“Mary, what a light in your eyes! How is it?”
It came over me slowly, but it came with such a passion of gratitude and
unworthiness, that I scarcely knew how to tell her--that He never has
been to me, in all my life, what he is now at the end of these six
months. He was once an abstract Grandeur which I struggled more in fear
than love to please. He has become a living Presence, dear and real.
“No dead fact stranded on the shore
Of the oblivious years;
But warm, sweet, tender, even yet
A present help.” ...
He was an inexorable Mystery who took Roy from me to lose him in the
glare of a more inexorable heaven. He is a Father who knew better than
we that we should be parted for a while; but He only means it to be a
little while. He is keeping him for me to find in the flush of some
summer morning, on which I shall open my eyes no less naturally than I
open them on June sunrises now. I always have that fancy of going in the
morning.
She understood what I could not tell her, and said, “I thought it would
be so.”
“You, His interpreter, have done it,” I answered her. “His heaven shows
what He is,--don’t you see?--like a friend’s letter. I could no more go
back to my old groping relations to Him, than I could make of you the
dim and somewhat apocryphal Western Auntie that you were before I saw
you.”
“Which was precisely why I have dealt with this subject as I have,” she
said. “You had all your life been directed to an indefinite heaven,
where the glory of God was to crowd out all individuality and all human
joy from His most individual and human creatures, till the “Glory of
God” had become nothing but a name and a dread to you. So I let those
three words slide by, and tried to bring you to them, as Christ brought
the Twelve to believe in him, ‘for the works’ sake.’
“Yes, my child; clinging human loves, stifled longings, cries for rest,
forgotten hopes, shall have their answer. Whatever the bewilderment of
beauties folded away for us in heavenly nature and art, they shall
strive with each other to make us glad. These things have their pleasant
place. But, through eternity, there will be always something beyond and
dearer than the dearest of them. God himself will be first,--naturally
and of necessity, without strain or struggle, _first_.”
When I sat here last winter with my dead in my house, those words would
have roused in me an agony of wild questionings. I should have beaten
about them and beaten against them, and cried in my honest heart that
they were false. I _knew_ that I loved Roy more than I loved such a
Being as God seemed to me then to be. Now, they strike me as simply and
pleasantly true. The more I love Roy, the more I love Him. He loves us
both.
“You see it could not be otherwise,” she went on, speaking low. “Where
would you be, or I, or they who seem to us so much dearer and better
than ourselves, if it were not for Jesus Christ? What can heaven be to
us, but a song of the love that is the same to us yesterday, to-day, and
forever,--that, in the mystery of an intensity which we shall perhaps
never understand, could choose death and be glad in the choosing, and,
what is more than that, could live _life_ for us for three-and-thirty
years?
“I cannot strain my faith--or rather my common sense--to the rhapsodies
with which many people fill heaven. But it seems to me like this: A
friend goes away from us, and it may be seas or worlds that lie between
us, and we love him. He leaves behind him his little keepsakes; a lock
of hair to curl about our fingers; a picture that has caught the trick
of his eyes or smile; a book, a flower, a letter. What we do with the
curling hair, what we say to the picture, what we dream over the flower
and the letter, nobody knows but ourselves. People have risked life for
such mementoes. Yet who loves the senseless gift more than the
giver,--the curl more than the young forehead on which it fell,--the
letter more than the hand which traced it?
“So it seems to me that we shall learn to see in God the centre of all
possibilities of joy. The greatest of these lesser delights is but the
greater measure of His friendship. They will not mean less of pleasure,
but more of Him. They will not “pale,” as Dr. Bland would say. Human
dearness will wax, not wane, in heaven; but human friends will be loved
for love of Him.”
“I see; that helps me; like a torch in a dark room. But there will be
shadows in the corners. Do you suppose that we shall ever _fully_ feel
it in the body?”
“In the body, probably not. We see through a glass so darkly that the
temptation to idolatry is always our greatest. Golden images did not die
with Paganism. At times I fancy that, somewhere between this world and
another, a revelation will come upon us like a flash, of what _sin_
really is,--such a revelation, lighting up the lurid background of our
past in such colors, that the consciousness of what Christ has done for
us will be for a time as much as heart can bear. After that, the mystery
will be, not how to love Him most, but that we ever _could_ have loved
any creature or thing as much.”
“We serve God quite as much by active work as by special prayer, here,”
I said after some thought; “how will it be there?”
“We must be busily at work certainly; but I think there must naturally
be more communion with Him then. Now, this phrase “communion with God”
has been worn, and not always well worn.
“Prayer means to us, in this life, more often penitent confession than
happy interchange of thought with Him. It is associated, too, with
aching limbs and sleepy eyes, and nights when the lamp goes out.
Obstacles, moral and physical, stand in the way of our knowing exactly
what it may mean in the ideal of it.
“My best conception of it lies in the _friendship_ of the man Christ
Jesus. I suppose he will bear with him, eternally, the humanity which he
took up with him from the Judean hills. I imagine that we shall see him
in visible form like ourselves, among us, yet not of us; that he,
himself, is “Gott mit ihnen”; that we shall talk with him as a man
talketh with his friend. Perhaps, bowed and hushed at his dear feet, we
shall hear from his own lips the story of Nazareth, of Bethany, of
Golgotha, of the chilly mountains where he used to pray all night long
for us; of the desert places where he hungered; of his cry for
help--think, Mary--_His!_--when there was not one in all the world to
hear it, and there was silence in heaven, while angels strengthened him
and man forsook him. Perhaps his voice--the very voice which has sounded
whispering through our troubled life--“Could ye not watch one
hour?”--shall unfold its perplexed meanings; shall make its rough places
plain; shall show us step by step the merciful way by which he led us
to the hour; shall point out to us, joy by joy, the surprises that he
has been planning for us, just as the old father in the story planned to
surprise his wayward boy come home.
“And such a ‘communion,’--which is not too much, nor yet enough, to dare
to expect of a God who was the ‘friend’ of Abraham, who ‘walked’ with
Enoch, who did not call fishermen his servants,--_such_ will be that
‘presence of God,’ that ‘adoration,’ on which we have looked from afar
off with despairing eyes that wept, they were so dazzled, and turned
themselves away as from the thing they greatly feared.”
I think we neither of us cared to talk for a while after this. Something
made me forget even that I was going to see Roy in heaven.
“Three-and-thirty years. Three-and-thirty years.” The words rang
themselves over.
“It is on the humanity of Christ,” she said after some musing, “that all
my other reasons for hoping for such a heaven as I hope for, rest for
foundation. He knows exactly what we are, for he has been one of us;
exactly what we hope and fear and crave, for he has hoped and feared and
craved, not the less humanly, but only more intensely.
“‘_If it were not so_,’--do you take in the thoughtful tenderness of
that? A mother, stilling her frightened child in the dark, might speak
just so,--‘_if it were not so, I would have told you_.’ That brooding
love makes room for all that we can want. He has sounded every deep of a
troubled and tempted life. Who so sure as he to understand how to
prepare a place where troubled and tempted lives may grow serene?
Further than this; since he stands as our great Type, no less in death
and after than before it, he answers for us many of these lesser
questions on the event of which so much of our happiness depends.
“Shall we lose our personality in a vague ocean of ether,--you one puff
of gas, I another?--
“He, with his own wounded body, rose and ate and walked and talked.
“Is all memory of this life to be swept away?--
“He, arisen, has forgotten nothing. He waits to meet his disciples at
the old, familiar places; as naturally as if he had never been parted
from them, he falls in with the current of their thoughts.
“Has any one troubled us with fears that in the glorified crowds of
heaven we may miss a face dearer than all the world to us?--
“He made himself known to his friends; Mary, and the two at Emmaus, and
the bewildered group praying and perplexed in their bolted room.
“Do we weary ourselves with speculations whether human loves can outlive
the shock of death?--
“Mary knew how He loved her, when, turning, she heard him call her by
her name. They knew, whose hearts ‘burned within them while he talked
with them by the way, and when he tarried with them, the day being far
spent.’”
“And for the rest?”
“For the rest, about which He was silent, we can trust him, and if,
trusting, we please ourselves with fancies, he would be the last to
think it blame to us. There is one promise which grows upon me the more
I study it, ‘He that spared not his own Son, how shall he not also _with
him freely give us all things_?’ Sometimes I wonder if that does not
infold a beautiful _double entendre_, a hint of much that you and I have
conjectured,--as one throws down a hint of a surprise to a child.
“Then there is that pledge to those who seek first His kingdom: ‘_All
these things shall be added unto you_.’ ‘These things,’ were food and
clothing, were varieties of material delight, and the words were spoken
to men who lived hungry, beggared, and died the death of outcasts. If
this passage could be taken literally, it would be very significant in
its bearing on the future life; for Christ must keep his promise to the
letter, in one world or another. It may be wrenching the verse, not as a
verse, but from the grain of the argument, to insist on the literal
interpretation,--though I am not sure.”