Digging Deeper (Spiritual Visitations)

Digging deeper into the topic of spiritual visitations, it occurs to me that we take our preconceptions with us when we ponder the afterlife…

 

I climbed back into bed after writing the last  blog post, but my mind continued to wonder, “Why would our loved ones be so eager to maintain contact with us, given where they are now?”

 

My preconceived (or indoctrinated) notion of the afterlife led me, automatically, to think of the Great Beyond as ether heaven or hell, neither of which I’m fully convinced even exist.

 

I’m 100% sure hell doesn’t since I don’t believe in a vengeful, jealous, damning God, despite what the writers of the Bible wrote in it. I trust them to “channel” God about as well as I trust Franklin Graham or James Dobson to; just saying!  (I’d far sooner trust former President Jimmy Carter and Jim Wallis to explain God to me, thank you very much–amen and amen!!!)

 

And if we’ve made God in our own image, which I’m convinced we have (rather than the other way around– read Reza Aslan’s God:  A Human History for more on this), since I’M not a vengeful, jealous, condemning person,  I expect God (if God exists in a form that is indeed worship-worthy)  to be a heckuva lot more advanced and forgiving than I am!

 

So, given that I think DeForest Kelley was a spiritual master while he was here on earth in the flesh, I view him as somewhere more “divine” than where I am on this mortal plain (which may be an illusion, too), and my question then becomes, “Why isn’t he 100% content and satisfied to remain in the company he’s in now?  What is it about me (and I presume plenty of other people still here on earth) that draws his attention away from wherever that is?”

 

When I first became an adult Christian by choice (got baptized), my perspective was, “When I get to heaven, I will be so focused on seeing and walking with Jesus that I won’t even look around to see who else is up there for at least a hundred earth years!!!”

 

I was so into the “I Can Only Imagine” vision that nothing else in the universe, I felt, could compel me to tear my eyes off the One who redeemed my soul. I mean, really.  Anything less than this would have felt like sacrilege, like blasphemy!

 

Given that perspective, De (and other loved ones who have “dropped in” on me in various ways since their passing) would be in dereliction of duty to spend any time gazing about to see if I was still doing okay, or to tap me on the shoulder just to say, “Hi! Just callin’ to check up on you!”

 

Is it not the height of arrogance to presume that someone in the heavenly realm would cast his mind or eye on anyone other than their Redeemer?

 

And the folks in hell who love me…. well, they’d be so busy gasping and burning and shrieking that I’d be the last thing on their minds unless it was to send me nightmares shrieking at me, “Don’t end up where I am!!! REPENT NOW!!!”  (I sleep very well at night. Zero nightmares in this regard!)

 

So… neither of these possibilities seem ripe for “spiritual visitations” from The Great Beyond!

 

Which leaves me to think that The Great Beyond might not be so great (or so terrible) as we’ve been led to believe.

 

What if The Great Beyond then, is instead, a place where our loved ones gather (or not) to reflect on how well they spent their previous lives on earth and are given the chance to express more of what they now feel they should have while they were here?

 

It might be a place where, between incarnations, we get a chance to review our greatest hits and misses so that when we assume human form again we’ll be in a more evolved place than we were the last time we incarnated.

 

Or maybe… just maybe… we’re the loved ones on earth who make them feel nostalgic for their former easy access to us?    (Life is hard for everybody; some more than others.  It’s a slog, no matter who we are.) Maybe our loved ones who have passed remember the way in which we eased their way through it in some way, and they miss the association–and the comfort of knowing that they were as special to us as we were to them–that they long to reach out and let us know, “I’m still here for you in every way I can be.”

 

I don’t know.

 

I do know that there are things we try to explain and understand that we don’t really. I think this is one of those things…

 

It’s a mystery that will only be explained when we get where they are–wherever that is!

 

For now, I will just rest in the thought that our bonds aren’t broken by death.

 

It feels right… intuitively.