CHRIST IN WINTER:
Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter --
It’s not easy to lose
weight in winter, either the winter of the calendar year or the winter that is
our declining years.
Summer is the time for
losing weight. Even if you aren’t, it feels like you are, because your clothes
weigh so much less. But we’re more active in summer, and have fresh produce to
eat instead of stew and hash, so we’re losing weight.
Helen says the good thing
about losing weight is that you don’t have to pay attention to your body all
the time, whether you can’t wear these pants because they’re too tight, whether
you’d better take another antacid pill before bed, whether you have to go to
Wal-Mart instead of Kroger’s so you’ll blend in better. In winter, you’re so
busy with your fat that you don’t have time for much else.
She says that must be what
death is like, losing all that weight so you don’t have to pay attention to
your body, so you’ll have time to pay attention to relationships.
The Apostle Paul said he
was sure we’d have a body in heaven, but he wasn’t sure if it would be physical
or spiritual. By “body” he meant an individual identity. On earth, that’s the
only way we can tell one another apart, and thus have an individual identity,
by body. Individual identity is the only
way we can have relationships. On earth we have to have physical bodies in
order to have relationships; not so in heaven.
Helen’s faith is that
whatever body we have in heaven, it will let us spend all our time on
relationships, without worrying about whether we can fit into our wings.
John Robert McFarland
“Two steeples, no
waiting.” Helen’s translation of the French sign on the cathedral in Montreal.
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