Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

Both heaven and hell are banquet halls, tables piled high with food. In hell, however, everyone is starving; the spoons are three feet long and people can't get the food to their mouths. In heaven the spoons are three feet long, too, but a great feast is underway. The diners feed one another.

Anonymous - "The Two Banquets"

We have our individual reasons for feeling that heaven cannot be meant for us. One of mine is my selfishness.

In the Divine Comedy, Dante set down the most elaborate conception of the afterworld ever written. So detailed are its descriptions of hell, purgatory, and heaven that many of his contemporaries in the fourteenth century believed he'd actually made the imaginary journey he describes.

In the Inferno Dante encounters the souls in hell. Though he meets a wide variety of people in its gloomy landscapes, all have one quality in common. Each one believes himself the center of the universe. In each of hell's nine circles, the damned assail Dante with their ongoing feuds, their self-justifying accounts of what went wrong. Nothing exists outside their thwarted desires, their wounded pride. It's chilling reading!

August, 1968. It was Liz's turn to go with me on an interview trip, but as the two of us set out in the car for Springfield, Pennsylvania, I had misgivings. How would a twelve-year-old react to meeting Dick Riley?

"Of course, bring your daughter along!" Mr. Riley had said over the phone. Still, Liz was a child who wept over limping dogs. And from what I'd heard about Dick Riley ... "You mustn't be alarmed when you see him," I tried to prepare her.

Sixteen years earlier, in a fall from a ladder, the man we were going to see had been paralyzed from the neck down. Years of rehab had restored partial use of one arm. So that with this crippled arm he could shift himself in bed, his lifeless legs had been amputated. "You mustn't stare," I told Liz. "Or act sorry for him."

Dick Riley's wife, Mary, welcomed us at the door and led us to the room where Dick was propped on pillows in a motorized bed, surrounded by the files of his accountancy business. On that summer afternoon a sheet was the only bed covering, too smooth, too flat, where his body ended abruptly at his hips.

Mary brought us all ice tea, then took Liz out to the garden while Dick told me his story. He'd been only twenty when the accident happened, married, with a baby on the way. The house painting firm he was working for had assigned him a three-story home that week.

"I was foreman on the job, bossing men twice my age."