Up Up and Away – 3

By this action the physical was actually brought into heaven and a physical dimension was introduced to the spiritual realm.

That is why Saint Paul insists that (despite the contradictions and seeming absurdities) when we die and are resurrected that we shall have what he calls a “resurrection body.” The actual physical components will not be reconstituted from dust and ash, but the physical dimension to our souls will live on. It is difficult to imagine this without imagining that we shall be like ghosts. Turn that on its head by imagining that what we are now is ghostly compared to what we shall be. Those “resurrection bodies” we are promised will be more real, more youthful, more eternal and more beautiful than we can ever imagine, and they will be so much more real than these bodies that they will be to these bodies as a real landscape is to a black and white photograph of the scene.

Do we have trouble imagining such things? I don’t know why. We accept the miracles of technology every day, but if someone had told our grandparents that we could feed a piece of paper into a machine in Peru which would then turn it into a series of bleeps which were transmitted millions of miles to a little machine spinning in space, only to bounce back to another machine in Pennsylvania, which then printed the image onto another piece of paper they would think we were dangerously mad dreamers. If we told our grandparents that a machine the size of a notebook would transmit the text of a book from California to Karachi in the time it takes me to blink they would ridicule such fantasies.

So why can we not imagine that similarly “unbelievable” things might be possible in that last frontier—the one between the physical and the spiritual realms? The person of faith stands on the edge of these possibilities and has room to muse, room to surmise and room to theorize. Anything is possible after all, and it is up to our imagination to try to visualize what it all means, and what kind of world is on the other side. Suddenly the person of faith is not an antique leftover of a bygone age, but the dreamer on the cutting edge. Suddenly it is the dull empiricist who seems like the Luddite, the Mennonite and the Antiquarian.

The ascension simply tells me that it the world is open ended, and I can expect the unexpected. Furthermore, it might happen to me. I can be transformed, I can have commerce with the spiritual world. I can make contact, and one day make that same journey from what seems to be real to a reality that is more hard and glorious than I could ever imagine. Furthermore, that reality is not some dreamy ectoplasmic existence. It is hard and real and delightful. Do we think that these physical bodies give us pleasure? We haven’t yet experienced pleasure. What we have had here is merely a glimpse of the glory that is to come. The most exquisite music here is only a whisper of the music of that greater reality. When you begin to catch a glimpse of this other country the ancient words ring true, and the heart lifts to think that it really may be so that eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived of such glories that await us.

Go here to learn more about Quest for the Creed