On Heaven as in Earth Part III

“You asked me if there would be dinosaurs in heaven.” I told Larissa.

“I did?” She laughed? “I don’t remember that.”

“You did.” I said.

Larissa and I were working together on a stretch of road with about 50 others. We were tamping down gravel that had been unloaded from a large wagon and was spread across the road. Our job was to pound the gravel down with a 10-inch by 10-inch metal square attached to a pole, called a tamper.

“How would you do it, Larissa?” I asked. “How would you describe this place to yourself in the beforelife?”

“I don’t have any idea where I would even start.” She said.

I didn’t know Larissa in earth beyond the age of eight, but here she looks like I imagine she looked in her prime, at about 40. Braided black hair, smooth dark skin with crows’ feet around the eyes. Long neck and deeply defined collar bone held up by a solid physique.

“You know,” I said. “In the beforelife, they would sometimes make prisoners do this kind of work. Laying down road by hand.”

“They did?” She stopped tamping and looked at me, smiling. In that instant I was besotted. People here are so gorgeous. I wasn’t attracted to her in a romantic way. It was just that there is no interference in relationships. Everything between everyone is clean. Unencumbered. There is no jealousy, no regret, no infatuation, intimidation, or unforgiveness, no carnal desire. Not that relationships lack deep emotion or complexity. But they’re better than the best relationships during the best times in the beforelife.

“I think I remember that.” She said. “I recall men chained together and working like this. Maybe I saw it in books or a movie. Was making a road like this some sort of punishment?”

“For some, I suppose. Can you remember what work felt like?”

“Barely. Work was hard, wasn’t it?” She asked. “Physical labor, I mean.”

“Sometimes.” I said. “‘Sweat of the brow,’ we used to say. And if someone had power over you and made you work, not letting you share in the fruit of your labor, it could make for real suffering. But working with your hands could also be enjoyable, like it is now. If it was work you chose to do for reasons you believed were important.”

“But was it this satisfying?” She asked. “Working with people you love and doing a thing that is so good to do. Making roads like this. Roads we’ll travel on just for the love of a good journey.” Larissa was tamping away at the gravel near her feet and then glanced up. “Look at how far we’ve already come.” And she and nodded at the stretch of road behind us.

“Let’s sit a while.” I said. So we laid down the tampers and moved to the edge of the road. There was a small embankment and some people working in a field that had a wide variety of different sorts of plants and trees. We sat down and took water skins from our belts drinking great quaffs of water.

“Just try.” I said. “Try to explain what being on heaven is like for someone who’d never been here.”

Larissa tilted her head back and closed her eyes.

“Well,” she said. “There’s work, that’s for sure. But that word has a different taste than I remember it had back in earth. Like, it was bitter back then. Sometimes, at least. It’s so hard to recall those times. Like a dream in which you only remember wisps.”

“You’re doing great.” I told her. “Keep going.”

“I remember food in earth. Did we say it like that? Did we say, ‘in earth’?”

“I think we said, ‘on earth.’ We’d say, ‘on earth’ and ‘in heaven.’”

“That sounds weird.” Larissa said. “On earth.” She said this like she was trying the words on in her mouth.

“’On earth as it is in heaven.’” I repeated this from the Gospels. “It’s what Jesus said we should pray for back then. Like we were to pray and to work so that the beforelife would become like the afterlife.”

“Makes more sense to say, ‘on heaven’ and ‘in earth,’ doesn’t it?” Larissa took another swig of water. “Like when Jesus said we were to be in the world but not of it. We were in the earth and now we are on heaven.”

“Anyway,” she continued, “I remember food, and that’s pretty much like it is here on heaven. Like Pad Thai. I remember having that in earth. And I remember tacos. We had tacos in the beforelife didn’t we?”

I nodded.

“But were the fragrances as intoxicating? Was the taste of it all so pure and clean and glorious?” She asked me.

“I don’t know.” I told her, but I had a suspicion that food in earth, if it was grown in really good soil and prepared with great skill, could be as good as it was here. Close anyway.

“How could you tell someone trapped in time what it’s like to live outside of it?” She asked.

“Just try.” I said.

“You can be everywhere.” She said. “All at once.” The words came slowly, as though she were trying to get them boiled down to their essence. Then she laughed.

“That would make no sense to me in the beforelife. I couldn’t imagine being fully present in more than one spot at one moment. Like now …. I am at this moment in Melbourne, Australia sitting at an outdoor café, and I’m at my drafting table in Accra, Ghana working on plans for a new library. And I’m in Portage, Wisconsin working with others to take apart the maximum-security correctional facility there – carefully preserving materials we can use again and singing a celebration song as we melt down some of the metals.”

Then she looked at me, hard, but not unkindly. “That would be impossible for me to imagine. I wouldn’t understand a lick of it.”

“Maybe.” I said. And then, “Probably. But what about the work?” I asked. “How would you talk about the work on heaven?”

“I would tell myself that on heaven there is deconstruction and reconstruction. There is undoing and there is doing. We take apart things that, in earth, came out of our brokenness and our woundedness. And we bring into being the things which were meant to be from the beginning. And I would say that ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ don’t mean anything here.”

“I would consider heaven to be slow if I looked at it when living in earth.” I said. “So many devices were supposed to be labor-saving, but either used up more stuff or took labor from those we didn’t care for. We also do a lot of walking. Walking was too slow from what I remember.”

“Yeah, I can also remember being concerned about so many things.” Larissa said, and she stood up and walked over to the area of road we were working on. “In church, I mean. We worried about everything. Who was ‘in’ and who was ‘out’ and whether a thing was to be embraced or repulsed. We were obsessed,” she said as she began to tamp the gravel. “Obsessed with answering questions nobody else was concerned about.”

“Not even God, sometimes” I said.

“Not even God.” She said.

“But I think I was right about one thing that I told you back then when we were in earth, and you were eight.” I said.

“Yeah?” Larissa said. “What’s that?”

“There is singing and dancing.”

Larissa smiled.

“There is that.” She said. “And don’t forget the dinosaurs.”