The Beatific Vision, God the bridegroom, and Women

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In the end, when all the veils are torn away and we experience reality for what it truly is, there is either being with God or apart from Him. We are promised a “new earth,” so something like this life may continue, but it will be in the presence of God.

Heck, I have seen speculation (mainly from Eastern Christianity, I think) that even Heaven and Hell are the same objective experience – the unveiled presence of God – and whether that is experienced as joy or horror is down to how we allowed Him to prepare us (or refused) when we were alive.

So a “third option” may just be literally inconceivable in the Age to Come.
 
Well that’s speculation and that wouldn’t even make much sense considering that you can only see God as he is through the Beatific Vision; the demons are not given this experience because hell is eternal separation from God.

As for the “third option” I don’t think anyone has really been able to give me an answer as of yet.
 
That’s actually not a bad idea, I just wish God would tell me now.
 
I completely disagree, sex is a fundamental reality of the human experience. When we go to heaven we remain our sex; while we may not have bodies, our very souls are either masculine or feminine. I’m not making this up - this is what the Church teaches!
 
LumberJack said:
Have you not wondered what would happen if Jesus comes again in the flesh to claim his bride? Wouldn’t that mean a ceremony between him and the Pope?
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No, because the Pope is the Vicar of Christ on earth. Jesus can’t marry himself and the Pope is not equivalent to the Church.

While I myself do not see God as being confined to a human gender, this particular metaphor of yours doesn’t work.
 
shrug It’s not what I would have picked. But we don’t really get to choose. It did give me some useful thoughts to gnaw on. But that’s kind of how it goes. Life is ordinary, life is ordinary, life is ordinary— and you have a brief experience that comes out of nowhere— and life continues to be ordinary, but a little seed of thought is planted in your head. And you can either ignore it or cultivate it.

We-- everybody, everything, all of creation-- are all little teeny pieces of a puzzle or a mosaic. But we do our jobs very imperfectly on earth. We’re always telling God “no”, or “I’d rather do it this way”, or “I’m not interested”, or “this is what I prefer”. And we let our small decisions each day get in the way of how the big picture is supposed to look. Or suppose we’re all part of an orchestra that’s supposed to be playing “Ode to Joy”, but three-fourths of the instruments are wandering around playing whatever tune pops into their heads, rather than working together to create something beautiful. When you’re enjoying the beatific vision, all that self-interest has disappeared, and the only thing that’s left is a desire to have the existence you’re supposed to have, and do the work God intends you to do. And if you magnify that by millions and billions of souls, all united in doing exactly what they’re supposed to do, and no longer distracted by unimportant things— it would be an amazing thing, to experience that kind of unity and love.

Those cows in the field are better at doing God’s work than I am. He gave them a job-- go be a cow, stand out in the weather, go have baby calves, let those calves grow up to have babies of their own, or to be eaten for supper. He gave me a job, too, but I let myself-- my pride, my impatience, my laziness, my irresponsibility, my selfishness-- get in the way of doing what I’m supposed to be doing.
 
God is the Significant Other in Heaven; therefore there is no need for marriage in the sense of life on Earth. God is primary. It’s just that on Earth it doesn’t seem that way.
 
Once again though, God being my “significant other” just sounds strange to me and creeps me out. I don’t want to love God that way, that’s what a future spouse is for! God just doesn’t seem beautiful in the way that a woman does.
 
Doesn’t that play into my fear of this “hive-mind”. I feel as though by following God’s will we become almost like slaves to this “supreme will” and lose our free-will.

I’d like to know if anyone can tell me but, when we experience the "beatific vision’ we are no longer able to sin right? Doesn’t that make us slaves? Just mindless pawns that receive infinite pleasure and joy in exchange for their freedom? I feel as though there is no freedom for humanity. We either serve ourselves, which means we sin and therefore we become slaves of sin and Satan, or we serve God and lose our ability to freely choose things other than those which God allows us to choose.
 
You have the ability, right now, to go stick your hand in the garbage disposal and turn it on. Nothing’s stopping you. But you don’t, right? Because you know that sticking your hand in the garbage disposal and turning it on is a bad thing. No good can come of it. It will harm you in a Very Bad Way. But you don’t feel yourself a slave, or less of a person, because there’s some common sense holding you back from putting your hand in a running garbage disposal, right?

All good comes from God. There is no good outside of God. Voluntarily separating ourselves from God hurts us a thousand times more than putting our hands in a garbage disposal. And that’s the attractive thing about sin— it has to seem attractive, or else we wouldn’t choose it.

“Hmmm, should I jump into this pit of hungry crocodiles, or should I stay safely on the bridge? Hmmm… safety or crocodiles… safety or crocodiles… I don’t know, those crocodiles look pretty awesome…”

God doesn’t say, “Don’t jump in the crocodile pit” because he doesn’t want us to have fun. He says, “Don’t jump in the crocodile pit” because it is intrinsically harmful.

Being able to experience the Reality of Reality is a good thing.
 
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It’s perfectly acceptable to avoid using romantic language for God, or to apply it only in the collective sense; Israel/the Church/humanity in general is His Bride, not you or me personally. The Father-children image is another Scriptural one you might be more comfortable with.

That said, when it comes to beauty, the beauty of every beautiful thing (including your future wife) is just a tiny share of the beauty of God.
 
midori’s reply is excellent. Additionally, we shouldn’t think of God’s will (even in Heaven) as a single narrow path we are bound to follow. Even though they do not sin, saints can still choose between good things. For example, if there is a literal “wedding feast of the Lamb” for our glorified bodies to enjoy, we would be free to choose which dishes to sample and in what order,

Free will is the freedom to do what we want to do. Saints don’t want to sin. They see how stupid it would be.
 
I do wonder though, how can God be beautiful if he has no body? How could I ever experience beauty without seeing it?
 
While I agree that sin is wrong and that the saints can now understand it to be stupid, as they now understand the whole of God’s plan, why is it then that Satan and the angels rebelled? They were close to God and would understand sin to be stupid too right? Then why did they do it?
 
The testing of the angels is supposed to have occurred before they were admitted to the Beatific Vision, so they were still able to sin. Like Adam and Eve, they were a lot more capable than we are (but even more so than A&E) and should have known better, but rebelled even knowing the full consequences. It is commonly thought that finding out about the plan for the Incarnation, and the resulting fact that humans – mere animals made of common matter – would ultimately be closer to God than they was the catalyst for the rebel angels’ refusal of God’s will.
 
Yes, that’s pretty much my understanding as well. Like humans, in their own way, the angels were not admitted to the fullness of the beatific vision until they had voluntarily chosen God.

A big chunk of the Fall of the Angels had to deal with the Incarnation. The Incarnation was going to happen whether humans fell or not. Basically, God says, “I’m going to create human beings, who are made of matter and spirit. And then the second person of the Trinity is going to be all-God and all-man. And he’s going to be born of a Woman. And she’s going to have an important place here as well. And he’s going to be the Head. And y’all angels are going to follow him.”

And some of the angels were very much against this idea. The thought that the Second Person of the Trinity was going to be “made lower than the angels for a little while” was very much abhorrent-- and the fact that they, who were pure spirit, would still be required to worship him? The idea that God would embrace such an inferior creature by becoming like one of them… imagine a rich aunt passes away, and leaves the bulk of her fortune to her annoying yippy chihuahua, while mostly passing over her children/grandchildren/nephews/nieces. 🙂

God chose to become Man. Furthermore, God chose to be Man’s Redeemer. And additionally, he left us his presence in the Eucharist for us to consume. He didn’t choose to become an Angel; he didn’t choose to redeem the fallen angels; and there is no angel who has ever consumed the body/blood/soul/divinity of God.

If that’s not favoritism, I don’t know what is.
 
NKaloms said:
I do wonder though, how can God be beautiful if he has no body? How could I ever experience beauty without seeing it?
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I tend to think of the Beatific Vision in this way.

God is infinite, which means He has all perfections and they cannot be fully plumbed throughout all eternity because we’re not infinite and can never be.

And so, we’re encapsulated in an ever-increasing sense of being loved, as we gain the capacity for it. We are exposed to His universe and His perfections free of the limitations of our senses, but after Judgment Day when we have bodies again, our sense will be perfected and invulnerable.

So, for example, we could enter into the center of a star, feel its heat and pressure just as they are, and yet not be crushed or burned or even put into pain. Simultaneously, we could explore its internal workings; how the atoms spin and interact and form reactions and compounds, and we’ll wonder as we absorb every principle of physics and every mathematical formula involved. That alone will take eons. At a point, we’ll begin to “hear” it; the heavenly chorus of all things; the mind-blowing “harmony” of all those principles and formulae and brightness and darkness and cold and hot and heavy, all interacting in a way nobody on this planet has ever seen or heard or ever will.
 
(Continued)

I think of our interaction with angels. What are they really? Are they more akin to us or to principles. If one told us its name on this earth, could we survive it? Would we be flooded with so much beauty and complexity and grandeur that our very capillaries would explode? But will we see them then, just as they are, and live?

And all the while, we know we’re in the presence of God because of the warmth of His love and His constant attention to us.

And we see people. I think perhaps we’ll see a person at every stage of his/her life simultaneously. He’ll be a baby, a child, an adolescent, a man in his prime, an old man, all simultaneously and mysteriously elevated like one of those photographs taken by true artists, who bring beauty out of the mundane. And I think we can be in communication with them all, even simultaneously if we wish.

And they, too, are part of the harmony. And it gets richer and richer forever, and we are never bored because God is forever new to us.

And time goes away. We can simultaneously be in the Jurassic period, in First Century Rome and today, all at the same time if we wish. We can step inside the pre-bang “string” and watch it expand into the universe if we wish.

Anyway, I like to think about it, and that’s how I think about it. No limits to everything we can imagine in our wildest imaginings.
 
NKaloms said:
They were close to God and would understand sin to be stupid too right? Then why did they do it?
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We don’t know in this life. But it’s possible to imagine a being so magnificent, so full of perfections, that it decided to worship itself for all eternity rather than serve its purpose. All angels are separate species. No two are alike. Each had an assigned function. But was that “assignment” what they rejected because it precluded utter devotion to itself?

They were not, we understand, united to the Beatific Vision, but they had a pretty good idea of it. After all, all they had to do was look at themselves and their own magnificence, and know they were created by an ultimately perfect Being in order to know something of it. We are assured by some saint or other (I forget who) that if we were able to perceive an angel just as it is, (and could survive the experience) we would be utterly convinced it was God.

But self-love is a strange thing. We deny to ourselves that we are in love with ourselves, but we are just that. Is it stupid? Of course it is, but that doesn’t really explain it. It’s a choice, deliberately made, and with a very good knowledge of the nature of the choice. In that sense, it’s not “stupid” at all. It’s not being uninformed or slow of wit. It’s a choice.
 
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