We had just been celebrating my 90th birthday. I sat down in my easy chair and felt faint, and all at once my heart stopped and I was gone. I slipped out of the house and found myself on some kind of sledge or surfboard suspended in the air. As I got accustomed to this, I began to move, first slowly, and then faster. I looked around and saw that I was not alone.
There were others, many others, all on surfboards, some sleek, some heavy and unwieldy. I looked down and saw that all my clothes had gone. In their place was a light robe. I looked up and saw in the distance a shiny panorama, what seemed like a city, surrounded by a wall, with minarets, steeples and domes, shining without the aid of the sun. We all seemed to be drawn to it.
I could now make out hundreds of white-robed beings who all seemed to be converging on the city. The landscape under us was beautiful, but it paled in comparison to the shining city ahead; the trees that I thought so majestic looked crooked and diseased, the people down there that I once admired looked hollow, and their accomplishments that once amazed me seemed puny. Was I racing back in time, or forward? Time seemed senseless.
I looked around me and saw that all of us beings were beginning to communicate with each other, and doing so without language, and without any of the barriers we knew on Earth. Wasn’t that Mother Theresa over there? She seems to have teamed up with John Knox. What a wonderful sight! Isn’t that Rembrandt? He’s deep in conversation with Van Gogh, and he’s throwing away paintings because they are starting to look cheap in the light of the city. Van Gogh is throwing away his, also. Both of them are gazing at the city — and it’s getting nearer and nearer. It has gates in the walls, and it is awesome. But that word is trite.
And suddenly I find that I could not remember what “trite” meant. I was losing English, the language I held onto all my life. And in its place was a new sound in my head. Was this the language of the new city? My inhibitions were disappearing. At last I could speak without first introducing myself. And my sledge had gone. Where was up and down? Left and right?
We must be in at least four-dimensional space. Or is space nonsense here? Then I began to see that the memories I had of Earth were just shadows of what was here. Here was a real river bordered by real trees, and I could be in the water, on the bank, in the trees, and this all at the same time. So Einstein is wrong here! He thought that he had arrived at truth, but now I see that it is all mere scribbles.
All this time — nonsense again — we were being drawn into the centre of the city. And I saw that there was a great crowd — 10,000 times 10,000 — and in their midst a wonderful radiance. I tried to describe it, but all the shadow words failed — honey, amber, kindness, laser, fluorescent, purity, diamond, g-sharp, 256 million, unicorn. And we were all singing, and I could sing all four parts — but it seemed like 40 parts — and numbers seemed to be failing too. I was lost, or is it that I am found? We were all together here, and my English reserve was gone, class and creed and colour. Why had I ever given these things any thought? And everything here is always moving! Why did I ever think that heaven was static? The mind I had on Earth was a mere shadow of what we have now. So this is God! And these must be the redeemed from every tribe and language and race. Hallelujah!
