While surfing the net, I came across your "Ideas on Marriage in Heaven Vary with Faiths" <http://newsok.com/article/3162596/1194050204>. I hope that you won't mind my offering comments.
You report that there is great disparity among "New Testament-based faiths," as to whether or not there will be marriage in Heaven. While some find a negative answer in Matthew 22:30, you report that some ponder Genesis 2 and cannot understand how there would not be marriage in Heaven. Yet, this question is clearly addressed in the New Testament. Like many people, I have not always felt comfortable with the answer.
While I’m not yet 50, the mere prospect of losing my wife – my soul mate, my best friend – troubles me. On a human level, I'd be absolutely lost. In general, men just don't seem to handle widowhood as well as women. It strikes me as a sign of God's mercy, that He so much more frequently calls husbands home first!
The Andrew T, for whom we named our son, was an exception to God's "husbands go first" rule of thumb. Widowed for nearly a quarter century, Uncle Andy used to say that his wife had been "miles ahead of him as a human being" (Just as an aside, I believe God gave Uncle Andy some extra time, to get his act together.).
Natalie Merchant has a very haunting song, entitled "Beloved Wife," in which she is the voice of an elderly widower:
- “you were the love for certain of my lifefor 50 years simply my beloved wifewith another love I'll never lye againit's you I can't deny it's you I can't defya depth so deep into my griefwithout my beloved soulI renounce my life as my rightnow alone without my beloved wifemy beloved wife....
“my love is gone she suffered long in hours of painmy love is gonewould it be wrong if I should just turn my face away from the lightgo with her tonight?”
<http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/nataliemerchant/belovedwife.html>
The pain of Natalie Merchant's old widower touches me deeply. Would it be OK for the old widower to just pack it in? Like a geriatric Romeo mourning his septuagenarian Juliet, would it be OK for him to turn his “face away from the light [and] go with her tonight?” Absolutely not! Yet at that profound moment of sorrow, it's understandable that the elderly widower might feel cheated to learn that his beloved will not be his spouse in Heaven. What a challenge it is to trust that God has something even more magnificent in store!
With their marriages, Christians are called to proclaim what Christ teaches about eternal life. While sometimes hard to accept, Matthew 22:30 is key to understanding Christ's proclamation: “At the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like the angels in heaven.”
I'm a big, big fan of what's been called Pope John Paul II's "Theology of the Body" (TOB) <http://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/JP2TBIND.HTM> - 130 or so addresses JP II gave during the first five years of his pontificate. While some speak of JP II's TOB as though it were revolutionarily different from what came before, TOB strikes me as really just a repackaging (beautful for all that) of what orthodox Christianity has always proclaimed about marriage and procreation.
Marriage and procreation are incredible, indescribable goods of monumental importance, intended to lead us to salvation. John Paul II began with a profound reflection on what Genesis teaches about marriage's indissolubility and moved from there to what the Sermon on the Mount taught about purity and from there to Matthew 22:30. Though men and women will not be married and will not bear children in Heaven, we will somehow be drawn even closer to each other, in God! With our present finite understandings, the awesomeness of this eludes our grasps. “What eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and what has not entered the human heart, [is] what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor 2:9)! We are meant to see God face-to-face! My quotes are from Michael Waldstein's magnificent new translation of JP II's TOB <http://www.amazon.com/Man-Woman-He-Created-Them/dp/0819874213/ref=cm_cr-mr-title>:
- "we should go back to the words of the Gospel in which Christ appeals to the resurrection, words that have a fundamental importance for understanding marriage in the Christian sense” (11/11/81)
- [Marriage] “belongs exclusively ‘to this world.’ Marriage and procreation do not constitute man’s eschatological future” (12/2/81).
- "In the resurrection, the body will return to perfect unity and harmony with the spirit; man will no longer experience the opposition between what is spiritual and what is bodily in him. ‘Spiritualization’ signifies not only that the spirit will master the body, but, I would say, that it will also fully permeate the body and the powers of the spirit will permeate the energies of the body….This ‘eschatological experience’ of the Living God will…reveal to him in a living and experiential way the ‘self-communication’ of God to everything created and, in particular, to man....Eternal life should be understood in an eschatological sense, that is, as the full and perfect experiences of the grace (charis) of God in which man can share through faith during his earthly life” (12/9/81).
- “The resurrection is not, therefore, only a manifestation of life that conquers death – a final return, as it were, to the tree of Life, which man was distanced from at the moment of original sin – but also a revelation of man’s destiny in all the fullness of his psychosomatic nature and of his personal subjectivity....This ‘heavenly man’ – the man of the resurrection, whose prototype is the risen Christ – is not so much the antithesis and negation of the ‘man of the earth’ (whose prototype is the ‘first Adam’) but above all his fulfillment and confirmation” (2/3/82).
- “If someone chooses marriage, he must choose it exactly as it was instituted by the Creator ‘from the beginning’; he must seek in it those values that correspond to the plan of God; if on the other hand someone decides to follow continence for the kingdom of heaven, he must seek in it the values proper to such a vocation. In other words, he must act in conformity with his chosen vocation”….It is a characteristic feature of the human heart to accept even difficult demands in the name of love, of an ideal, and above all in the name of love for a person” (4/21/82).
- “a conscious and voluntary renunciation of marriage….is possible only when one admits an authentic consciousness of the value constituted by the spousal disposition of masculinity and femininity for marriage” (5/5/82).
- "The constitutive elements of the theology of the body are contained in what Christ says when he appeals to the ‘beginning’ concerning the question of the indissolubility of marriage (see Mt 19:8), in what he says about concupiscence when he appeals to the human heart in the Sermon on the Mount (See Mt 5:28), and also in what he says when he appeals to the resurrection (see Mt 22:30)….The ‘redemption of the body’…expresses itself not only in the resurrection as a victory over death. It is present also in the words of Christ addressed to ‘historical’ man….In his everyday life, man must draw from the mystery of the redemption of the body” (7/21/82).
Your article also claimed that some Christians believe that God selects a soul mate for each person, who "may be a person's earthly spouse or someone the believer would have chosen in life if he or she had had the opportunity to know the individual." I'm at a loss as to what you're referring and do not recognize it from the orthodox Christian tradition. To what is it that you refer?
I do firmly agree with you that "God has our best interest and happiness in mind."
