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

Our Creator would never have made such lovely days, and given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal.
                 Nathaniel Hawthorne

I think all of us are given foretastes of that bliss from time to time. I believe we should see them as very personal "windows into heaven" and store them away in memory for those times when heaven seems farthest away.

When my mother's mother was growing up in South Dakota in the 1880s, she kept a hope chest. The "chest" in Goggie's case was an old brown carpet bag. In it she placed a quilt, a lace doily, an embroidered pillowcase, beautiful things for the home she hoped one day to have. When snow blew for weeks across the prairies, or the wheat fields shriveled in a summer drought, she'd draw the treasures from the chest and look beyond the discouraging present.

I never had a physical hope chest, but I keep a spiritual one now to aid me in cultivating the neglected virtue of hope. One of the treasures stored there is the graveside service following the funeral of my friend Molly Shelley. Molly could hardly wait for heaven! Having encountered God's love through the shades of green in her own backyard, she experienced it also in rain drops. Squirrels. People's faces. "God couldn't love me enough to give me all this, if it wasn't to last!"

On my last visit to her home in Pennsylvania before her death from cancer at age forty-four, I found her stitching red and yellow felt balloons on a rectangle of blue cloth.

"My shroud!" she told me eagerly:

Balloons were to be the theme of her funeral. "At the graveside everyone will have one. When they release them they'll soar up, up-way up till you can't see them anymore. But you'll know they're still there ... flying free ... just out of sight!"

Molly was bed-bound by then and in great pain; I had to take care not even to brush her mattress. Like Mary Stuart, I thought, when death released Molly "from this my hard prison," she too would sing, "my spirit soars upward to thee."

Molly was also in emotional pain. Leaving a husband and six young children! Trying to prepare them for the grief she could not prevent and the future she could not share. But as we worked together on the funeral leaflet - with balloons, of course, on the cover - she couldn't hide her excitement at the still closer relationship awaiting her. "Thank you for coming today," began the letter from her that opened the service, "to celebrate my returning home to our Father."

Celebration. Release. Coming home. Previews of the joy to come are given us in many ways. For Molly it was the beauty of the "commonplace" world around her. From her I learned to fill my hope chest with ordinary sights and sounds. Moments, for example, when the small routines of living seem to flow without effort - when I experience what our friend David Manuel calls a "graced day." The news item I wanted to hear is on the radio as I tune in. The person I've been trying to contact phones me. A car pulls out of the parking place as I drive up. It's a day when the timing of many schedules seems to mesh like notes in a symphony, when in the humblest event I "catch the universe in the act of rhyming."