Wednesday, May 14, 2025

This is the forty-second installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season. There will not be any jokes about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything in this post.¹

Wow, it’s Wednesday already. Time just flies on by.

My family is doing a novena for St. Isidore the Farmer (to distinguish him from St. Isidore of Seville), whose feast day is Thursday the 15th. One of the reflections focuses on the dignity of work, especially physical labor, which is something that has earned a kind of disdain by society today. After the industrial revolution, people have been convinced they don’t need to do nearly as much work as before, and that the ultimate goal of life is to get an education and do a non-physical job, using their mind and intellect instead of their bodies. Now we’re about to begin another revolution, where AI replaces the mental work that people now do, but that’s another post.

What does this all have to do with heaven? Because God commanded us to work the earth, and made it difficult to get food and sustenance without doing that work. Many of Jesus’ parables are about people doing physical work, so why would he spend all that time and effort getting us to work so hard to just have us stop and do nothing for eternity?

There are many mentions in the Bible of a “new heaven and a new earth.” This doesn’t mean that heaven itself will cease to exist, it’s more of an expression for the entire universe, everything that we know to be. But it does mention a new earth, which means that the contained ecosystem we know as our world will very likely still exist in some capacity. Plants will still require tending, animals will still require herding. We will still need our bodies to do work with them, and everything we’ve learned will still be valid and necessary.

Another interesting idea is the specific wording of a new earth, instead of the new earth. I argue that there is definitely other intelligent, sapient life out there in the cosmos, because if God is infinite love, why would he have created our little world and then just stopped? I think the Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis has it right that Jesus came to other worlds in other forms, and we’ll get to hang out with all of them in heaven.

But maybe not all at once. All of this renewal is supposed to happen when Jesus comes again, at the end of time. But does that mean he will come to each world individually when they’re ready to be renewed, or when ALL worlds throughout the entire universe are ready? If each world is locked in a battle with evil, will we be able to help them too when we get to the transitory period of the current heaven? I don’t claim to have the answers to that, but it is fun to ponder.

1  Probably