|
When I was seven or eight years old I wanted to be an airline pilot. At twelve I planned to be a government spy. At fifteen, more modestly, my ambition was to be a radio announcer. Now, in my declining years, despite what I may, or may not, have achieved in my earthly life, I can, hopefully, (despite my comforts and sins) have the rewards of heaven.
W B Yeats, the Irish poet of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, once penned these words:
‘The wind is old and still at play
While I must hurry upon my way
For I am running to Paradise.’
The afterlife – call it what you like – is our advent after Easter. ‘The Lord is risen’, we rejoice, and many reply, ‘He is risen indeed’. It’s this Faith that holds us through life and death. God knows how hopeless are the problems that confront us, how serious the decisions that weigh upon us. But, surely, despite our failures and sins (individual and collective), the gaiety of spirit is that which comes from the fact that Christ is alive and that his spirit is at work in us and his creation.
In spite of the fact that we’re caught up in the so-called ‘credit crunch’ and taunted by the philosophy of despair and the cult of the absurd, we can join in the Christian chorus:
‘For yours is the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory’.
His word is the same:
‘Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you:
Not as the world gives, give I unto you.
Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.’
| |
|
