May not be a Bruce Lee quote. But it's true.

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JMJ

The Readings for Wednesday in the 7th Week of Easter (B2)

• Acts 20:28-38 
• John 17:11b-19

Non rogo ut tollas eos de mundo, sed ut serves eos a malo.
I pray not that thou shouldst take them out of the world, but that thou shouldst keep them from evil. 

There's this great line in St Catherine's writings, asking God not to take a temptation away from her, but rather to give her the victory over it. Of course, there's also the line in the Our Father asking that we not be led into temptation, but delivered from evil. 

We sometimes want an easy ride. We want a sermon that's all jokes, we want a recipe that's all hamburger helper. We want a religion that's light and quick. How may Americans confuse Christianity with Mayberry, RFD? How many westerners are happy to call themselves Buddhists, but only on their own terms? (There are Dharma Punx who parallel the Orthodox Children of the Apocalypse in their serious rejection of Western values in the name of a deeper religious calling.) To be fair, before Americans got into the act, a lot of other people confused religion with "our culture". God even calls out the People of Israel for doing that to Judaism in the Old Testament: creating an easy to get along, cultural thing that had little or no resemblance to the faith taught by the prophets - and a lot of resemblance to the practices of everyone else in the region. Everyone likes an easy religion.

Thing is, most religions are not intended to be easy. Classical Paganism was filled with rules, taboos, stipulations, food regulations... it took late 20th century writers to create a feel-good religion out of all that, a lackluster, Presbyterian sort of paganism for American bookstores. Oprah and Madonna turned the highest levels of Jewish Mysticism into something you could study with friends over a Bacon Double Cheeseburger. Anyone promulgating a traditionally stringent form of paganism gets accused of being a right-wing religious nut just like any other religious conservative.

Jesus' prayer is a reminder that not even God himself thought this would be easy. St Mary of Egypt struggled for 40 Years in the Jordanian desert. If you don't think the story is factual, remember it was told by Monks who, thus, at least acknowledged that theirs was a long struggle, a lifelong struggle. So is ours.

Along with Jesus, St Catherine and St Mary both know that without the struggle, the faith is meaningless. It's ok to make choices, but doing away with temptation, doing away with evil, per se, is not the way to make disciples. 

Taking the easy way out is never the right way.

I'm wrestling with the virtue of fortitude and also with follow-through. It's easier to run away. 

Work Ethic

Thinking tonight about Duffy's "Stripping of the Altars" and the Henrican Reformation: focusing on the cultural shift away from a Catholic, community village/farmland surrounded and supported by the Church's feasting and fasting, work day and holy day schedule, to a Protestant, urban, individualistic culture, devoid of fasting or holy days (other than Sunday). The idea that most of the week was some religious holiday or other whereon work was lessened or forbidden so that everyone could hear Holy Mass, say prayers, go to the local saint's shrine, etc, went away and was replaced by the idea that Church was on Sunday and the rest of the week was for work.

Work required jobs, jobs require concentrations of people, farm-gobbling became the thing and mobs of landless people moved to the already booming cities. This same process continues now, 500 years later, almost entirely unchanged. The biggest change is that divorcing work from the ethical structures crafted by religion has left the Job as the realm of social darwinism. We call this the Protestant Work Ethic: work hard and you will succeed. The Protestant originals would add "and this is a sign of God's blessing..." but even without God it continues. It's not the ethics of work, it's an ethic developed from the idea that work is required - and all else must give way to work.

As the Protestant Ascendancy began to weaken in the 19th and 20th centuries, the gaps were filled in by Catholics and Others, but the culture as molded by the predecessors began and continues to mold the successors. Not one Spiritual but Not Religious, not one None, not one Atheist is uninfected by the original sin of the capitalist west: the Protestant Work Ethic. We all know that we must work until we literally drop. Those of us rare enough to have retirement plans have to realize that we are essentially being made to work twice as hard to pay now for what we will get later: it's not free money, you know.

Work quotas, once the bane of the factory worker, are now able to be applied to even the office minion and the basil. The job, no longer a function of your person or your vocation, is now an urgent necessity for your rent or food. Yes, this has been so for a while, but it has never been so until recently in all of history. Your local serf's Lord had an obligation to care for the families, to provide food, to see their children well cared for. This is no longer the case: I'm obligated only to give you a paycheck. We call this Libertarian business, but it is solid Calvinist economics.

Are are made wage slaves, to use the Marxist term, by a culture that has no Catholic religious obligation and no sense of noblesse oblige. If I earn money, it is for me to do with as I wish. I can found a charity for my tax benefits and to export my personal ideology, or I can avoid that and invest wisely and run businesses into the ground as write-offs. Only in England did the wealthier Anglicans have this same sense and they cared for their servants as well as the townsfolk around them. Even this culture began to die off after the World Wars. A culture which no longer taught the religious obligation to care for those beneath one began to rely on the state to do it and, in the end, the folks not taught the religious obligation took over the state as well, and saw no reason for the state to do it either.

It is no wonder that we are surrounded by the wealthiest of cultures that is at once terrified of the poor and unable to care for them.

Now even "good Catholics" believe it is the state's obligation to care for the poor, but run their apartment buildings or coops as if they were Robber Barons from the Gilded Age. Retiring empty nesters can't wait until the last child leaves so they can turn the extra bedroom into a garden shed or a guest slot instead of moving a poor person into it. Whilst people like me pride ourselves on living alone, but thus fritter away our income as if it were "my income" and not something God has given me to care for the poor. If this sentence confuses you, pooling income and lowering demands or expectations results in a superfluity of resources that can be shared with others.

Along with this odd, Protestant economy we have adopted the Protestant idea that you're not the boss of me. Catholics of previous eras knew that God had created a social hierarchy not because those higher up were closer to God, or better, or less sinful, but rather because any sense of trickle down required the idea that some be higher up. Ronald Reagan's Voodoo Economics failed to work because we have an American Idea that no one is better than anyone else. We have created a society that mirrors the Protestant idea of Church. We may all have different functions, but in the end, we all stand equally before God (or the state) as individuals. Just as no Protestant can get the full sense of this phrase, Regard not our sins but the faith of your Church... neither can any non-Catholic or Non-Orthodox imagine a place where there is no place as "my income" but rather "what God has given me to care for you..." (and the more Catholics and Orthodox that get infected with the aforementioned Original Sin, the fewer will even understand those phrases).

We take comfort in the idea that wealth per se is a sign of blessing, and that I can do whatever I want with God's blessings. We find encouragement in Mid-20th Century political ideas confused with moral statements and fail to see that even Marx had some Christian influence.

In the end, we have built a society where I can be blessed by God (or random datapoints I have manufactured) without any sense of obligation to you save only in the occasional penny tossed your way either by taxes or else by my choice for manual charity. The last thing we want is a reminder that we have an empty bed someone could sleep in, empty shoes someone could wear. In those cases we'd rather share our superfluity with a thrift store that can give us a tax receipt than with the beggar at our step. Thus turning even the tools of care into a benefit for ourselves and misusing the blessings God gave us.

Tante Corrie Knows

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JMJ

The Readings for Tuesday in the th Week of Easter (B2)

• Acts 20:17-27 
• John 17:1-11a

Sed nihil horum vereor : nec facio animam meam pretiosiorem quam me, dummodo consummem cursum meum, et ministerium verbi, quod accepi a Domino Jesu, testificari Evangelium gratiae Dei.
But I fear none of these things, neither do I count my life more precious than myself, so that I may consummate my course and the ministry of the word which I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel of the grace of God. 

Paul will say several things like this in his Epistles. I have only one thing to do... this is it and everything else is only so much dung. I don't know how to live like that. Because in the few times I've been laid off or come to the end of a housing arrangement, I've been terrified. Yes, I've made sudden changes and always survived, but only by grasping at enough straws until I mixed a metaphor and built a house out of them.

I've been reading Corrie Ten Boom's second book and wondering how it is that I could find myself a Tramp for the Lord, wandering the world trusting that my next step will be 100% safe so long as I am trusting God's plans and not my own. Of course, I'd have to give up planning to do that. Corrie's life - after the Nazi Concentration Camp - is filled with stories of landing in a strange city and meeting a random stranger who opens a whole new world of God's grace for the spinster Tante from Holland. I pray every day for this faith: not faith that "can move mountains" but rather can move me from my own fear and isolation. 

Corrie says that when one has gotten on a train, if the train goes through a long tunnel, one does not not jump off the train just because one is afraid of the dark. One trusts the engineer to keep things moving along. Can one walk into the world, by faith - not by sight - and just do whatever it is God has planed? It seems to me that a single man "of a certain age" who will not be getting married must have something to do, yet. But what will "finishing my course" look like? How can I best be that person?

Once there was a Pentarchy.

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JMJ

The Readings for the Feast of St Matthias, Apostle
Monday in the 7th Week of Easter (B2)

• Acts 1:15-17, 20-26 
• John 15:9-17

Et dederunt sortes eis, et cecidit sors super Mathiam, et annumeratus est cum undecim Apostolis.

And they gave them lots, and the lot fell upon Matthias, and he was numbered with the eleven apostles. 

I've worked for churches, off and on, for a lot of the last 35 years. Add to that non-profits and higher education, and I'd say that easily 60-75% of my job time has been in this world which is a veritable banana split of politics, ego, and turf wars. The 6 months I spent at the Benedictine monastery in Colorado are just the double fudge sauce on this sundae of doom. Today's reading from Acts calls to mind an odd experience in the middle of all that. 

A non-traditional congregation was having its annual elections for their governing body (called the Parish Council or Vestry). There was an odd tradition in this community of only bringing one group of candidates forward, by a process of interviews, and then asking the community to vote yes on the slate. You might realize how non-democratic this is. Oddly they did not. It was a way to self-perpetuate whilst appearing to adhere to traditional forms of governance. It essentially ensured that people of the wrong sort would not get elected to office to challenge community norms. 

My memory does not fully hold a clear vision of how this event happened, but at this council meeting there were two candidates for a job. One was the Approved Nominee. The other was one who was a newbie and an unknown quantity. The team, if memory serves, tried to convince one or the other to step down. But in the end it was coming to a vote. Agent Provocateur that I am, I moved that rather than vote we decide by lot. The official candidate was unimpressed with this suggestion although the newbie didn't care one way or the other. The community, by majority vote, accepted my motion. The lot fell to the newbie. The official candidate, having been promised the job, remained unimpressed.

Although there were lots of energies and personalities involved, the sheer politics of the event sucked. Aristotle said man is a political animal, but  human nature is what we're here to rise above. So... how to deal with Politics in the Church? 

To be clear, I'm not talking about Church involvement in secular political actions. I think most political choices can be viewed through a lens of morality and I'm thankful that this Pope (and, indeed, all the Popes) have taken steps to guide us towards moral choices in the secular realm. (Admittedly, some Popes did that by modeling bad behavior...) I'm talking about the intrusion of what St Paul calls "factions" in the Church: the taking of sides, I am for Paul, I am for Apollos, etc. This could be read to include the things that are bringing about the demise of the Protestant mainline, but I'm sticking with things like: Orthodox bishops withholding Ordinations until they get a few "donations", or Catholic bishops asking for priests to be a little more quiet around the diocese for being a bit too famous on the internets, or Catholic priests taking their entire congregations into schism and apostasy because the Bishop is too traditional; priests of any denomination being able to look the other way for wealthier parishioners. 

All the usual things. I mention none of this for scandal: because it goes on all the time. I'm asking what to do about it. And I don't mean how to stop it.

All this week leading up to Pentecost, I think this is a crucial question. How is the Church governed.The first apostles opted for drawing lots. If you've ever seen the Shoes of the Fisherman, you'll know that getting a new Pope involves an odd mix of politics and inspiration...

So what do you do about it? Run around yelling, "This can't be the Church?" Toss in the towel and say, "Wow." I'm somewhere in the middle, to be honest, because I think God's funny and lets us run amok, and this is how He's decided to run the Church. This is a mark of divine providence, as far as I'm concerned: because most human institutions last about as long as a tube of toothpaste. 

The Church, however, can side with soon-to-be-dead political movements, the wrong ethnic identities, financially risky property deals, bad choices in clergy, declining populations (if you think "the Nones" are bad, try the Black Plague), poorly chosen expansion polices, and even egregiously sinful Popes, and yet the Church is still here. Rome, Attila, the Ottomans, the English, the French, the Germans, the Nazis, the Soviets, and quite a few others have all tried to get rid of the Church. Yet, the Church is still here. I take quite a bit of comfort in that. All-too-human politics happening in an all-too-human Church seems the least of our worries.

Filling All Things with Light

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JMJ

The Readings for Solemnity of the Ascension (B2)

• Acts 1:1-11
• Ephesians 4:1-13
• Mark 16:15-20

Propter quod dicit : Ascendens in altum, captivam duxit captivitatem : dedit dona hominibus. Quod autem ascendit, quid est, nisi quia et descendit primum in inferiores partes terrae? Qui descendit, ipse est et qui ascendit super omnes caelos, ut impleret omnia.
Wherefore he saith: Ascending on high, he led captivity captive; he gave gifts to men. Now that he ascended, what is it, but because he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same also that ascended above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.

This is how the Byzantine rite praises Christ at Easter: 

In the tomb with the body 
and in Hades with the soul, 
in Paradise with the thief and 
on the throne with the Father and the Spirit, 
were You, O boundless Christ 

filling all things.

Today's feast raises Christ again, from Earth to Heaven - and now with us as well. From this morning's Matins in the EF, a Sermon from Pope St Leo the Great:

After the blessed and glorious Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, wherein the Divine Power raised up in three days the true Temple of God which, in their impiety the Leaders of the peoples of Israel and Rome had destroyed (namely the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ), God was pleased to ordain, by His Most Sacred Will, and in His Providence for our instruction and the profit of our souls, a season of forty days which season, dearly beloved brethren, doth end on this day. During that season the bodily Presence of the Lord still lingered on earth, that the reality of the fact of His having risen again from the dead might be armed with all needful proofs. The death of Christ had troubled the hearts of many of His disciples their thoughts were sad when they remembered His agony upon the Cross, His giving up of the Ghost, and the laying in the grave of His lifeless Body, and a sort of hesitation had begun to weigh on them.

Hence the most blessed Apostles and all the disciples, who had been fearful at the finishing on the Cross, and doubtful of the trustworthiness of the rising again, were so strengthened by the clear demonstration of the fact, that, when they saw the Lord going up into the height of heaven, they sorrowed not, nay they were even filled with great joy And, in all verity, it was a great an unspeakable cause for joy to see the Manhood, in the presence of that the multitude of believers, exalted above all creatures even heavenly, rising above the ranks of the angelic armies and speeding Its glorious way where the most noble of the Archangels lie far behind, to rest no lower than that place where high above all principality and power, It taketh Its seat at the right hand of the Eternal Father, Sharer of His throne, and Partaker of His glory, and still of the very man's nature which the Son hath taken upon Him.

Therefore, dearly beloved brethren, let us also rejoice with worthy joy, for the Ascension of Christ is exaltation for us, and whither the glory of the Head of the Church is passed in, thither is the hope of the body of the Church called on to follow. Let us rejoice with exceeding great joy, and give God glad thanks. This day is not only the possession of Paradise made sure unto us, but in the Person of our Head we are actually begun to enter into the heavenly mansions above. Through the unspeakable goodness of Christ we have gained more than ever we lost by the envy of the devil. We, whom our venomous enemy thrust from our first happy home, we, being made of one body with the Son of God, have by Him been given a place at the right hand of the Father with Whom He liveth and reigneth, in the unity of the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

- Emphasis added. This is how important Our Lord's Ascension is: it is the Crown of our Salvation. For now, not only are we saved from our sins and ransomed from death, but are we also welcomed to Heaven, raised higher than even the angels and united to the Godhead in the person of the Christ; who is of one substance with the Father and with us. 

But I've Never Been to Me.

+JMJ+

The 13th of 15 in a Series of Meditations on the 15 daily intentions offered by members of the Angelic Warfare Confraternity.

Wherein we pray for our our hearts, that the place where Christ abides in us with the Father and the Spirit may become the place where we live with the Holy Trinity in friendship. 

With this intention we turn a corner to a wider, mystical focus on salvation. Yes, all of the intentions have been directed towards salvation, but this one together with the next two (the final three of the series) are the the culmination of this journey, the capstone of the process.

The garden of Eden story will, perhaps, be familiar to readers. Adam and Eve, our first parents, blessed to live in Paradise by their creator, elect to follow their own consciences and so come to sin. In the very act of sinning they find themselves banished from Eden and exiled into a world where they have to work, know pain, and forever lament that they cannot get back to the Garden. Byzantine hymnody puts these words into Adam's mouth:

Adam sat opposite Paradise and, lamenting his nakedness, he wept: ‘Woe is me ! By evil deceit was I persuaded and robbed, and exiled far from glory. Woe is me ! Once naked in my simplicity, now I am in want. But, Paradise, no longer shall I enjoy your delight; no more shall I look upon the Lord my God and Maker, for I shall return to the earth whence I was taken. Merciful and compassionate Lord, I cry to you, ‘Have mercy on me who am fallen’.

In the tradition of Christian allegory, the departure from Eden is echoed for each of us in our exile from our true self. As we cannot know, apart from Christ, neither truth, nor peace, nor justice, neither can we know our very being to the core. In our heart - after Baptism - lives God himself. It might seem especially odd, since to our Protestant friends we have to "invite Jesus into our hearts", but for the Catholic and Orthodox reading, it is our hearts into which we cannot come and - like the Garden - God is inside, alone, calling for us in the cool of the evening. All of life becomes a process of alignment with the guidance of this inner garden; until at last, in the peace of Christ, we find the way clear to enter again into Eden.

Through eating Adam was cast out of Paradise. And so, as he sat in front of it, he wept, lamenting with a pitiful voice and saying, ‘Woe is me, what have I suffered, wretch that I am! I transgressed one commandment of the Master, and now I am deprived of every good thing. Most holy Paradise, planted because of me and shut because of Eve, pray to him who made you and fashioned me, that once more I be filled with your flowers.’

This prayer of ours is that the place where Christ abides - together with the Father and the Spirit - may become the place where we dwell with the Holy Trinity in friendship. We beg to enter into our own hearts. What can this mean?

I suffer from a pattern of anxiety attacks. I've never quite understood them. The oddest was when I got my first car. I still cannot understand how it is that folks leave a $15,000 thing alone in the parking lot at WalMart or on the street at night. I was never worried that it would get broken into as such, I just kept asking folks, "How do you do this not only every day, but all day, all the time?" And so it is that I have trouble leaving home, or leaving the office, or walking away from a meeting... etc. Is everything done? Is everything safe? Although I know not everyone deals with exactly this, I imagine (perhaps wrongly) that all of us have some portion of this pattern inside: our mind picks up an idea and will not let it go. Everything becomes a struggle to deal with anything other than that one thought. 

Our mind functions this way - especially the vocal part, the babbling part of the brain. It's not only a huge distraction from work, or relationships, or whatever;  it pulls us out and away from the inner Eden. We have to hush that part of the mind, still it, bring it into alignment with the peace that comes from God. In fact, we can be so distracted, that - looking inward - we think even our heart has become a troubled sea. We forget the sea is never fully troubled at its depth. It is still and calm down there even when the storms are raging above. We have to guard our peace, and to bring our babble-brain into our hearts to be stilled.

We cannot be ourselves, really, until we find our true self fully restored in God. We dance with a ghostly conception, a false self, which we try to "fix" or "heal" or "empower". We are tricked into not realizing this is a decoy, a golem constructed from wattle and ego. This decoy is not a devilish plot, don't get me wrong. We build this decoy, this idolon from the husks we find around. The demons only have to point us to it whispering words about rights and freedom. When we enter our hearts, finally, we can know the Trinity to be our only source, our salvation, and our ongoing sanctification. We can also begin to see in full light who we really are, what we really are. We can see and know this clearly, unobstructed by emotion, passion,  concerns, desires, and worries. God has especially said that those will take care of themselves so that we can fully rest in God's mercy, in God's love. The Eastern prayer here is, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner. To the West we can turn and find, Jesus, I trust in you. 

Let this drawing closer to God in our hearts be the action of Communion. That as Christ dwells within us we may be drawn closer to him with each participation of the Mass, which is heaven on earth, the Garden of Eden again in full flower. Let us enter there into our heart and find God calling us home. Let us know him that we may know, finally, his plan for us and who we are. In this intention, let us open up to God who by grace is given to us and can never be taken away, but we can ignore him. Let us not.

So, about this wall...

✙

JMJ

The Readings for Friday in the 5th Week of Easter (B2)

• Acts 15:22-31
• John 15:12-17

Vos autem dixi amicos : quia omnia quaecumque audivi a Patre meo, nota feci vobis. 
I have called you friends: because all things whatsoever I have heard of my Father, I have made known to you. 

One thing I often heard in dating relationships was that I have "bad boundaries". After many years in failed relationships I finally learned what these were in the course of two conversations divided by 5 years. In one, a friend was telling me about a certain "Creepy" sort of person who one might meet who wants to become close friends as a result of a sexual encounter. In another conversation, a different friend, was telling me he was never that sort of person. He always had "good boundaries". Both of these folks wondered why anyone wanted to be emotionally intimate just because sex had happened. I realized I was the person they were speaking about: the one that thinks sex must imply some sort of connection.

In The Lost Language of Cranes the protagonist, Philip Benjamin, has a falling out with his romantic partner who tells him "you need me too much. Half way across this city in the middle of the day I can feel you needing me." Or words to that effect. I saw this once when it was on PBS in the early 90s, so I may not have the worlds right, but that scene stuck with me. Haunted me. In fact in my memory it's the only words I can remember from the movie. But exactly what's wrong with needing someone? Decades later when relationships were ending I'd still say I don't get it... what's wrong with needing someone? 

I have called you friends because whatever I've learned from my father I've made known to you.

As a hopeless romantic, I always had bad boundaries. And I have often wondered why that was (even before I had the terms down). Why did I "fall in love" or become emotionally attached? What if, however, these terms are intentionally in divine logic? What if what is generally seen as an enjoyable biological function is, in fact, a deeply spiritual and kenotic act of self-destruction? Would it not be natural for there to be no boundaries after it?

Jesus shares literally all of himself with us: body, blood, soul, and divinity. He shares with us all that the Father has given him and names us as friends, using a Greek word (philos) that implies non-sexual relationships based on common experience. The implication that there is a huge amount of intimacy, of union, that comes long, long before physical intimacy happens. Letting sex come first (which does happen from time to time) and yet denying the rest of intimacy: that is the odd choice. As Robert Anton Wilson makes clear in the Illuminatus trilogy, as well as in Schrodinger's Cat: the Universe Next Door, sex is the ultimate breaking down of the boundaries, the end of the division, the unitive wholeness of humanity. Saying, at that point, "you need me too much" is like the river saying it shouldn't need water. Having opened that door, slamming it shut again is the real bad boundary. 

At the end of this Gospel reading, Jesus says we should love one another, using a different Greek word now: agape. Unlike philia which is based on common experience, Agape is an act of will, and it is not something we can do alone: it is possible only by God's love through us. Our love tends to be about gratification and validation. God's love is about self-pouring out - into us, to overflowing and then out of us into others.

The intimacy offered to us in friendship, or even in the sexual union, is only a foretaste of the intimacy made available to us in the act of Eucharistic Communion. Here the divine fire of heaven enters our spiritual and physical bodies to destroy all that is not of the same divine origin. Uniting us fully and finally to the source and summit of that fire. The act of communion is the sacramental union of your soul with the divine dance at the end of Dante's Paradiso XXXIII

ma già volgeva il mio disio e ’l vellesì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa,l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle. (Par. 33.143-45)

but my desire and will were moved already—like a wheel revolving uniformly—bythe Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

A final note. When Dante reaches the end of his vision and is granted the sight of the universe bound together in one volume, what entrances him is not plain Oneness but all that multiplicity somehow contained and unified. His heart is set on seeing and knowing that multiplicity, an otherness that is still stubbornly present in the poem’s penultimate word. God is the love that moves the sun and the other stars: “l’amor che move ’l sole e l’altre stelle”.
Much has been written about the transcendent stelle with which the Commedia ends; let us give due weight as well to the adjective that modifies those stars, the poem’s penultimate word, altre. Dante believes in a transcendent One, but his One is indelibly characterized by the multiplicity, difference, and sheer otherness embodied in the “altre stelle”—an otherness by which he is still unrepentantly captivated in his poem’s last breath. (Source)

We, dear sisters and brothers, are to be those altre stelle, the other stars moving in God's light. The act of theosis will burn down all the walls left. We move from friends to lovers of the Divine source of Love. Heaven is an infinite dance without boundaries.