“This would make a great blog post,” my friend commented as he and I searched with increasing bewilderment and disappointment my parents’ three thousand-square-foot home for a lost cell phone.
“No it wouldn’t!” I snapped a bit too harshly in reply. “There’s no resolution to this story. The mystery isn’t solved.”
In less than twenty-four hours, I realized 1) my friend was right, 2) the story would have its resolution, 3) the mystery would be solved, and 4) I would, in fact, be blogging about our other friend’s (temporarily) lost cell phone. Most material for Stop to Smell the Flowers develops in this unexpected and embarrassing way.
Halloween was becoming All Saints’ Day and Evonne, Reena, Manny, and I were about to part ways after watching It when we realized Reena’s phone was missing. Cue the Saint Anthony prayer.
We searched in the obvious places, then explored the more dubious locations. We retraced our steps. We dialed Reena’s number a couple dozen times over the course of the thirty-minute hunt. We couldn’t understand why the phone was nowhere to be heard (we later discovered it was on silent mode, not vibrate) or found, even after we checked the really creative spots. How could Reena’s phone not be in the witch’s cauldron of Halloween candy? We were so smart to look there!
Cue St. Anthony smacking his palm against his forehead.
That is, if he had a palm…and a forehead.
As of right now, he possesses neither. None of the saints do, except for the one or two that have been assumed into heaven, body and soul. The rest, Christians believe, are awaiting the reunion of their souls with their perfected bodies at the end of time. While St. Anthony’s body on earth has decayed (all except his tongue, curiously enough), his soul has not–in fact, it has done the opposite.
Now my family members are the ones smacking their palms against their foreheads. Leave it to Lou to turn a search for a cell phone into an eschatological treatise. But, I would argue, there’s no better time to discuss the Four Last Things (death, judgement, heaven, and hell) than around the trio of days commemorating the dead: All Hallow’s Eve (or Halloween), All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day (or Día de los Muertos).
“Do you think St. Anthony is laughing at us?” I asked Reena on All Saints’ Day after my mom had heard her phone’s alarm ringing from somewhere in our living room that morning, and my dad had discovered the device buried in the couch where my friends and I had only checked one hundred times ourselves.
“We were so close, yet so far,” I continued. “We could have saved so much time if only we had X-ray vision. Do you think there’s X-ray vision in heaven? Will we need X-ray vision? Will we lose things to begin with? Will we even have possessions?”
I now realize how exhausting it must be to have a conversation with me.
I couldn’t help myself. My imagination ran wild. When we know so little about the Second Coming, and the Particular and General Judgements, and the new heaven and the new earth, and the afterlife as a whole, can we be blamed for asking such silly questions, and are they “silly” questions anyway?
Here are some things we do know our glorified bodies will be able to do “in the resurrection on the last day,” based on the sneak preview Jesus gave us before His Ascension (Jn 11:24):
- Not die (incorruptibility)
- Shine (clarity)
- Walk through walls (agility)
- Eat (hooray)
Whether we will need to eat or walk through walls is a question for a real eschatologist. I recommend consulting St. Thomas Aquinas and/or St. Paul on this matter. The Church did.
“What we shall be has not yet been revealed,” but we do know we will retain or receive these qualities and more because “when [what we shall be] is revealed, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 Jn 3:2).
We shall be like Him.
So, perhaps in this earthly life, we’ll waste time looking for cell phones, but after the Second Coming, there won’t even be time and there probably won’t be cell phones, or at least the need for them. (X-ray vision isn’t out of the question, though.) Until then, we must be content with using our lost items and our silly questions and St. Anthony’s help to glorify God.
Stop to Smell the Flowers 