Enjoyment of the Soul in the Resurrection While It Is in Heaven
Enjoyment of the Soul in the Resurrection While It Is in Heaven¹
I congratulate you, my brothers and sons, on the glorious Feast of the Resurrection, and I also congratulate President Mubarak on the successful results of his travels to many countries for the good of Egypt, the Arab world, the whole region, and also the countries of Africa, wishing our dear homeland Egypt every goodness and blessing. And now:
As we celebrate the Feast of the Resurrection, I am pleased to speak to you about the enjoyment of the soul after the resurrection while it is in heaven.
The Enjoyment of Release
The soul is now imprisoned in the body, in this material cage. While the soul is a light entity characterized by transparency, the body is material and characterized by heaviness. The body tries to control the soul to pull it into its materiality, and the soul resists. Thus, there is a struggle between them. If the soul triumphs, it lifts the body upward. And if the body triumphs, it drags the soul down into the pleasure of matter and its emotions.
Even in knowledge, the body represents a fog that prevents true vision for the soul. The soul currently sees only through the eye of the body, and hears only through the ear of the body. All its kinds of knowledge come through the senses of the body.
But in the release of the soul, it will have broader knowledge that it does not derive from bodily senses, but rather it will have spiritual perception. And it will not move with the legs of the body, but it will move lightly: ascending and descending, and crossing distances without passing through a medium, like the angels or like thought which moves to another continent without crossing the space between them.
And souls meet and know one another and converse without translation from one language to another. Rather, they understand one another through a spiritual perception not confined within the limits of languages. Truly, in what language did our father Adam, and our father Noah, and Moses the prophet, and Job the righteous communicate when they met together in the other world? Or were they and all the righteous communicating without any tongue of ours? Or without voices! And in what language did they speak with the angels? Or do they converse with them in a non-human language! That is, in the language of the spirit!
And apart from human senses, what will spiritual vision be?
We move to another point of the soul’s enjoyment in heaven, which is the enjoyment of liberation.
The Enjoyment of Liberation
Souls now, while united to bodies, are not free in what they want… There are many pressures upon them from outside, and from the body itself… But when the soul departs from the body, it will be freed from all its constraints.
It will be freed from the instincts of the body and from all its emotions. And it will be freed from the ailments of the psyche such as anxiety, disturbance, and doubt. And it will be freed from weakness and incapacity, from tiredness and exhaustion, and from many diseases to which the body is exposed and casts their effects upon the soul.
And it will be freed from the conspiracies of evil people and from what they cast upon the soul of fear and terror, and from the measures it attempts for distance and protection from harm.
And it will be freed from the fear of death, for death will have already taken place upon the body and there will be no possibility for its repetition.
The Enjoyment of Righteousness
In the other world, the soul will be freed from sin… There is no place for sins that arise from bodily desires and instincts, for it has put off the body and separated from it. Likewise, there is no place for sins that come as a result of external temptations. For in the other world there are no temptations and no wars of demons. Satan will not enter the dwelling places of the righteous in heaven. And there are no sins in which the soul may fall due to human contact.
For the righteous souls will dwell in the other world with righteous souls of the same kind, and sometimes of the same degree. And there is no place for conflicts or divisions.
And God will remove from the souls of the inhabitants of heaven the knowledge of sin and its memories and its stories and its images that were on earth. And He will grant these souls the crown of righteousness, so that there is no longer the possibility of sin nor desire for it.
Truly, how great and profound is this enjoyment: that the soul lives there in a new world entirely of righteousness, without stumbling, without evil, nor even the likeness of evil. A world much more beautiful than the paradise in which our parents Adam and Eve lived before the fall, where they lived in innocence and simplicity, but in a nature capable of falling—and they did fall. But in the other world, there is no possibility of falling.
The Enjoyment of Transparency
In the other world, the soul will enjoy transparency no longer veiled by the fog of the body. Transparency in knowledge and perception almost reaching the transparency of the angels. In it the veil is removed, and it sees the unseen, and knows secrets about the other world which it could never have known on earth. And it continues to grow in knowledge, and God expands its understanding to know more, with a new kind of perception above the level of the senses… And its knowledge will come through two paths: one is the manifestation of the soul in its nature; and the second is divine revelation, as God reveals to it what its current nature cannot comprehend…
The Enjoyment of Joy
It is an indescribable joy, different from the delights of our world—it is a spiritual joy. And it is a joy in matters new to the human being, which he experiences for the first time. It is also a continuous joy that does not stop nor cease, but is constantly growing and renewing… And it is also a joy of victory and triumph, and enjoyment of the promises of the Lord to the victors.
And the soul rejoices in the perfect fellowship that is in heaven: the fellowship of the righteous and saints, and indeed the fellowship of the angels and archangels, and the fellowship of those about whom we used to read in history and longed merely to know.
And more than all this is the fellowship with God Himself—blessed be His name—for all the joys of heaven without God would not be true joys.
If this is the case, then let us prepare from now—in our present earthly life—so that we may be ready for all those heavenly enjoyments which God has prepared for those who live in His obedience. Not for all souls, but for the pure victorious souls who strove and triumphed and became worthy that God reward them with His eternal kingdom.
In conclusion, I congratulate you, my brothers, on the grace of the Resurrection which God has granted us in the other life. And we all pray for the peace of the whole world in which wars and conflicts have spread, with a special prayer for our country Egypt and for President Mubarak and all who work for this dear nation, and we also pray for Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, and all the Arab countries, and for all our brothers in Africa… Wishing all of you a happy year.
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An article by His Holiness Pope Shenouda III published in Akhbar El-Youm newspaper on 7-4-2007.
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