What I Most Want

In replying to a comment on one of his recent posts on salvation and Heaven, Bruce Charlton made a very penetrating remark: “In general God grants us what we most want, or a simulacrum of it…”

My interior ears pricked up at this phrase because I have been thinking about this very thing for much of the past few days. When it comes to the other side of this life, to Heaven, to what lies beyond, to eternity….what is it that I want? If I believe that my Father will give me the desires of my heart, and if this earthly sojourn serves to shape and refine those desires….where am I at this moment? What are the desires of my heart for that moment when my life here ends?

It’s easy for me to say what I do not want. I do not want to float on a cloud while strumming a harp. I do not want to walk on literal streets of gold while shouting “Praise the Lord!” to everyone I pass. I do not want to live in a mansion while everyone I ever knew and loved lives in their own mansion. I do not want to sit in an endless worship service. I do not want to exist in some vague, wispy way. I do not want to spend eons dissecting doctrine. I do not want to gorge at a banquet table and never gain weight.

What do I want?

Ah, that’s the tricky part. At my age, I still don’t know. The best I can do is to answer that I want the things that I can only have in tiny sips here — quiet, time to explore my own mind and heart, a stilled mind that can finally write with power and precision. But why write, and to whom? I have no idea. All I know is that I find solace and meaning in putting my fingers to the keys, or taking up the pencil and the composition book.

And I want to grow living things, unimpeded by the things that thwart me now, like physical fatigue, and the brutally thin and rocky soil of the region in which I live, a region which must have been a busy boulevard for glaciers at some point in the past. When I think of Heaven, I have a mental image of kneeling in the soil and feeling the life in it, the same way that I can feel the life in a puppy or kitten now. Feeling the life and vitality and richness, and coaxing it to nourish the seed or shoot or kernel I place within its care.

And I want to fly. Not like angels in paintings, with an ethereal expression on my face as I soar through clouds of vapor and beams of sunlight, but like the hawks I see above our farm. To fly above a real place, a real living location, and to see the land and the water from that high perspective, to watch the little things scurry below, and to see the light splintered into shards across the hills and boulders. To swoop and dip and turn and roll and feel my own resurrected body pierce the living air as a dolphin pierces the salty blue expanse of sea. And to see others up there with me, luxuriating in the flight and the wonder.

And there are other things jostling around in my mind’s cellar, trying to be named, trying to be identified, trying to be articulated. For now, they are unknown to me, but their  presence is real. For now, my hope of Heaven is to create and to fly and to see.

And to once again stand and speak with those I’ve loved, those who have passed from my life into the next one, and to speak with them without smudging a single feeling or intention with my own clumsiness. Heaven indeed. Nothing abstract nor conceptual. Real joys. Real paradise.

~ S.K. Orr