Ascension of the Virgin by Michael Sittow
Father Cassilly concludes his description of life in the world to come. He writes: “Power and strength will be characteristics of the risen body. Its senses and members will be quick and vigorous, ready to respond to the impulse and behest of the soul. It will be endowed with celerity of motion, enabling it to transport itself with the speed of thought from place to place and to penetrate solid objects at will. Christ ‘will reform the body of our lowness’ (Phil 3:21) and make it like to His glorified body. . . . Our bodies will be remade, reformed, to suit the new manner of existence. We shall not be bound to the laws of space and gravity, since St. Thomas [Aquinas] tells us that a corporeal place or habitation will not be necessary for our happiness, though we shall have it as an accidental adjunct and an additional pleasure of glory.”
“Even the friendship of others, which is so needful to us on earth, will be but an accidental joy in heaven. The vision of God will so entirely satisfy us and fill all our faculties to repletion, that we shall feel no need of solace, or refreshment from the companionship of angels and saints. . . . Friends, who loved each other in charity so intense that their existences were bound up one in the other, will not be severed, but will rejoice a hundredfold in each other’s beatitude and gifts. And we shall have not two or three friends, but each one of all the hosts of the blessed will be to us a brother or sister in whose beauty and perfection we shall rejoice as though they were our own.”
“These are some of the ineffable delights that God has prepared for those who love and serve him. . . . Heaven will be but one long day of happiness with a dawn but no setting; each moment of it bringing new pleasures, a renewal of intensest action, a further plunging and immersing into the infinite perfections of God, a deeper and more perfect appropriation and appreciation of Him and the wondrous works of His hands.”
Quotations from Francis Cassilly, A Story of Love, 2d ed. (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1917).
SaintlySages 