Anthony Esolen, scholar, writer of deep and beautiful prose (and translator of Dante, as noted a few days ago here), writes of his mother-in-law's death:
The faithful Christian will say that this grandmother of my children, this woman who turned to the Lord almost at the last moment, was in heaven; and, if it should please the mercy of God, that would be correct. But we who live in a world of time and change can only with difficulty speak about a world beyond decay, a time outside of time, nor can we really fix in our minds any clear image of it. Hence the language-stretching of the apostle John -- who speaks of Paradise not as a snowy mountaintop in Greece, or a fire-lit hall in Norway, but as things that we can and cannot imagine, a city that is also a bride, a Lamb that is also a Man, a river that is a wound, blood that washes robes white, the First and the Last, the One who died and who lives again. Time, I know, is a function of this world of day and night, but the God who set the sun and the moon in the firmament of the heavens is the creator of time, as Augustine reasoned long ago. He can do what He will with time -- and He can do what He will beyond it, beside it, without it.
Jesus reveals to us that God is our Father, who gives good things. To all species of creatures he gives the fullness of good things that they, by their nature, can enjoy. If she lived for a hundred or a thousand years, my terrier would never be happier, I think, than she already is when she walks with me along a path through the woods, sniffing under rocks and dashing here and there, trotting two miles for every one of mine. Should man, then, who can conceive of God, whose mind reaches before and after, whose joy is in knowing the truth, and who longs to meet that Truth face to face, be deprived of his full measure of good, unless he should foolishly cast it away?
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