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

Part III

Rejoice that your names are written in heaven.

Luke 10:20

And even thou, most gentle death,
Waiting to hush our final breath,
o praise him!
You lead back home the child of God,
For Christ our Lord that way has trod.

                     St. Francis of Assisi

"All the way to heaven is heaven," St. Catherine declared, and looking back on my journey, I've found it to be so. Heaven behind me, before I thought about such things at all. Heaven around me - the growing awareness of a larger reality. But Heaven before me? What can I know, this side of death, about the journey's culmination?

I can study the Bible. Ponder the insights of saints past and present. Recall my own intimations of that larger world. As I've done all this, have I found answers that satisfy me? A few. But more than individual answers, what I've gained is the conviction that the life begun in heaven here, continues there. Wider, fuller, brighter even than our hopes.

How differently I once thought of death! You died and that was the end of it. Belief in an afterlife was mere self-delusion. My introduction to the foolish notion had come not in church, but in the basement of the Louvre Museum.

I remember roaming its dimly lit corridors, peering at four-thousand-year-old mummy cases and wishing that, of all the subjects I could have chosen to study in Paris in the fall of 1949, I hadn't picked "Burial Objects of Old Kingdom Egypt". I'd been learning, in a French history course, about Napoleon's expedition to Egypt. Thanks to Napoleon, the instructor said, the Louvre had the greatest collection of Egyptian antiquities outside Cairo.

But when I'd enrolled at the School of the Louvre to explore these treasures, I'd discovered that the museum's classes were all for specialists. "Burial Objects" - of the catalogue listings the one that sounded most general - consisted of an analysis of the probable original burial site of a certain alabaster jar, and a demonstration that the third leg of an acacia-wood stool had been repaired in antiquity.

So having paid my tuition, I wandered wistfully among the acres of unlabeled exhibits - this was long before the installation of today's user-friendly Egyptian wing. Every now and then I'd come upon a white-bearded classmate musing over the inscription on a sarcophagus lid. I was not only the sole female taking this course and the youngest by decades, but apparently the only one who did not read hieroglyphs.