Following The Resurrection.4

"No one has ascended up to heaven, except he that has come down from heaven, the Son of God who is in heaven.

Go, tell my brothers that I will ascend to my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God."

--Jesus

I opened a box of old photos we'd dug out of my deceased mother's storage unit. The box (and her earthly belongings) had been sitting in storage for several years before we finally took the time to retrieve them. The box is really the only keepsake that stayed with me after recently purchasing a new home near where I grew up and cleaning out years of accumulated stuff.

Needless to say, I hadn't seen many of the items in the box

for years. I discovered photos of my father I didn't know existed -- for he died at an early age, I was only seven. I have very few recollections of him. The photos revealed qualities and questions I'd never pondered. Along with photos of his mother and brothers, I realize I know very little about their stories: the influences, values and experiences that shaped the things they hoped for, the conversations they had, the values they lived by, the quality of love they shared, the legacy they hoped to leave.

In a previous blog I shared a quote from Hugh Ross on the difficulty of a visitation from another solar system specifically in keeping generations of whatever lifeforms on board a spaceship focused on a mission. I realized I barely knew my own father, never met his father (who also died at a young age), and couldn't tell you the name of my great grandfather! So whatever "mission" they felt they were called to got swallowed up by the reality of death prohibiting them from passing much of what really matters on to their posterity.

So what really matters? What are the things that are worth passing on to our posterity? Three things stand out from these words of Jesus:

Ascension.

Every human being is called to higher things. MacDonald observes: "There is this difference between the growth of some human beings and that of others: in the one case it is a continuous dying, in the other a continuous resurrection." The apostle Paul refers to the "hope of the resurrection" not meaning simply life after death but the call to an ascending life whereby we live with an awareness that we are constantly undergoing newness of life (even when we don't feel it so).  The seeming chaos and brokenness of this life is being led to the higher, deeper, greater by our Big Brother, Jesus.

Brotherhood.

"Shall a man love his neighbor as himself and must he be content not to know him in heaven? Better be
content to lose our consciousness and know

ourselves no longer. Shall God be the God of the families of the earth, and shall the love that he has thus created towards father and mother, brother and sister, wife and child go moaning and longing to all eternity? What will resurrection or life be to me, how shall I continue to love God as I have learned to love him through you, if I find He cares so little for this human heart of mine, as to take from
me the gracious visitings of your faces and forms?
And in the changes which, thank God, must take
place when the mortal puts on immortality, shall we not feel that the nobler our friends are, the more they are themselves; that the more the idea of each is carried out in the perfection of beauty, the more like they are to what we thought them in our most exalted moods, to that which we saw in them

in the rarest moments of profoundest communion, to that which we beheld through the veil of all their imperfections when we loved them the truest?"

MacDonald, God of the Living, Unspoken Sermons II

I uncovered another old photo album out of the box. An

album I'd put together while working at a summer camp during my high school years. The pictures tearfully reminded me of the sweet and "profoundest communion" with dear friends. I was reminded of how I've tried, throughout my life, to recapture the depth of fellowship and friendship and purpose I felt during those wonder-filled seasons . I've come close at times and wandered into dry desert places at others. What a powerful promise: to be in a place where that kind of fellowship is the rule and not the exception!


Father and Godhood.

"The very Godhead lies in the giving of life. Therefore [those who've gone on before us] must be alive. If he speaks of them, remembers his own loving thoughts of them, would he not have kept them alive if he could; and if he could not, how could he create them? Can it be an easier thing to call into life than to keep alive?

What is the use of this body of ours? It is the means of Revelation to us, the camera in which God's eternal shows are set forth. It is by the body that we come into contact with Nature, with our fellow-men, with all their revelations of God to us. It is through the body that we receive all the lessons of passion, of suffering, of love, of beauty, of science. It is through the body that we are both trained outwards from ourselves, and driven inwards into our deepest selves to find God. We cannot yet have learned all that we are meant to learn through the body. Is all that we have learned to be lost? Who that has loved this earth can but believe that the spiritual body of which St. Paul speaks will be a yet higher channel of such revelation? 

Our God is an unveiling, a revealing God. He will raise you from the dead, that I may behold you; that that which vanished from the earth may again stand forth, looking out of the same eyes of eternal love and truth, holding out the same mighty hand of brotherhood, the same delicate and gentle, yet strong hand of sisterhood, to me, this me that knew you and loved you in the days gone by. I shall not care [what form you may take] so long as it is yourselves that are before me, beloved, sons and daughters of the Divine!" MacDonald, ibid.

Whatever I did not know about my earthly ancestors and their hopes, disappointments, character and faith, this I do know: I have a Father who is unchanging and incorruptible in his plans and purposes for every human being!

Thank you Jesus for your willingness to do His Perfect Will demonstrating His Perfect Love for me, my family and friends and all the family of those who know and love you!