The Center for contemplative practice
A Lay Cistercian Looks at Spiritual Reality
INSTAGRAM FROM THE EDGE OF TIME
THOUGHTS FROM THE EDGE OF TIME: I just viewed a science program that said that the earth will no longer be here in 3 billion of so years. The program said the challenge foo humans is to find a way to go to other worlds that can sustain us. So far, we have found no candidates fitting that description, 3 billion years or not. So how can a God that is good and loving abandon us to oblivion? Doesn’t make sense. Actually, it makes perfect sense, if you think like God and not like the World teaches. The World says humans live seventy or eight years, then die. They need atmosphere (combination of oxygen and other gases) for us to survive. We won’t live long enough for space travel, but several generations might do it. We are prone to asteroids, rocks in space, cosmic rays, heat, radiation, in any journey we might make to another planet. We can’t land on stars. The odds don’t look good, according to cosmologists who study these things.
Let me offer you another scenario. God loved us so much that he wants us to be with him. He even adopted us as His sons and daughters and prepared a place for us where we can live comfortably as humans.
All he asks is that we learn how to love one another with the love that Christ had for us. Philippians 2:5-12. This is fierce love transcending matter and time, in the physical sense.
Our space ship to get to heaven is to die, but not just death as the World thinks of it. While on earth we are ask to die to self so that we can rise to new life. This is the Resurrection to new life with Christ. We are transported to a new world, one that has awaiting us since the beginning of time.
A world that does not exist in a way that we can comprehend time and matter but one in which there is only love and one consistent with our human senses and experiences. We know what that love is because Christ loved us with that same love. Our destiny as humans is not the earth (the name for Adam was dirt or earth) but to be with God forever.
So, we actually do have a way to get off of this earth, one that does not depend on physical universe or even the mental one (death is the end). The spiritual universe is there for us to prepare to pack our bags for what is to come.
St. Paul says we can’t imagine the good what is waiting for us in Heaven. Being a Lay Cistercian gives me the map, the suitcase, what I can pack for the trip to forever.
There are other suitcases out there, but only one destination, one way to travel, one truth about forever, one life to lead beginning now and culminating in fulfilling our destiny as a human.
We are spiritual apes, destined to love God with all our heart, all our mind, and all our strength and our neighbor as ourselves…Forever.
This is the good news of salvation.
This is the joy that comes from realizing the scope of what God has prepared for us since before the beginning of time and matter.
This is why, as St. Augustine says, our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.
This is why the Church Universal exists, to help us make the trip to Forever.
So here you are, just died and standing before the Throne of the Father and the Lamb, and he asks ” Do not be afraid. What have you packed in your suitcase. Did you love others as Christ loved you,? “Did you see me on earth?” Read Matthew 25:31-46. If you used your reason and tried to love with all your heart, your mind and your strength and your neighbor as yourself, God will say, “Good and Faithful Servant, come share your Lord’s joy.” If He does not say that, well, you got what you wished for.
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