Living Our Eternal Lives Already

Remember those billboards with that disturbing question: “Where will you spend eternity?” The object of that question was to scare the living hell out of the beholder and encourage him or her to come to Jesus before you die and it’s too late to decide. You have to choose, which puts you in the cat bird’s seat; a bad assumption. Another bad assumption is that eternal life can’t begin until we get rid of this current living situation by dying. Raising yet another conundrum: is there life before death? A lot of religions use this outdated worldview as part of their theological construct to encourage walking the straight and narrow in order to get your eternal reward in heaven knows where or when.

May I be so bold to suggest that we might just be blind to the notion that all of life is sacred and eternal, from the get-go. Since time immemorial, the Creator has endowed us with the gift of days and years forever and ever. That we are already spending our precious lives smack dab in the middle of eternity. Paul Tillich called it “The Eternal Now.”

The romantic poet, William Blake, wants us to see this world through a different lense altogether: To see a World in a Grain of Sand/ And a Heaven in a Wild Flower/ Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/ And Eternity in an hour. By the way, living our eternal lives has nothing to do with pantheism or believing that the divine in all of nature. It’s much bigger than Mahalia Jackson unequivocally singing that she believed for every drop of rain that falls a flower grows. The one-drop-one-flower theory is soft science at its finest and bad religion at its worst. Right up there with “he’s got the whole world in his hands”, assuming a gender for the Creator. Heaven forbid!

Such nature worship tends to be oblivious to the big picture of eternity happening all around us as we live and breathe in this infinitely expanding universe. The Brazilian poet, Paulo Colelho, puts it in a more thoughtful fashion like this and ties it to our larger theme of stumbling over stardust: We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.

We may wait from here to eternity to see if it’s going to get better in the sweet bye and bye, or we can wake up every morning and thank our lucky stars that the gift of eternity has already been bestowed on us all without our having to do a blessed thing. Well, at least we could relish every minute of it and enjoy the hell out of it, for heaven’s sake!