More than just me
I just finished a making a DVD for my dads birthday. I collected all the photos of him and his dad, who died about 20 years ago, and scanned them and cut and pasted and so on and so on.
After about three days of working on this project, and looking through old family photos it got me thinking about history and being.
This may sound cliched, but I was reminded that we are a collection of people melded together to be who we are.
It that sense I got thinking about eternal life and what it means for my grandad. My brother looks like him, I have personality traits from him, and all us kids have his temper. But his 'soul' exists through my dad and throughout us kids, same as all our ancestors played some part and thus their soul continues to exist within all of us.
Watching Hot Shots, the Charlie sheen comedy, a comment was made, he is an asshole, his father was an asshole and his fathers father was an asshole! As stupid a comment as this is, it got me thinking about the heaven and hell. We can create a destructive pattern that we pass on to our children and from generation to generation, or we can pass on who we are as creating people.
At a funeral the other day I heard story after story about a lady who believed that hospitality was the essence of God, and even though her kids aren't churchy at all, they have a knack for welcoming everybody into their lives and their homes. For that lady, that must be heaven.
2 comments:
Yeah I can see where you're coming from Pete, but to be honest it all sounds a little bit pop psychology for me.
I do think in one sense people live on through their descendants, but I also think its totally more than that.
Do you not think there your own soul lives on in some form as its own entity, rather than just melded in with others?
I believe that if we where to take seriously the idea that our ansestors are present within us and that we play a part in their continual enternal life, then we see human life as more sacred than we do, how we treat our bodies would change.
A mate of mine died a few years ago, we was brain dead but his body was harvested for organs and he lives on today in the 6 people whose recieved his organ.
Can you then say that he is not living on?
Check out the movie 12 grams. Takes the perspective of the reciever of an organ and the family of the donor.
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