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To: Mad Dawg
expansive view of what it's like to be with God

As I understand it, you're appealing to God. Is that correct?

5,544 posted on 01/12/2007 6:53:54 PM PST by xzins (Retired Army Chaplain and proud of it! Supporting our troops means praying for them to WIN!)
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To: xzins
As I understand it, you're appealing to God. Is that correct?

I'm repulsive to most people, Maybe God finds me appealing.

No, Wait. That's not what you meant.

Kidding aside, I'm not sure what you meant, and I'm about to turn in.

I think the blessed are with God. I think while we can deduce certain aspects of what that must mean, we can scarcely imagine.

But God is outside of time. To be with Him is certainly going to involve a certain freedom from time as we on earth experience time. Even we in prayer, and in love, (come on, admit it) have had time dilate. I know when somebody came at me with felonious assault in his eyes and a club in his hands, time REALLY dilated, as did space.

And St. Peter describes God's experience of time as slow ( a minute like a thousand years) or Fast ( a thousand years like a minute) So I figure that that suggests at least that those who are with God can handle a full in-box.

Sometime read Dante's Paradiso. The whole Commedia is a wonderful wonderful poem. But in the Paradiso, in that wonderful, eager, child-like, medieval way, he manages to convey some of the freedom of the Blessed from normal time and space considerations which we take for granted. C.S. Lewis also does well, though in hints you might miss if you aren't looking for them, in The Last Battle, and in Perelandra.

The Blessed, allow me to suggest, are those who have received completely the gifts which God yearns to give us. Since those gifts are infinite, their reception overwhelms considerations of time and space.

And God came in Christ to make it possible for us, mere creatures, "begotten in a bed", to share in His nature. And He IS sacrificial Love. We know this because when He came among us to reveal Himself perfectly, what we saw was squalling, weeping, sweating, dying, triumphant, and glorious Love - sacrificial, that is, doing a holy thing.

And what I look forward to, what I long for, is to join Him in the dance of the eternal sacrifice of eternal love.

The silly way to say this, and I am nothing if not silly, as I said to someone in Freepmail, is Heaven is like a Gaston and Alphonse cartoon: "Thank you.' No, thank YOU!", No, excuse me, but thank YOU!" and then everybody smiles and laughs and embraces.

But at least before the end of the world, when we will learn what a "holy thing" truly is, right now it means reaching out, listening, being in the presence of God with others in our hearts.

And so here and now(which is the only place where we can possibly contact God in his eternal Now and omnipresent Here) we meet God and the blessed, and they hear us, and weep and bleed and rejoice and triumph for us, and we in Him -- and in Him also in them.

Yes, it's not rational argument. It's what I see, and I scarcely know what to think about it.

5,550 posted on 01/12/2007 7:22:47 PM PST by Mad Dawg ('Shut up,' he explained.)
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