Impassible: Impossible Here NOW?

Marcel Ayme' memorial, Montmarte, Paris

I'm struggling with risenness. Our risen bodies, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, will have four qualities.  The first is "impassibility", which shall place them beyond the reach of pain and inconvenience.  The others are brightness, agility, and subtility.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Joshua_Heschel ignited elegantly my speculation when he wrote the phrase “hereafter and here now.”  As next Sunday’s readings revolve around life after death,  Rabbi Heschel’s phrase gives me license, I think, to consider that God is not bound by time, and perhaps, as Catherine of Siena said, “All the way to heaven is heaven,” that we live
eternally now, too.  These four “qualities” of the risen body provide a framework.

Impassibility:  This is, at first blush, the cool stuff we thought of as kids, walking-through-walls stuff.  Casper the Friendly Ghost did it all the time, and Jesus did it too, after he emerged from the tomb.  But as we grow older, it means that if we’re playing a game of softball in heaven, we’ll be able to reach down for that hot ground ball and snap it up without having to grunt and wonder how the ground got so much farther dawn that it used to be.  I recall a friend at work who was, like my Uncle Steve, crooked.  His right side was partially paralyzed, his walk crooked, his smile crooked, and his right arm like a half-folded, featherless wing.  I hired him for a job instead of other candidates that were perhaps more likely to have succeeded in it.  I hired him because he pleaded with me, calmly but candidly, and I wanted him to have it.  His performance was mediocre, but his spirit and smile brought something to our team that a person with a straight body could not have given us.  And one day we learned that Bill had died suddenly, and we learned that he knew all along that he was dying.  The tears come to me again now, thirty years later.  I was glad to have given this mediocre performer that occasion to work and smile and inspire us with his courage.  But the reason Bill comes to mind is that when he died, I imagined him walking straight, swinging his arms freely, and smiling a big, symmetrical grin. 

Bill was, as the encyclopedia citation describes it, “beyond the reach of pain.”  Don’t we often find solace in the death of loved ones in their being beyond pain?  But even as I feel gratitude for the salty reside left from my memory of Bill-walking-straight, I am pulled forward by the last word in that description of “impassibility” of our risen bodies: inconvenience.  How much of our here-and-now is limited by inconvenience?  I smile to recall when our first daughter was learning to drive and she ran over a nail and got a flat tire.  I cheerfully said to her, “Well, Margie, it looks like you’ll learn how to change a flat tire.”  She looked at me with a look that only a teen-age daughter can give, her hands on her hips, and said “Dad, this is not a convenient time.”  I remember the laugh that erupted from my soul as I considered the irrelevance of convenience.  “Margie,” I said, smiling despite her exasperation with me, “Flat tires never happen when it is convenient.”  But talk was cheap.  A few days later, an event that I had planned at the university was being threatened by lousy weather.  My graduate assistant, only a few years older than Margie, came in and saw my long face.  “What’s with you” he said.  When I told him how the weather was a real pain, he smiled a smile embarrassingly similar to the one I had smiled at Margie on the side of the road, and said “Get over it.  Weather is weather.” 

Do we have the choice of getting over it?  Can we choose not to be frustrated by flat tires and “bad” weather?  The word inconvenience comes from the Latin word venire which means to come.  Convenience means that state of being when things come together, when they fit.  I have two sons-in-law who share a remarkable trait.  They are like water when it comes to loving my daughters.  They find their way around and through whatever obstacles seem to impede their loving.   It’s a heavenly trait.  They help things fit by being flexible. 

But I keep coming back to that wall thing, walking through them.  Maybe living Heschel’s herenow is a matter of not building the walls in the first place, or taking them down.  More about that tomorrow as I share what I discover in this life and death situation.