Three People I Want to Meet in Heaven

Most of you have heard of Mitch Albom's little pot boiler, The Five People You Meet in Heaven.  Albom's study of a place most of us believe in and all would like to visit ["if only it existed they sigh"], brings an amusement park operator into contact with five people who impacted his life. If you believe in such a place, whom would you like to meet? More importantly and frightening is the question, what would you ask them? Or tell them?

All of us probably have a dream list of the Greats. That list has changed over the years hasn't it? When I was 14 I wanted to see Ted Williams and ask him if was true that he could really smell the faint odor of smoke as the ball singed the bat when he foul tipped it. Later, I thought about Shakespeare or even Faulkner or Hemingway. By the time I was 30 only Shakespeare remained on my wish list. Yet today he remains too daunting for me. I don't have enough arcane, scholarly questions such as, "Why in Henry IV, Part 1, why did you take so long getting young Hal to battle? That's not even a good question, folks. I would like to hear others ask better questions, but would choose the back row, a seat on the aisle, if you please. Bathroom exit, you know. Even in Heaven?

Given my reservations, I have a better idea. What do you think about this possibility for you as well?  Think about, say, three people you might want to thank for their lives, their personal contribution to your life.


Sorry, no loved ones, close friends, or divine figures allowed. I happened on this idea this afternoon, resting in bed, reading a thick book very slowly, my mind wandering back to my mother. One of her famous last statements before a killer stroke she told me in the rest home. "I want to hug and kiss your dad--and then I want to find John and Abigail Adams." Here a high school graduate who had read fewer than a dozen books on the Adams family, wanted to see them. I think she just wanted to thank them for the texture they brought to her life. She loved them for who they were and because they, as she said, "made my life more meaningful." 


So, here we go. My gratitude simply echoes my mother's. A giant thank you to the following three:

1. Henry and Hester Thrale.  Henry, a brewer, not a man of books and his sprightly wife, Hester, found Samuel Johnson kneeling at the feet of a bewildered minister. He was in the middle of a nervous breakdown. Johnson was  the greatest conversationalist in the known world of his day and famous essayist and poet. They bundled him off to their rolling estate, Streatham Park, where he began to heal. W. Jackson Bate says of this moment in time: "The Thrales did more than contribute to the restoration of Johnson's health. They made it possible." 

They saved  Samuel Johnson for all of us who love him and continue to read him today [many by assignment only]. He survived to produce nearly 20 years more of writing and famous conversations, recorded in James Boswell's famous Life of Johnson. My brothers and I always have a "Johnson" quote for the occasion. We love him.

2. Lev and Sophia Tolstoy. Both endured what critics call the "worst marriage in history." When Sophia read Anna Karenina [perhaps the greatest novel ever written], she said, this "thing is spotty--incomplete. Where are you in this novel?" He put himself in as Levin and added his sister-in-law, as Kitty and wrote the masterpiece. 


When he began throwing successive drafts of War and Peace [perhaps the greatest novel ever written. I know, I know] into trash barrels, she picked them out, sorted them, and then rewrote each subsequent draft because she was the only one on earth who could read his handwriting. 

When Tolstoy wanted to turn over all publication rights to his collected works, she fought--and they knew how to fight. She won. Stalin, in the only fit of compassion he ever revealed in his life, assented and turned the publication rights over to the Tolstoy Trust. Thank you for enduring the world's worst marriage, Tolstoys. Because of your guts and stubbornness, Sophia, we have, YES, the two greatest novels ever written. [See The Last Train Station, starring Christopher Plummer and the great Helen Mirren on Netflix.]

3. Abraham Lincoln. Where does one begin with this man? Yes, he was a politician; he wanted to be President of the country and he wanted to unite that country at all costs. When 7,000 Union Blue went down in 20 minutes at Shiloh, he paced the War Room, saying, "what will the people say!" Leave the convoluted arguments to historians, especially the revisionists; many of them the cadre of new black historians who peck at Lincoln's motives and slowness in emancipating the slaves. My love and thanks is purely personal. Here was a man who lived out his life with a bipolar wife, a man whose face shows the affliction of such battles as Shiloh [though the Union lost at a cost of only 24,000 men], Cold Harbor, the loss of Willie, his son, the distain and abuse of an ignorant father, the nagging darkness of melancholy, etc.

When talk in Sunday school wanders to those "perfect" bodies we all long for, I think of Lincoln's "sacred scars." He paid for every wrinkle with pain. And all those so-called "presidents" who followed? And those guys who "run" today away from one single concrete  solution to our real problems? None of them ever did or will, now, hold a candle to Father Abraham Lincoln.


Do you think there are only three in your life?  Let's talk about this again sometime.

Beauty

I have lived long enough in the church to watch a kind of evolution of Christ-art.  Many of us were moved by the Bloch exhibition at BYU last summer.  He and Harry Anderson [a Seventh-Day Adventist] seemed to capture the physicality of Christ, the energized blood and bone Christ so unlike, say, El Greco. We wanted a true man in our Savior. “Ecce Homo,” Pilate said.  “Behold THE man.”

More recently, new illustrations have further enhanced the Savior’s “beauty.” More than likely His skin color would have been the honey-brown of Hispanics or Palestinians today, I seriously doubt he had blue eyes.  Change continues.  His physical features have become further enhanced:  stronger arms and legs, a man of apparently large stature, silky hair flowing, facial features much closer to early Greek obsessions with ideal proportions, i.e., the length of the space between his nose and his mouth, the length of his arms in proportion to his torso and legs.

I plead for patience when it comes to Christ-art; However, we are fortunate Arnold Friburg did not paint the Savior.  Such outer muscularity, which he felt mirrored the inner spiritual resources of, say, Moroni, would push back the heart-felt Isaiah version of  the “man of sorrows” who is without “beauty that we should desire him.”  Instead, the Great Poet, says Christ, was “rejected, . . . acquainted with grief,” someone the Great Unwashed “despised and esteemed him not.”

Isaiah’s vision stands, then, in stark contrast with the Hellenistic world of which Christ and the early apostles were a part.  Inundated as we are these days with Calvin Klein’s beauty, adds to the swirling, frenetic world of high energy foods and exercise equipment, propelling us into obsessions with health and endurance.  We wear out our knees and ankles before our hearts give way.  But we must, as Yeats says, “labour to be beautiful.” William Wordsworth walked 150,000 miles; most young housewives run that many miles in a month.  But I stray here.

Let me counter my own version of beauty with two examples:  The “Catadores" [garbage pickers in Rio] “art” and Abraham Lincoln.  Be gentle and patient, folks.  This effort comes from a man who just two weeks ago wanted a set of Steve Reeves’ calves in the next life.  Dare I ask Spencer W. Kimball what his take might be on my “resurrection reconstruction” project?  I shudder to think. . . . .

Early in 2010, Vik Muniz, a Brazilian transplant to New York, felt “compelled,” he said, to transform the infamous Rio de Janeiro landfill, the largest in the world, into an art piece.  Moving among the tireless “pickers,” Muniz snapped pictures of old and young, the weary and the dirty, the sad and, strangely, the happy majority.

Watching him and 8 of those chosen for their striking [but not 21^st century] beauty, he greatly enlarged their portraits, outlined them artistically with garbage and then took final pictures, reducing them to gallery size.  Tears sprang to my eyes as I watched the participants stand on a scaffolding, looking down at themselves in interesting poses, their faces aglow.  And they all wept as they saw themselves as beautiful, captured by Muniz’ genius with perspective.  He saw something no one else could see.

The exhibit, along with the contestants, flew to London and around Brazil, where over a million people visited these Catadores, now called “recyclers,” organized into a union.  Now Brazil is one of the most productive recycling nations in the world.  Garbage has become art; art has become money and jobs.

Not too long ago, a young returned missionary from Brazil sat next to me in Sunday school.  I told him my son had served there, and that he had loved the people and the language, and that he still prays in Portuguese and often converses with clients in their beloved tongue.  “You should see the documentary on the Rio landfill,” I said.  It moves slowly enough that you’ll grasp the workers’ conversations, and you’ll see the people you served.”

“A garbage dump?” he said.  “Don’t think that would interest me in the least.  Garbage is garbage.”

William McLellan, the worst general ever to serve in the US army, along with Custer, called Abraham Lincoln the “big gorilla.”  His puerile, envious letters to his wife reek of hatred.  When Lincoln visited the troops after Shiloh, they mockingly described his “extra spindle shank legs, his long underwear showing; his lanky body perched precariously on a donkey.”  This was their Commander in Chief.  And yet they loved him, and yelped and clapped up a storm.

When we speak of beauty, of “perfection” on that “perfect resurrection morning,” maybe we should rethink beauty and perfection.  Does Lincoln want to awaken, looking like George Clooney?  What of that scar at the top of his furrowed brow?  The one for Bull Run.  The second, more shallow gulley after Cold Harbor, the deeper line, embedded in both cheek and forehead, the one for Mary Todd, his bipolar wife who could not stop spending, who could not stop worrying, who could not stop dancing.

And what of the sleepless, melancholy Lincoln himself, weeping for Willie. “My son has been taken from me,” he told Stanton, his head in his hands.  Now as Commander in Chief, he led, but without other Chiefs to follow.  He learned the art of war, teaching himself [a personalized West Point experience], because “no Union office has the guts to “go out and kill Lee’s army,” he confessed to his often divisive cabinet.

Then Grant. Victory.  Election.  Assassination.

I  will not compare Lincoln with the Savior, but I do suggest that our scars, won on life’s battlefield, just may be the “beauty” about ourselves we don’t want to lose.