Transparency
Daily Reading, May 19
One enduring sense I have is that everything will be revealed in the hereafter. In the words of the old Anglican collect for purity, heaven exists in the presence of the God “unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.” I think of this when I say something disloyal about someone who is not present, or when I try to hide the truth about myself from people whose illusions flatter me. If all of this will be perfectly transparent by-and-by, why not prepare for that by practicing transparency now?
Of course I also harbor the hope that if I have managed to do or be any good for God, that will be transparent too. I am embarrassed to admit that, but as someone who has spent my whole life confessing my sins, the prospect of being allowed to discover what I might have done right in this world sounds like heaven to me.
If it is true that most of us give what we want to get, then in the end my highest hope for heaven is simply to be rescued when my time comes—plucked from the roadside where I have fallen, struck dumb by all there is to love and grieve in this world—and gathered into God’s own safety, whatever that turns out to mean. I am willing to forego the details, as long as I know whose lap I am in.
From “Leaving Myself Behind” by Barbara Brown Taylor, in Heaven, edited by Roger Ferlo. A Seabury Book from Church Publishing. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org
"in the end my highest hope for heaven is simply to be rescued when my time comes—plucked from the roadside where I have fallen, struck dumb by all there is to love and grieve in this world—and gathered into God’s own safety, whatever that turns out to mean. I am willing to forego the details, as long as I know whose lap I am in."
I want those words read at my departure!
Posted by David Charles Walker![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.episcopalcafe.com/thesoul/nav-commenters.gif)
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May 19, 2007 11:49 AM
I have long wanted these texts
used at my Burial Office:
(I don't seem to be able to
put the correct line-breaks into the Ephrem quote.)
People behold themselves
in glory
and wonder at themselves,
discovering where they are.
The nature of their bodies,
once troubled and troublesome,
is now tranquil and quiet,
resplendent
from without in beauty,
and from within with purity,
the body in evident ways,
the soul in hidden ways.
HYMNS ON PARADISE
ST EPHREM
Introduction and Translation
by
Sebastian Brock
St Vladimir's Seminary Press
Crestwood, New York 10707 1998 p. 125
. . Death itself does not frighten me so much as the thought of a long and feeble old age. The litany in the Prayer Book prays that we may be delivered from sudden death, but it means sudden and unprepared, and we are not meant to want to linger . . . More difficult is to learn to hand over to God one's willingness to be old and feeble, to enter a second childhood in which one loses all one's adult dignity, and is stripped of all one's painfully acquired knowledge, and has to begin all over again, at the mercy of other people . . .
My bodily life will be finished, and it will be a relief if the body is worn out, and the purpose of my life will have been achieved, and I shall be with God . . . I shall see him face to face. It will not be pleasant, for my sins will have spoiled my taste for him. But I believe that he wills to cleanse me in the saving death of Jesus, and I know that I will to receive his cleansing love here, and there; now, and then. Through his mercy I believe that I shall achieve my true end for which I was born, and towards which all my prayer and daily life have been pointing, the enjoyment of God for ever in communion with the blessed company of all faithful people.
Reginald Cant, quoted in Owen Chadwick _Michael Ramsey: A Life_ OUP 1990. The quote is taken from a 1974 book _The Churchman’s Companion by Cant et al.
J. A. Frazer Crocker, Jr
Posted by old_and_grey_headed![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.episcopalcafe.com/thesoul/nav-commenters.gif)
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May 20, 2007 2:33 PM