The Gates Ajar

by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

“I see; that helps me; like a torch in a dark room. But there will be shadows in the corners. Do you suppose that we shall ever fully feel it in the body?”

“In the body, probably not. We see through a glass so darkly that the temptation to idolatry is always our greatest. Golden images did not die with Paganism. At times I fancy that, somewhere between this world and another, a revelation will come upon us like a flash, of what sin really is,—such a revelation, lighting up the lurid background of our past in such colors, that the consciousness of what Christ has done for us will be for a time as much as heart can bear. After that, the mystery will be, not how to love Him most, but that we ever could have loved any creature or thing as much.”

“We serve God quite as much by active work as by special prayer, here,” I said after some thought; “how will it be there?”

“We must be busily at work certainly; but I think there must naturally be more communion with Him then. Now, this phrase “communion with God” has been worn, and not always well worn.

“Prayer means to us, in this life, more often penitent confession than happy interchange of thought with Him. It is associated, too, with aching limbs and sleepy eyes, and nights when the lamp goes out. Obstacles, moral and physical, stand in the way of our knowing exactly what it may mean in the ideal of it.

“My best conception of it lies in the friendship of the man Christ Jesus. I suppose he will bear with him, eternally, the humanity which he took up with him from the Judean hills. I imagine that we shall see him in visible form like ourselves, among us, yet not of us; that he, himself, is “Gott mit ihnen”; that we shall talk with him as a man talketh with his friend. Perhaps, bowed and hushed at his dear feet, we shall hear from his own lips the story of Nazareth, of Bethany, of Golgotha, of the chilly mountains where he used to pray all night long for us; of the desert places where he hungered; of his cry for help—think, Mary—His!—when there was not one in all the world to hear it, and there was silence in heaven, while angels strengthened him and man forsook him. Perhaps his voice—the very voice which has sounded whispering through our troubled life—“Could ye not watch one hour?”—shall unfold its perplexed meanings; shall make its rough places plain; shall show us step by step the merciful way by which he led us to the hour; shall point out to us, joy by joy, the surprises that he has been planning for us, just as the old father in the story planned to surprise his wayward boy come home.

“And such a ‘communion,’—which is not too much, nor yet enough, to dare to expect of a God who was the ‘friend’ of Abraham, who ‘walked’ with Enoch, who did not call fishermen his servants,—such will be that ‘presence of God,’ that ‘adoration,’ on which we have looked from afar off with despairing eyes that wept, they were so dazzled, and turned themselves away as from the thing they greatly feared.”

I think we neither of us cared to talk for a while after this. Something made me forget even that I was going to see Roy in heaven. “Three-and-thirty years. Three-and-thirty years.” The words rang themselves over.

“It is on the humanity of Christ,” she said after some musing, “that all my other reasons for hoping for such a heaven as I hope for, rest for foundation. He knows exactly what we are, for he has been one of us; exactly what we hope and fear and crave, for he has hoped and feared and craved, not the less humanly, but only more intensely.

“‘If it were not so,’—do you take in the thoughtful tenderness of that? A mother, stilling her frightened child in the dark, might speak just so,—‘if it were not so, I would have told you.’ That brooding love makes room for all that we can want. He has sounded every deep of a troubled and tempted life. Who so sure as he to understand how to prepare a place where troubled and tempted lives may grow serene? Further than this; since he stands as our great Type, no less in death and after than before it, he answers for us many of these lesser questions on the event of which so much of our happiness depends.