Thursday, December 15th, 2005
I’ve just read Mitch Albom’s novel, “The Five People You Meet In Heaven“. It’s the story of an eighty three year old veteran of World War II who dies while trying to save a girl in an amusement park. The story takes us through Eddie’s life through encounters in heaven with five people whose lives intersected with his in significant ways.
I’ve seen the book in Borders and in airport bookshops and almost bought it several times. Finally I succumbed, finishing it on a plane flight from Mackay to Brisbane.
Well I must say I was impressed, moved and intellectually stimulated. This is the guy who wrote “Tuesdays with Morrie”, the non-fiction account of his conversations with his college mentor, sociologist Morrie Schwartz who was dying from Lou Gehrig’s disease. Mitch is in touch with matters of life and death. He touches on the experiences of post traumatic stress disorder, the impact of resentment and forgiveness, and the transformative effects of deep and faithful love.
Mitch is also a nationally-syndicated newspaper columnist for the Detroit Free Press, nationally-syndicated radio host for his flagship station WJR-AM in Detroit, and television commentator. He has an excellent web site - www.mitchalbom.com - featuring tapes from Tuesdays with Morrie and interviews from his radio shows. He’s clearly at home on the internet - with well designed sites www.albom.com and www.albomfivepeople.com.
“Five People” was made into a television movie, starring Jon Voight, Ellen Burstyn, Jeff Daniels and Michael Imperioli. Likewise Tuesdays with Morrie
was dramatized for television, starring Jack Lemmon and Hank Azaria. Morrie wrote his own book, “Morrie: In His Own Words” and was interviewed on ABC’s Nightline by Ted Koppel. Those interviews are now available on DVD as “ABC News presents Morrie Schwartz - Lessons on Living“.
What amazes me though is the spin offs on the Five People novel. There’s “Effective Habits of the Five People You Meet in Heaven” by Steve Kellmeyer - a Christian interpretation of Albom’s work. And then there’s Wisdom from the Five People You Meet in Heaven by Brandon Gilvin and Heather Godsey. Not to mention the spoof, “The Five People You Meet in Hell: An Unauthorized Parodyby Rich Pablum and “The Five People You Meet in Hell: Surviving Katrina” published last month by Robert Smallwood.
Tags: Fiction, heaven and hell, Reading
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Saturday, August 27th, 2005
I’ve put up my third podcast at PostKiwi Podcasts - on heaven.
It’s a 50 minute dialogue from Logan Uniting Church, Sunday evening, August 21, 2005. (16 MB) mp3 file.This was part of worship.com, a worship experience aimed at young adults.
We started with three TV adverts, including the Carlton Draught Big Ad, DB Heaven and God Tabasco. See notes from last weekend for input from Mercy Me and CS Lewis, “The Great Divorce”.
We broke up into groups for 10 minutes to brainstorm questions and imagery. The questions ranged from “What will we do in heaven?” to “What about people from other religions?” and “Will there be Playstation in heaven?”
Podcasting sermons is not as easy I thought it might be. First of all - there’s the quality of the tape. Using a lapel radio microphone leaves a bit of hiss. The hand held microphone seemed to produce a better quality sound. You could possibly put up with that in a high quality recording but when you get down to 16 or 32 bps the hiss turns into an annoying high pitch line of noise.
Tags: heaven and hell, Podcasts, Spirituality
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Saturday, August 20th, 2005
Here’s the quote we’ll be using tomorrow night, from C S Lewis’ book, “The Great Divorce”. It’s his response to the picture provided by William Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell”.
I was alone in the the bus, and through the open door there came to me in the fresh stillness the singing of a lark.
I got out. The light and coolness that drenched me were like those of summer morning, early morning a minute or two before the sunrise, only that there was a certain difference. I had the sense of being in a larger space, perhaps even a larger sort of space, than I had ever known before: as if the sky were further off and the extgent of the green plain wider that they could be on this little ball of earth. I had ‘got out’ in some sense which made the Solar System itself seem an indoor affair. It gave me a feeling of freedom but also of exposure, possibly of danger, which continued to accompany me through all that followed. it is the impossibly of communicating that feeling, or even of inducing you to remember it as I proceed, which makes me despair of conveying the real quality of what I saw and heard.
At first, of course, my attention was caught by my fellow passengers, who were still grouped about in the neighbourhood of the omnibus, though beginning, some of them, to walk forward into the landscape with hesitating steps. I gasped as I saw them. Now that they were in the light, they were transparent - fully transparent when they stood between me and it, smudgy and imperfectly opaque when they stood in the shadow of some tree. They were in fact ghosts: man-shaped stains on the brightness of that air. One could attend to them or ignore them at will as you do with the dirt on a window pane. I noticed that the grass did not bend under their feet: even the dew drops were not disturbed.
Then some readjustment of the mind or some focussing of my eyes took place, and I saw the whole phenomenon the other way round. The men were as they had always been: as all the men I had known perhaps. It was the light, the grass, the trees that were different: made of some different substance, so much solider than things in our country that people were ghosts by comparison.
The Great Divorce at Amazon.com
Tags: CS Lewis, heaven and hell, Reading, Spirituality, Theology
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