Untimely Thoughts Of An Immortalist

I awakened at - 8:47? I think, 8:47. Too late to Uber the morning rush.

It's now 10:50. I have spent most of the past two hours in my office with the blinds pulled and the lights off so that it's dark. Not nighttime dark. In-between, neither-here-nor-there dark.

No TV, no radio. Silent.

I think the ill-defined darkness and the silence have both contributed to me spending most of the past two hours browsing online - for nothing in particular. After spending perhaps half an hour or more trying to recall an article that I read once about luxury cars that can be bought at discount (I don't remember now why I chose to look for that article in the first place), I've Googled random terms that came to mind, ending with a search for electric cars and hybrids.

I have checked the time at intervals, noting its passing, and noting that I am not getting anything done, And I asked myself, "Why am I doing this?"

What type of pleasure am I getting out of this? It's more than the intellectual/cognitive pleasure of learning new stuff. It's like a physical thing, a feeling.

And this word popped into mind: timelessness.

I know that time is passing, but the darkness, the silence, and the very fact of not getting anything done help to create a feeling as if it weren't. It's sort of like Flow, except it's not. Or maybe it's an aberration of Flow, a mal-Flow.

I feel like I could do this - Google in the dark, follow random link after random link - forever.

******************

Rather, I felt like I could do that forever. But now I'm doing this- writing a blog post: a significant shift in direction of my attention and a heightening of intention. Finishing this, publishing this, matters.

A few minutes ago, part of what I felt was a sense of nothing mattering. I don't mean despair, I mean indifference. A pleasurable indifference arising from the feeling of being disconnected from time. The feeling of timelessness led to feeling as if it did not matter what I did, and that feeling was not painful. It was rather pleasant. Okay, I'll say it - I was comfortably numb.

And it occurred to me that the feeling of timelessness may be a preview of eternity.

As a resurrectionist and an immortalist, I expect to live forever (along with everyone else) in a way that is not limited to this planet. Living forever will mean never running out of time, never experiencing a lack of time. Not being limited to this planet will mean not being bound by the 24-hour day.

I have tried to imagine this. How will we experience time? Or will we experience time at all? Will the concept itself fade away as useless - No time, only life?

And just now the notion came to mind that if time as we know it disappears, nothing that we do will matter.

In respone to which this notion popped up, knocking that one down: in eternity, everything matters.

It suddenly seemed clear to my imagination that the Christian's post-transition life will not be a life in which we need to redeem time, because the days are evil. Nor will it be a life in which we waste time. Rather, it will be a life full of good activity spanning galaxies, and ever-deepening relationships with an ever-increasing number of people, all rooted in intimacy with the Godhead.

It will all matter.

Now, iinteraction with lots of other people would seem to require some means for measuring time. Otherwise, how will I make my appointments with Johann Sebastian Bach for composition lessons (that's on my post-transition bucket list)? But what that means will be, I have no idea.

And given that I have spent 1.5 hours writing this (yikes!), now is not the time to figure that out. I am still largely Here rather than fully There, and here, I am already late for starting an insane day of meetings and tasks. I want to devote more time later to the matter of demonstrating eternal, galaxy-encompassing life within the context of time and space. For now, I'll end with: in eternity, everything matters, so for immortals, everything here matters now.

P.S. - I'm yielding to temptation: this came to mind while writing. Enjoy!

Notes Of A Resurrectionist, Following A Death

I posted my last entry so late on the night of Friday, May 9, that it was early in the morning of Saturday, May 10. Later that morning, my brother Al called to say that Janet and I should come to Louisville, because Mom had taken a turn for the worse. We got there that night.

Sunday, the 11th, we visited her at the nursing home. She hadn't eaten since Thursday.That evening my siblings and I decided to request hospice care, and to bring her back home.

Monday, the 12th, we met with the hospice worker. Tuesday, they brought her home, and a stream of family members stopped by to visit her. The hospice worker told us to adjust her every couple of hours to prevent bedsores, and gave us a schedule for administering medicines.

Different people sat with her at different times. I was with her late, and crawled in bed around 4:30 Wednesday morning, the 14th. Janet woke me around 5:00 because she was concerned about Mom's raspy breathing.

Janet and I were adjusting her when she stopped breathing altogether.

I went downstairs to tell Al and his wife Yolanda, who had devoted much of their lives to caring for Mom in recent years. And they came up. And we said goodbye in our own ways - mine was to kiss her temple and say, "See you later, old lady."

I meant it.

Because I believe in Jesus's resurrection, I also believe in everyone else's, including Mom's and mine.

If I continue here as long as she did, it will be another 32 years before I shuffle off this mortal coil. After which, I expect that she and I, in whatever forms we manifest, will enjoy one another's company again. For a lot more than 32 years, or 62, or 94. As a verse of "Amazing Grace" (not written by John Newton) puts it:

When we've been there ten thousand years,
bright shining as the sun,
we've no less days to sing God's praise
than when we first begun.

When I posted the news of her death on Facebook, I wrote, "she had a good run, and loved Jesus for a long time, and I therefore consider this transition, like graduation from a really tough school, more of a triumph than a tragedy."

During the following days, I kept waiting to be waylaid by sadness, to experience something that I could recognize as part of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

I wasn't; I didn't.

By the following Monday afternoon, when we visited the G. C. Williams Funeral Home for the family viewing in advance of the wake that evening, the disconnect between what I expected to feel and what I did feel had reached the point where I just blurted out to our funeral director, while I was signing some papers, something like,

"I just can't get myself to feel sad." I was too filled with gratitude for having had Mom for so long. Gratitude for her making it for 94 years. And happy for her, because now she is with Jesus. I said that to the funeral director, and ended with, "Where's the downside?"

Will I miss her? Of course. But at most I will miss her for 30 years, maybe. How infinitesmal will that 30-year slice of time feel when we are both still young five million years from now? Please!

For at least a couple of days, I was genuinely afraid that my lack of sorrow, my lack of heartbreak, indicated a degree of ...what? Sociopathy? A degree of not being mentally healthy.

But then I would remember 1 Corintihians 15, and 1 Thessalonians 4. And I would think of Revelation 14:13 - "Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on." And I'd hear Brahms' setting of that line ("Selig sind die Toten, die in dem Herren sterben von nun an."). And even sing it.

And I could not feel sad for any more than the briefest of moments. In the light of resurrection, the five stages of grief - or at least the first four - simply seemed unnecessary. I felt like I went straight to acceptance: She's gone, and that's ok, because she's better off now than we are, and because we'll see her again relatively soon.

The most awkward part has been speaking with unbelieving friends. They offer their condolences for my loss, and I appreciate it so much, because I know they mean so well, but I've wanted to say somehow, "Thank you, but I view this as a temporary separation, not a permanent loss. I'll miss her for a while, but we'll be together again in such a better way, and for so long, that this is minor."

Maybe grief will still sneak up on me and knock me for a loop. If it does, so be it; sometimes we just need to let ourselves feel our feelings. But until then, I won't try to make myself feel what I don't, because, really...

She's with Jesus. Where's the downside?