Desperation Sunday

Well, as I have vowed to produce an entry every day (which vow, John assures me, is completely arbitrary and... flexible I think he said...), and as I now have about half an hour left of today in which to produce said obligatory bit of... whatever it is that I'm doing -- and this, in spite of having spent the better part of three hours trying like crazy to make something sensible, word-wise, come out of either my head or my fingertips, I've decided to offer up the following little fantasy, and hope you won't mind.  We can pick up musing on Sundays... next week?  The week after?  Or, as goes the famous like from one of my favorite New Yorker cartoons, never?  'How about never, Walter?  Is never good for you?'

A Sunday Fantasy, or A Thought About Heaven

There really is a Heaven of my dreams.  It has no harps, no golden roads (or golden motorcycles, as a friend of my late brother fantasized) -- or, maybe it has all these things -- why not -- it's just a fantasy.  But the main point of the Heaven I like to think about is this:

We all of us, are all together, at once, in the same place and the same time.  (But of course, because the laws of time and space currently governing our poor earthly bodies won't apply, there will be no crowding or discomfort -- no legs falling asleep, or someone having to look out from behind a pillar.  Everyone will have a front row seat, and the acoustics will be perfect.

We will all, individually, tell our story,  From beginning to end.  Fully, without any details omitted.  And, most importantly, we must tell our story in the order in which we learned it.  (I don't know about you, but are many important things about myself -- decisions made on my behalf, results of choices I myself made, which were evident only years later --  I may have learned of long after the fact, and it makes every story better, I think, if each life unfolds, for the attentive listeners, just the way that life was experienced by the person who lived it.

We will all tell our stories, at the same time, and we will all listen to each other person's story, one by one.  At the same time.  (Now, remember, time and space have been hung on a hook behind the door that's not in anyone's way)  What we might experience, in this sorry sphere, as an absolute cacaphony of voices, of all imaginable tongues and dialects, will, in fact, be perfectly intelligible to each of us, as though spoken only for us, one by one.

And here is the part that I think is especially gratifying -- this unspooling, all at once, of each and every life story ever experienced, will become, for all of us, the incredibly interwoven, inextricably complex tapestry of time and accident and choice and passion, of every whim or failure -- And because we are simultaneously telling our lives AND learning our lives  -- well, how could it be otherwise? -- there will be, eternally, still another voice, telling that one threaded life, that at that moment, loops around yours -- providing an insight, a connection, to the very life you yourself are spreading our for everyone to savor, in its piquancy, its saltiness, its lush comfort, its pangs and ennui... and which, in turn, loops around the spilling life of someone else...

Anyway, I just kind of toy with this idea, and find it oddly satisfying (to say nothing of being all-inclusive and non-denominational), like getting to a place you've been looking for, and it's nice after all, and you don't have to leave right away, so you can relax.

Relax.

What a nice idea.