Will I Be Gay in the Resurrection?
Posted by Wesley Hill
As Lent moves rapidly towards its close, I’ve been trying
(and mostly failing) to make space in my life for some more meditative reading,
and right now I’m inching through Frances Young’s God’s Presence: A
Contemporary Recapitulation of Early Christianity. It’s a remarkably
unclassifiable book, as Young weaves her work in Patristics (the study of the
church Fathers) together with personal, pastoral reflections, largely revolving
around her disabled son Arthur. Today this passage struck me in an especially
forceful way:
“Arthur’s
limited experience, limited above all in ability to process the world external
to himself, is a crucial element in who he is, in his real personhood. An
ultimate destiny in which he was suddenly ‘perfected’ (whatever that might
mean) is inconceivable—for he would no longer be Arthur but some other person.
His limited embodied self is what exists, and what will be must be in
continuity with that. There will also be discontinuities—the promise of
resurrection is the transcendence of our mortal ‘flesh and blood’ state. So
there’s hope for transformation of this life’s limitations and vulnerabilities,
of someone like Arthur receiving greater gifts while truly remaining himself.
Perhaps the transformation to be hoped for is less intellectual or physical
advance and more the kind of thing anticipated in the present when the fruits
of the Spirit are realized in relationships.”
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