Pat wrote, “Perhaps it is enough simply to believe the spirit does not died.”  We all have some doubts about life after death. I can’t imagine that there isn’t life after death but there is still that little nagging occasional doubt that Pat had when she wrote that sentence. The little essence that was in Pat and is in me can’t just snuff out at death. It is far too real. Yet there are some who believe this.

All Christians and Jews I talk to believe in life after death and look forward to rejoining their loved ones in heaven. Mind you many have not thought it though and have no idea what heaven or life is going to be like after death. I suspect but don’t know that all world religions believe in life after death. A god and life after death are after all what “religion” is all about. Life after death is a compulsion of the human mind; it is very difficult for a human being not to believe in it even if it is just a belief that something lives on after we die.

Christians believe Christ’s promise that there is a place for each of us believers prepared by Christ himself. Yes, Pat and I believe that completely. We also believe the New Testament passages promising we will recognize our loved ones even in their new eternal Christ-like body and that our loved ones will be waiting for us when we get to heaven to help our rebirth into the eternal resurrection body.

Pat and I also believed very strongly in the sacrament of marriage.  We believe that in marriage two entities are made one by God never to be separated. Even by death itself. In fact, we are made whole again by death. We also both believe that love continues after death and continues to grow every stronger. As described by Pat, though we are two individuals we are still united as one when we depart this life here on earth. We are a trinity – Pat, I and the person that our love is. The third person, Love, is the binding force just like the Holy Ghost in the divine Trinity. Christians have always believed that God is Love and that LOVE is what unites us all in the communion of Saints.

“For you must realize,” says Jacob Boehme, (Confessions) “that earth unfolds its properties and powers in union with Heaven aloft above us, and there is one Heart, one Being, one Will, one God, all in all.” On the Grief Journey, you eventually stop running and simply look in your own heart and are swallowed by the embrace of your loved one in her eternal resurrection body (explains that kiss the day after she died) – you are united again in the love of Christ. You realize nothing has changed, you are whole again and nothing, no part of your love is taken away. As physically lonely as you are, you continue to grow in love forever.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Enduring is part of Christian love, the love which brought Pat and I together in marriage. The end of the great journey is when you discover God has been calling you to become true man and wife united in one eternal resurrection body in Heaven. C. S. Lewis’ GOD and US at last. Christianity has always held that the difference is, in fact, soul deep, that the souls and resurrected bodies of men and women are masculine and feminine through all eternity. Men and women are equal but different. They complement each other. They are the Chinese Yin and Yang the founding principal of the universe