Please talk to me, Susan.
Please tell me you want to know me.
Please tell me we can have a new beginning.
The Pure Love conjured up within, between, and through Susan and Esmeralda — heads bent, elbows on smooth-varnished round wooden table, hands clasped over enchanted lotus petal, knees scraping the rougher underside of this elf-sized (and thus undersized) dining hall table — glows with the energy of a hundred-millions suns.
Sound like an impossible amount of energy? Well, “the energy of a hundred-million suns” is not quite accurate. Pure Love is infinite, so it contains more energy than a hundred-million suns. But I don’t suppose Pure Love contains the same sort of energy that suns contain. What is the energy of Love? And why do we tend to picture that energy as a white light so powerful that it swamps all existence — as if Pure Love were the ocean and the rain and the wind, and all of existence (all the infinite universes popping in and out of existence, each dancing its dance in the however-many-billions-of-years it flashes in the pan) was a tiny little fishing trawler swamped by and sinking under water pouring in on all sides?
Pure Love must overwhelm Esmeralda and Susan. It must make of them vessels and vassals of the One Light that all hearts see play. What becomes of their childhoods, of walks in the sun and the rain, of Susan’s first songs and Esmeralda’s first calf? What is left when Love sweeps through?
And Sadducees came to him, who say that there is no resurrection. And they asked him a question, saying, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife, but leaves no child, the man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. There were seven brothers; the first took a wife, and when he died left no offspring. And the second took her, and died, leaving no offspring. And the third likewise. And the seven left no offspring. Last of all the woman also died. In the resurrection, when they rise again, whose wife will she be? For the seven had her as wife.”
Jesus said to them, “Is this not the reason you are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God? For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living. You are quite wrong.”
Is this an appropriate place to pause and consider the metaphysics of true love?
Well, then, just real quick.
Everybody knows (in the bone marrow of our hearts) that when we die; race, religion, ethnicity, gender, and all personality traits disappear and are lost forever — except of course hanging forever as a memory in the mind of God (and thus in a sense existing forever, since God’s memory is not of the past, but of the eternal present, where God’s perspective lies). Everybody knows that at death, everything except the Pure Love we have gathered and become is burned in the fire. And that it is good that way, otherwise the heavens would be full of ghosts held captive by mortal delusions. Think how awful that would be! To carry the fluff and stuff of this daydreamed adventure into Reality!?!? That would be madness. Luckily, it is not so.
And obviously, along with our shedding of our individual mortal minds/hearts/bodies, our relationships to one another must drastically alter. Hence Jesus’s point that there will be no marriage in heaven.
But what of the second part of his response:
” … And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living. You are quite wrong.”
What is he saying there?
And what about true love when you fall in love forever and you will stay together in this world and the next and if one is reborn the other will be reborn to, so that the two can find one another again and join together again, over and over, always together for ever and ever?
Is that just a silly fantasy, akin to a child wishing he could be a soldier in a glorious battle, because he’s too young to understand what a hard fate that actually is — that whatever his individual outcome, the glorious battle will cause terrible suffering that quite possibly could’ve and should’ve been avoided with a little more care, planning, and understanding, and rather less glory?
Are we would-be true-lovers not much better off dying into a wisdom wide and deep enough to love everyone infinitely, and thus equally?
I’m sorry I didn’t tell you in a nice and sane way that all I’ve wanted since first we met was to connect with you, know you, relate to you. I can’t even want my heart to recover from its brokenness. Because once my heart recovers, then you really are gone forever. Or so it seems. Though doubtless that is just more human folly, and not informed by metaphysical insight.
Still I can’t shake the possibility that humans do know one another in heaven and that there is still even some contact between the living and the dead. But I don’t know how that can be squared with dying into wisdom. Or is it that we die a million times before dying completely into wisdom, and reasonably good living/dying brings us into a sort of mini-heaven, where we rest and recuperate before signing up for another training day on earth, where one must be born partially blind to spiritual Reality, and where one can thus study Reality in a whole-being, nuanced way that heavenly bodies — being rather blissed-out on so much mental and emotional insight and joy — can’t??
If we are reborn over and over again, perhaps relationships are maintained and evolve over lifetimes as well — allowing for something like true love; even if in the end the best love is the widest and deepest one, and so we all must work at opening our hearts and minds until — in this life or some later one — we lose all individual relationships for a relationship with the One that, at our core and shining through our every moment, we all always were anyway.
I don’t know.
In any case, the Pure Love swamps Susan and Esmeralda, overrunning everything they used to think they were, and filling them to overflowing with the life overflowing that Knows that and in what way it is True to say, “We are all in this together”. For a moment, the two young women disappear into the Light. This Light streams always on both sides, and all mind/heart/matter is always but a thin film, living for real only to the degree it catches and reflects Light into/as life. But in a moment like this one, the Light exploding inside and out is so bright that one cannot help but lose oneself within It, and in that blessed disappearing act become one with the Light and with all Its works — which is both the formless creator and the flowing-together of everyone and everything that has been, is, or will be.
The Love advances. Anne catches to drift of Susan and Esmeralda, just as she finally gets herself around the magic stored within the SWK’s magic stores.
Momrath must flee. He’s lost a dragon battery to the termite’s fascination with Mench; and he’s also experiencing a shortage from the dragon battery now under Siel’s (admittedly weak and soon to fizzle out) mini magic dome. The magic patch which the athletic young Ellen has run, on light elven feet, up from the magic stores to the top of wall has shored up that wobble in the magic dome. And, worst of all, Momrath senses a flood of Pure Love heading his way; which, if It overtakes him, will change him, will make his current grand ambitions seem like the silly and petulant foot-stomping of a spoiled brat — and if that happens, how can he ever take over the world?!?!
Oh look! This is good! Between the two remaining batteries, Momrath has enough magical power to evacuate most of his monsters and troops (both the living and the dead ones) back with him! Thank God! Now we can have a meditation on what enlightened people do when faced with the question of whether or not to use violence to stop what they perceive as evil activities. Oh, but are we ready for such a contemplation? Well, no, but we’re not there yet, and if worst comes to worst, we can write our way out of the conundrum (like, for example, we could have there be a way to stop Momrath that involves only undermining his hold on the Magic Realm, and which requires no further warring).
Never mind. Forget I said that.
Where were we?
Ah yes:
I love you.
You’re a nice girl.
I’m sorry I didn’t just tell you how I feel.
Authors: Bartleby Willard & Amble Whistletown
Editors: Amble Whistletown & Bartleby Willard (as of Monday, April 24 at 9AM, there’s not actually been any editing done, since our editors have not read this yet; still, we imagine that at some point editing will happen, so we have prepared this announcement to catch that future reality in)
Copyright: Andy Watson, whatever that is
