Rise and Shine

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 second quality is "brightness", or "glory", by which we shine freely, like the sun.  


Yesterday I wrote of the distractions of inconvenience in the bodies we walk around with, now-bound and not-so-heavenly.  But I wrote little about pain, about the darkness of it that holds us back from the second “quality” of the bodies that Catholic tradition projects will be ours in the next life. That quality is brightness. And remember that my own premise is that “afterlife” doesn’t wait, but lurks, looms, lives in us now, if we claim it. 

Ah, this word claim reminds me of a story.  There was a professor loved by his former students, one of whom sent him, without fail, a beautifully boxed and wrapped handkerchief every Christmas.  After a few years, he had quite enough handkerchiefs, and stopped opening the boxes, simply stacking them in his closet.  He would write a kind but cursory thank-you note, expressing his gratitude for the “gift”.  Eventually the student died, and the professor grew old.  Without a pension, he struggled to pay his rent

and put food on his table. His clothes became worn and he became reclusive, ashamed of his poverty.  He smiled to think that the one thing he had in abundance was handkerchiefs, opening one of those stacked-up boxes when he needed one.  It was twenty years after the student had died when he opened one particular box.  Inside it was the customary handkerchief, but as he pulled it out, an envelope fell from inside it.  He opened the envelope and read the note.  “My dear professor, you have given me the greatest of gifts, a life worth living.  And now it seems that it is to be a shorter life than I had anticipated.  The disease that I have will find me dead in a year. Enclosed please find a cashier’s check that is the small fortune that I have accumulated with much thanks to what I learned from you.  It is my hope that it will give you in your old age what I had hoped to enjoy in my own.” 

There is something of the professor in each of us, I think, struggling unnecessarily because something we have been given sits unrecognized and unclaimed, a gift unopened.  My friend Peg would call it facile if I were to write much about pain.  She knows I don’t know pain.  Not really.  Not much.  But even my brief scrapes with pain have taught me that it’s hard to be really present to anyone else when pain turns me inward.  Pain can be like a black hole, sucking in everything that is given, returning nothing.  And yet I have known people who live with pain and yet seem to radiate goodness and kindness and thoughtfulness.  

My friend Max would, while enjoying listening to me respond to a query he had made, wince with the pain that would occur without warning as his cancer progressed, and then his eyes would soften again and he’d resume his joyful listening.  He shines.

My friend Paul’s mom who has advanced and likely terminal cancer sees us and smiles, and snaps her fingers and furrows her brow when she realizes that she had forgotten something that she wanted to give to us.  She shines.

When I was freshman in college, a popular and involved female senior invited me to a picnic where an event would be planned for the following year.  She had observed me in class, and thought I had something to offer.  “I hope you come,” she said; “This is your chance to shine.”  I did go to the picnic, but was unable to get beyond my shyness.  At the time I did not think of it as being distracted by pain.  But now I look back at that experience and realize that it was indeed an interior pain, of self-doubt, of being nothing like my older brother, of having nothing of value.  There is no sequel to that story, no awakening, no resolution.  That handkerchief remained in its box, among the stuff I left in some storage room somewhere.

Maybe some of us are born or raised with a bushel over our light.   Maybe life is a pain.  But if it‘s true that all the way to heaven is heaven, if the hereafter is also herenow, this maybe now  is our chance to shine.

(The third quality is that of "agility", by which the body shall be freed from its slowness of motion, and endowed with the capability of moving with the utmost facility and quickness wherever the soul pleases.   The fourth quality is "subtility", by which the body becomes subject to the absolute dominion of the soul.   More on those tomorrow.)