Being not tempted
Buy heaven or hell
I yearn my keep
From the love unearth
I like epic themes, such as heaven and hell. Nonetheless, I find the carrot of heaven or the stick of hell to be a distraction from good living on earth. Love strikes me as what melds the good life on earth. Love is a good in itself, reflecting the grace of our Creator. Love is the way. Love puts hell in the refuse category, rejecting the cynical notion that redemption is a dead end street. Hell implies that God gives up on us, and that God’s will can only overcome us with some sort of eternal prison. More insidiously, hell accepts that human will is somehow supreme, even trumping God. Death itself seems a more than adequate fail-safe for limiting any human’s will! If there is a heaven, it would prove consistent with God’s pattern of surprising me with good things, taking me beyond my limited intellect, experience, or even imagination. My conception of how God operates is much more like a parent raising a young child, or in my more mature states, like a lover wooing me into even greater ways of being. My siblings in this big, strange human family may behave badly at times, but we are still family and need to have each others back, and at least not kill each other! Cain murdering Abel was all the more outrageous because they were brothers. It is no different today — we are all brothers and sisters. We should not forget such things. This is not simply a metaphor. Evolutionary biology indicates that all modern humans descended from a common ancestor on the continent of Africa. Humanity would be better served to remember our African mother and know that we are one race, the human race. Love of family is our greatest inheritance. Let this love bring us together, not tear us apart.
