This title is printed to order. This book may have been self-published. If so, we cannot guarantee the quality of the content. In the main most books will have gone through the editing process however some may not. We therefore suggest that you be aware of this before ordering this book. If in doubt check either the author or publisher’s details as we are unable to accept any returns unless they are faulty. Please contact us if you have any questions.
The loss of a real and heartfelt belief in God–and by real I mean an experience that is both steady and moving, ethereal though down-to-earth, sentimental but never trite–comes from an earlier more foundational loss, namely that of an ardent and directed desire for heaven, and more specifically, that paradisal longing for the resurrected life. This book seeks to recover the neglected nature of heaven, degraded into something out-there and unknown, degraded further into a vague wish for immortality and the often empty words of consolation. Or even worse, the almost comic book reduction of heaven to an earthly social(ist) paradise, the immanentization of the Christian eschaton. The vague better place, which is meant well, often means nothing at all, or worse than that can hamper us when approaching and engaging the mystery of grief. This book will address and interrogate various questions about the nature of the afterlife–on the status of guilt, forgiveness, friendship, love, embodiment, sexuality–and propose various paths to answers. We are talking about that sacred innermost promise: the hope of paradisal reunion most secret and yet most universal, never abstract and shapeless, but embodied and individual. We must wonder whether our casual forgetting of this estuary of human hope, the resurrected life, has caused us to lose ourselves in such a way that we do not even know what we have lost.
