"Heaven Can Wait" is the first depiction I can recall of a bureaucratic afterlife, although the system belongs to Hell. Interesting that late 20th-century adaptations moved the bureaucracy to Heaven.
I greatly appreciate your commentary on beauty and recapturing the Christian/Catholic imagination. I am so grateful for the mystics. I think they get a bad wrap in our modern, scientifically oriented culture. Even Catholics today have a tendency to regard the mystics with skepticism. However, they point us to the transcendent.
There is obviously a deep hunger for the transcendent people are grasping for it in the New Age, Eastern religions and philosophy, witchcraft and UFOs. People just don’t know what they truly long for.
I finished reading Dante’s Purgatorio a week ago. Towards the end of Purgatorio, Virgil leaves Dante and Dante is overcome by sorrow. But he realizes that Virgil (who represents human philosophy) cannot guide him any further into Paradiso. Until this point, Virgil had guided Dante through Inferno, all the way through Purgatorio till the earthly paradise (which is not the ultimate Paradiso). Dante is trying to tell us that human knowledge and philosophy get us only so far in the spiritual life. It doesn’t get us to heaven.
Very beautiful and heartwarming. You ask: "... how did modern people get the idea of the afterlife as a bureaucracy? Where did that ubiquitous trope come from?"
My first thought was to wonder if it came from something equally or more ubiquitous, namely the institution of education. The child goes to school, progressing from ignorance to the fullness of knowledge, and only upon completion of one's education do we emerge as fully developed beings able to enjoy the fruits of our efforts. Or so we all have been promised -- the earthly and material over the spiritual.
Our contemporary garbage dump of a society surely is a hindrance for the few still interested at all in imagining heaven, but it's doing a bang up job of depicting hell.
Thank you for this. Was having a very difficult day and feeling discouraged, just looking at beautiful art and remembering that our faith is in fact real and powerful…helped me pray our family rosary with something to meditate on and end the day on a hopeful note. Art is powerful.
Thank you for the glimpse of heaven. I think Isaiah's vision inspires my imagination of what God's presence feels like and also some of what Moses experienced in the wilderness. In reality our imaginations will never be able to match the glory - so we'll just have to wait and see! I also watched The Good Place which I thought was just good fun and not at all what heaven would really be like.
I thought about Moses face to face with God in the tabernacle too, that he had to go about with a veil over his face because the transformation frightened people. God is stranger than we are usually led to believe.
Having thrown out the television in 1992, I would thereafter not have been able to watch any sitcom, let alone the one you mention. But I wonder, based on your brief but funny description of it, if it really wasn't a backhanded warning about the socialist utopian dream that was (again) just starting to get legs in the West.
That is, if your conclusion about it isn't what its creators intended. A longshot, perhaps, but that's what crossed my mind reading.
I haven't owned a television since 1994. We have this thing now: the internet.
And yes, that's a pretty good interpretation. But I think they really did think they'd found a satisfying solution with the disintegration door. It was very Buddhist. I think they are just modern people who don't know ultimate things.
"Heaven Can Wait" is the first depiction I can recall of a bureaucratic afterlife, although the system belongs to Hell. Interesting that late 20th-century adaptations moved the bureaucracy to Heaven.
Oh yeah, I remember the 70s version of that movie. It was ages before I knew it was a remake.
I greatly appreciate your commentary on beauty and recapturing the Christian/Catholic imagination. I am so grateful for the mystics. I think they get a bad wrap in our modern, scientifically oriented culture. Even Catholics today have a tendency to regard the mystics with skepticism. However, they point us to the transcendent.
There is obviously a deep hunger for the transcendent people are grasping for it in the New Age, Eastern religions and philosophy, witchcraft and UFOs. People just don’t know what they truly long for.
We must remind them through sacred art.
I finished reading Dante’s Purgatorio a week ago. Towards the end of Purgatorio, Virgil leaves Dante and Dante is overcome by sorrow. But he realizes that Virgil (who represents human philosophy) cannot guide him any further into Paradiso. Until this point, Virgil had guided Dante through Inferno, all the way through Purgatorio till the earthly paradise (which is not the ultimate Paradiso). Dante is trying to tell us that human knowledge and philosophy get us only so far in the spiritual life. It doesn’t get us to heaven.
Very beautiful and heartwarming. You ask: "... how did modern people get the idea of the afterlife as a bureaucracy? Where did that ubiquitous trope come from?"
My first thought was to wonder if it came from something equally or more ubiquitous, namely the institution of education. The child goes to school, progressing from ignorance to the fullness of knowledge, and only upon completion of one's education do we emerge as fully developed beings able to enjoy the fruits of our efforts. Or so we all have been promised -- the earthly and material over the spiritual.
This would also explain why all the tropes about heaven show it as a place of ultimate disappointment. School never delivered on the promise.
Our contemporary garbage dump of a society surely is a hindrance for the few still interested at all in imagining heaven, but it's doing a bang up job of depicting hell.
Now now... Don't forget that the internet is like the Palantir controlled by Sauron, it will only ever show you bad things.
Ha!
Thank you for this. Was having a very difficult day and feeling discouraged, just looking at beautiful art and remembering that our faith is in fact real and powerful…helped me pray our family rosary with something to meditate on and end the day on a hopeful note. Art is powerful.
Thank you for the glimpse of heaven. I think Isaiah's vision inspires my imagination of what God's presence feels like and also some of what Moses experienced in the wilderness. In reality our imaginations will never be able to match the glory - so we'll just have to wait and see! I also watched The Good Place which I thought was just good fun and not at all what heaven would really be like.
I thought about Moses face to face with God in the tabernacle too, that he had to go about with a veil over his face because the transformation frightened people. God is stranger than we are usually led to believe.
Having thrown out the television in 1992, I would thereafter not have been able to watch any sitcom, let alone the one you mention. But I wonder, based on your brief but funny description of it, if it really wasn't a backhanded warning about the socialist utopian dream that was (again) just starting to get legs in the West.
That is, if your conclusion about it isn't what its creators intended. A longshot, perhaps, but that's what crossed my mind reading.
I haven't owned a television since 1994. We have this thing now: the internet.
And yes, that's a pretty good interpretation. But I think they really did think they'd found a satisfying solution with the disintegration door. It was very Buddhist. I think they are just modern people who don't know ultimate things.
Often times, the truth is spoken from the mouths of babes.
Well, it was cleverly enough written to actually be funny quite a bit, so that was fine. But I think they revealed more than they knew.
Skopos and Telos,
Matthew 5:8 ❤️👁️
Thank you