{"id":2844,"date":"2007-02-20T10:15:22","date_gmt":"2007-02-20T10:15:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/eternity.html"},"modified":"2007-02-20T10:15:22","modified_gmt":"2007-02-20T10:15:22","slug":"eternity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/eternity.html","title":{"rendered":"Eternity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anthony Esolen, scholar, writer of deep and beautiful prose (and translator of Dante, as noted a few days ago here), writes of his mother-in-law’s death:<\/a><\/p>\n

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The faithful Christian will say that this grandmother of my children, this woman who turned to the Lord almost at the last moment, was in heaven; and, if it should please the mercy of God, that would be correct.  But we who live in a world of time and change can only with difficulty speak about a world beyond decay, a time outside of time, nor can we really fix in our minds any clear image of it.  Hence the language-stretching of the apostle John — who speaks of Paradise not as a snowy mountaintop in Greece, or a fire-lit hall in Norway, but as things that we can and cannot imagine, a city that is also a bride, a Lamb that is also a Man, a river that is a wound, blood that washes robes white, the First and the Last, the One who died and who lives again.  Time, I know, is a function of this world of day and night, but the God who set the sun and the moon in the firmament of the heavens is the creator of time, as Augustine reasoned long ago.  He can do what He will with time — and He can do what He will beyond it, beside it, without it.<\/p>\n

     Jesus reveals to us that God is our Father, who gives good things.  To all species of creatures he gives the fullness of good things that they, by their nature, can enjoy.  If she lived for a hundred or a thousand years, my terrier would never be happier, I think, than she already is when she walks with me along a path through the woods, sniffing under rocks and dashing here and there, trotting two miles for every one of mine.  Should man, then, who can conceive of God, whose mind reaches before and after, whose joy is in knowing the truth, and who longs to meet that Truth face to face, be deprived of his full measure of good, unless he should foolishly cast it away?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anthony Esolen, scholar, writer of deep and beautiful prose (and translator of Dante, as noted a few days ago here), writes of his mother-in-law’s death: The faithful Christian will say that this grandmother of my children, this woman who turned to the Lord almost at the last moment, was in heaven; and, if it should…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nEternity - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/eternity.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Eternity - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Anthony Esolen, scholar, writer of deep and beautiful prose (and translator of Dante, as noted a few days ago here), writes of his mother-in-law’s death: The faithful Christian will say that this grandmother of my children, this woman who turned to the Lord almost at the last moment, was in heaven; 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2844\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}