he says, "Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours" (Matthew 25:24–25). With every investment there is a risk of loss, without which there could not be profit, and with every good action there is a risk of it going awry by circumstance or by our own limitations. If we believe that we serve a Master who is not loving, and who would not forgive us if our investments failed, we cannot bring ourselves to invest. Though in fact, we see no one in the Gospels try without succeeding.

Heaven cannot be a reward for our own goodness: we have nothing of our own to store up there. But as we recognize that what we have on Earth is not our own, and so put it toward the service of God, our hope of Heaven increases with no underside of fear, even when we cannot imagine it. "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" (Matthew 6:19–21). Our hearts are drawn toward Heaven, and so they do the works of Heaven on Earth, while allowing us to hope outside of Earth. By these works I mean something very practical. We give our time and resources and even our body for the good of everyone, and especially for the lowest of the low who by the standards of the world are the least in grandeur. "If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world" (James 1:26–27).

There is a fantastic article on charity from a source I generally disagree with, associated with the conservative schismatic Anglican Church in North America. Credit where it is due, Brandon LeTourneau gets it, and "Sacral Almsgiving: Presence & Sacrifice" is a fantastic case for the centrality of alms-giving in Anglican Christianity. I was particularly touched by the quotes LeTourneau collects about how charity allows the presence of Christ in the Eucharist to become effective: "sacral almsgiving is not like the sacraments, it ensures the sacraments," "one will not find Christ in the chalice if they do not find Him in the beggar," "you cannot claim to worship Jesus in the Tabernacle if you do not pity Jesus in the slum." But the point I'd really like to comment on is where LeTourneau writes, "if the grace that they may procure for their benefactors was truly perceived, one would quickly and often run about so as to offer alms in order to receive it." After all, "it is more blessed to give than to receive" (Acts 20:35), and so to give is always a win-win—a very good investment. But of course, if the grace of this investment were "truly perceived," faith would be supplanted by perception, and hope by the experience of the reward. At that moment, "Faith will vanish into sight; / hope be emptied in delight" from the hymn "Gracious Spirit, Holy Ghost", which can only happen on the day of the Second Coming when all is revealed. Before then, we can only hope, and "run about" doing the work of God according to our ability, accepting the wages of hope for the strengthening of faith.

Oh, since the day I saw you, I have been waiting for you

What does it mean to be rewarded in Heaven? We can imagine rewards akin the rewards on this Earth: that some people, in the world to come, will have bigger houses and plots of land than others, for example. Yet none of that really seems like a reward when we consider the glory of the beatific vision. Does having a larger Heavenly house really reward us when it is set alongside the absolutely infinite love and joy and glory of God, communicated to us eternally and everlastingly, poured out for us to dwell and explore and grow in without limit? It seems crass to me to even consider those kinds of rewards, and petty in a way that Heaven cannot possibly be petty. Will we derive any satisfaction from seeing others in Heaven less blessed than we are, like we would having the biggest house on an avenue? That cannot be our reward.

But our reward in Heaven could be one another. Let's say that, by our actions, we helped to bring a person who would not have been saved into salvation. We know that that would be a joy worthy of Heavenly attention because Jesus says it is: "Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance" (Luke 15:7). And really, there can be no surprise about that. Jesus clearly attributes a huge amount of importance to friendship, given that it is in friendship, over any kind of relationship, that we see the perfect example of love: "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father" (John 15:13–15). To quote a common joke, "Nobody talks about Jesus's greatest miracle – having 12 close friends in his 30s." So much of Jesus's ministry is essentially about building up a society of friends, not only in this world but in the next. And every person who shares Heaven with us is our friend forever.

I don't think we consider that Heavenly friendship often enough. Consider how valuable a life-long friend is; now consider how infinitely more valuable a friend for eternity must be. Consider how infinitely deep the love and understanding between two people who have known each other for unfathomable aeons must be. Now consider that this is what Christians hope to have not with one person, or even with hundreds, but with billions. This prospect boggles my mind. I literally cannot imagine it, because it is so radically beyond the scale of what my human life can comprehend. But I can tell that, whatever joy I know in friendship in this life, the communion of saints which I hope for is astonishingly greater—and this is enough to bring tears to my eyes. There can only be one greater joy than this: only the joy of the friendship of Christ my God, the Friend of friends, can be greater, and it is he who makes these other friendships possible. Nevertheless, I do not think the superior friendship of God makes the friendship of any saint less valuable or less exquisite. There is a truly astonishing reward: to be able to dwell together, forever, world without end.

The funny thing about these kinds of friends is that you are constantly seeing them for the first time. Every time you step out onto a busy street, you see someone for the first time, and it is reasonable to hope that that is the first time you will see someone whom you will know and love forever. If many are saved, you are constantly making first impressions you will carry with you beyond the end of time. If all are saved, then literally every time you meet someone, you are meeting someone who will be more important to you than your husband or wife ever could be in your time on Earth. To really act on this fact would be a true ethics of extremity, because how much kindness and gentleness would you hope to show to someone that important to you in your first encounters? For in fact, every encounter you have with someone on Earth is merely the first tenth of a second in an everlasting year. You are only ever just getting to know your friends.

When meeting someone you've fallen in love with at first sight, it's a cliche to say, "I've been waiting for you all my life." But in fact, this is literally true of everyone, because every person who attains salvation is bound to be closer than any couple of lovers—and this salvation, I would insist, is intended for all people, whether or not it is attained by all. Therefore it can be expected that, whenever a sinner repents and becomes a friend of Christ, the whole communion of saints would cry out, "Oh, since the day I saw you, I have been waiting for you!" In the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the saints cannot be like the obedient son, who is angry with the rejoicing with which his lost brother is received again. The saints can only rejoice at having another sibling and another friend, one whom they have been waiting for since they first laid eyes on them. That is a true reward.

But there is a caveat. I am not truly convinced that we can bring about the salvation of another human being. Christ saves, by the word of the Father, and the Spirit saves by allowing us to respond to Christ. But we cannot effect this salvation for someone else—it is as much the exclusive work of God as the creation of the world, and no less glorious, since the world will end but sainthood is eternal. We cannot, by our own work, save anyone when this is the exclusive provenance of God. If we could, saving another person would come with the obvious Heavenly reward of that person's eternal friendship. But since we cannot save other people, it seems to me that anybody's presence in Heaven must be a free gift to us, and not a reward for our own work. If it were, our salvation would not be safe in Christ's hands, being given over to unrighteous people.

Another person's salvation, therefore, cannot be our reward, though it is a tremendous gift to us. However, I do think that it is in our fellowship with our friends, of whom Christ is the first and greatest but far from the last, that the rewards we should be hoping for in Heaven may be found. One of the most beautiful descriptions of the communion of saints, in my opinion, is that found in the epistle to the Hebrews: "Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us" (Hebrews 12:1). What we do on Earth does not go unobserved, and is not forgotten. The Father observes us, and the saints observe us, and our actions join the account of eternal things.

You know I will adore you 'til eternity

I have talked before on this blog about how, in 2021, my favourite poem was James Lowell's "The Present Crisis." In "Whose Service Is Perfect Freedom," I mentioned three lines in particular, which speak of the soul's natural repugnance at "compromise with sin." My interpretation of the poem was one of truly horrible guilt: I felt I had been convicted and sentenced, justly, to Hell for my moral mediocrity. And I'm not surprised that this is how I read it. I encountered this poem in the wake of my close friend's suicide, a situation which made the reality of sin exceedingly clear to me. I saw it everywhere: in psychiatry, in government, in capitalism, in the nuclear family, in the drug trade, in the internet, in academic philosophy, in our culture's obsession with death, in my own actions. The whole world had failed her, and I saw that in everything that failed her the sin of hardened hearts. I could not pretend sin was not real anymore, that the world was not fallen. And I knew that, by living in the world, I was surrounded by it, and made compromise with it every day. I lived and breathed in a festering heap of sin and death and was okay with it. I disgusted myself. I knew I had to live differently but I didn't know how.

I really did change how I lived because of that poem, and James Lowell deserves glory for that. For several months, those thyming words on a page from a century and a half ago got me to regularly give up money, blood, and time to causes I would now do for the sake of Christ. That poem also, for the very first time, brought me to cry at the crucifixion, which baffled me at the time. Several lines made me cry, but my awful weeping at that one made no sense to me.

Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 'tis prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,
Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified,
And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.

I hated the idea that I would only be just when it was prosperous, would only take advantage of other people's righteousness, would doubt until the moment of the crucifixion. I still hate that idea, and sometimes fear it's what I'm doing. But what I love about this stanza is the call to action, and what Lowell shows as the other side of doubt. To share Truth's "wretched crust," drinking out of the bitter cup. I wanted that. I didn't know how to get it, because nothing I could do felt like enough. But then those stanzas that I thought about so much kicked in:

Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,—
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

We see dimly in the Present what is small and what is great,
Slow of faith how weak an arm may turn the iron helm of fate,
But the soul is still oracular; amid the market's din,
List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within,—
"They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin."

It's remarkable that these lines affected me as much as they did. I wept at the death-grapple of the Word, I wept at Truth on the scaffold, I wept at God within the shadow, and I wept at compromise with sin—all without having any formulated religious belief at all. But more than that, I was moved intensely by those first two lines of that second stanza. "We see dimly in the Present what is small and what is great." Am I the one who sees dimly, who does not know what I am meant to do? "Slow of faith!" That's me! He is talking about me. "How weak an arm can turn the iron helm of fate!" He means my arm, my own weak arm, myself at the helm of fate! My soul convicted me of my compromises, but more than that, it told me what I should do—though all the things I did seemed small to me, and I had little trust in my own soul. I knew I was weak in ability and in faith, but somehow, for some reason, Lowell convinced me I had to try something, because I was too blind to judge my own small actions to be truly insignificant. Though I have never thought before to connect this moment to my eventual taking up of faith, it really does seem plausible to me that that was the mustard seed.

But when I read it now, I no longer feel half as much convicted by Lowell's poem. The poem still convicts me, because it would convict the vast majority of people. How can I not feel pierced through when I hear him say, "For Humanity sweeps onward: where to-day the martyr stands, / On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his hands," and think that that Judas could very well, if I make compromise with sin too many times, be me? But the other side of the poem, which moved me into action once before, has grown keener and keener as I've grown in faith. When I hear Lowell charge me, "They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth," I feel so strongly—yes, upward and onward still, now and forever! When I hear him say, "Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet 'tis Truth alone is strong, / And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throng / Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to enshield her from all wrong," I think—yes, I see those them, I see those hosts of Heaven and the strength of Truth! And that beginning stanza:

When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth's aching breast
Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west,
And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb
To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime
Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of Time.

Yes! That thrill of joy prophetic is here, the Spirit is in the world, and is moving, and is enough to bring my tiny little heart to the fullness of humanity if I only let it happen within me! It is less and less dim to me, it is more and more apparent. But the stanza which really brings me to the inner core of faith, which makes me wretchedly weep and joyously hope at the very same time, is one I never paid attention to before at all:

By the light of burning heretics Christ's bleeding feet I track,
Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns not back,
And these mounts of anguish number how each generation learned
One new word of that grand Credo which in prophet-hearts hath burned
Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face to heaven upturned.

Oh, to be God-conquered... To write a word of that creed... In these words I feel I understand what the communion of saints really means on Earth. By going to the very limit, pouring oneself out for Christ, we come to the greater knowledge of God on Earth, though we see it very dimly. And I now feel comfortable, at long long last, to say it really is to pour oneself out for Christ which is what's necessary, whether Christ be known by name or by the shape of the world which requires him. The work that must be done is the work of perfect love, the face of which we have seen dwelling in our midst, the body of which we have killed yet failed to lock up in the grave. The words of Paul to the Corinthians strike me:

"According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building on it. Each builder must choose with care how to build on it. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw—the work of each builder will become visible, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each has done. If what has been built on the foundation survives, the builder will receive a reward. If the work is burned up, the builder will suffer loss; the builder will be saved, but only as through fire" (1 Corinthians 3:10–15).

What is the grand Credo that Lowell describes but the works which are built on Christ, which have passed through the fire and survived—that tiny portion of those works which we have been fit to remember. Because I am sure we have forgotten the vast multitude of saintly lives, and of those which we have remembered, we have retained only the slightest bit. From these we have constructed the Credo we have on this Earth. But we know also that the Credo of Heaven must far exceed all we have here. "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known" (1 Corinthians 13:12). No good work forgotten, no saintly deed erased. "And those whom we have forgotten do thou, O Lord, remember." Cloud of witnesses, I beg you to bear witness.

When we inherit Heaven, we inherit the record of every work that has been done for Christ. Just as Christ shall never die again, neither shall these works pass out of recollection. Whenever we act for Christ's sake, in the service of his perfect freedom, we add to this record which shall be with us forever, to be poured over by all the saints for the recognition of God in these deeds. For it is only in Heaven, in the beatific vision, that the truth of these events occurs to us, and everything that we have done for Christ unknowingly is clothed in the mystery of godly love. For God "never shows the choice momentous till the judgement hath passed by"; but having passed, there is no end to the splendour of all love's gestures.

Then we are rewarded, when our works pass into Heaven, rewarded for each with everlasting rewards. Is the reward the glory of having acted, that it is our name to which an event of endless beauty is now attributed? Perhaps in some lesser part, but what need does a saint have to lord over another, when each is a friend of each and inherits without scarcity the wholeness of God? The greater glory, I feel, is simply in filling the sky with stars, pinpricks where God's love broke into a ruinous, fallen world. For there will be uncountable deeds of love in the world to come, in the world which is not fallen; but this world we inhabit now, where love is so much harder, will be over "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye" (1 Corinthians 15:52), and when that time is come, nothing more will be done here. We are at the moment of the greatest opportunity, the moment where the highest glories can be done in the face of the greatest difficulties, and we will not forget what we have done here—though our mourning for our failings will cease. We do not know how our works will seem to us in the world to come, but if their foundation is Christ, whose foundation is God, and we have seen God face to face, then so too are we sure to see in our works what today we can merely hope for and never understand.

One saint looks on another, and rejoices for the work that saint has done, for each saint is a friend of all the saints of Heaven. For the good that one saint has done to another, all others saints rejoice, because it is a friend of theirs who has received it, and a friend of theirs who has done it, and is thereby exalted. And more, each saint knows fully that the one who has done it is the Spirit of God in humankind, and the one who has received it is Christ, and these are also their cherished and beloved Friends, so the rejoice all the more. And they see that what was done in a fallen world was not a fallen thing, but the word of their Father, and the mystery of unreasonable love. And they rejoice: alleluia, alleluia!

What an easy yoke, what a light burden, to dedicate these suffering lives to those perfect words of compassion. Pray for your enemies; feed the hungry; turn the other cheek; put down your anger; forgive; give up your life for your friends. Christ has only told us to do what will be a light for us that never goes out, a new word in the Earthly creed and a hundred thousand words in the the creed of Heaven. "Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 4:6–7). And why should we be anxious about anything? If we love too much, what can they do to us? If they kill us, love is only glorified. If they don't, all the more time for other glories.

Of course, it does not appear so easy. If it did, the world would not be fallen, and the glory of Earthly compassion would not be seen in such stark relief. But when the path of love seems clouded and unreachable, there is a life in which we see a love so perfectly exposed that in it is the essence of God. Look on the cross, at perfect love displayed. Recall that no one hoped that he would ever rise again. Know that had they hoped, their hopes would not have been in vain. And remember that this is where the hope of Heaven stands.

"And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief" (Mark 9:23–27). I can hardly believe one phrase of what I myself have written, except on the foundation of that prayer alone.