The Glorified Body: What Awaits You Is Beyond Imagination

What Will Your Body Be Like in Heaven? St. Anselm of Canterbury—Doctor of the Church—offers a glimpse that is both stunning and soul-stirring.

In this Holy Week meditation, we explore the glorified body: the radiant, powerful, and perfected body promised to the saints. Drawing from St. Anselm’s writings—brought to life through Fr. Robert Nixon’s translation in The Glories of Heaven—we discover what awaits us beyond the grave:

Transcript

faster than a speeding bullet more powerful than a locomotive able to leave tall buildings and sing about Sound familiar this is something greater As described by St Anselm of Canterbury doctor of the church 900 years ago he gave us a glimpse of what is to come Glory power beauty These are attributes of the glorified body This isn't fiction This is your future if you follow Christ

Welcome back Today is Monday of Holy Week and I can't believe we are here Yes Thank you for joining journeying with us We began quite a while ago and we did meditations on hell Then we went into purgatory and last week we did meditations on heaven and this week we continue to do so Uh what's the value though of doing meditations on heaven well if you think back to hell those meditations we we put our mind on that because we wanted to know what we want to avoid That's one of the values of meditating on hell And then we moved on to purgatory The meditations of those is to inspire us to avoid lukewarmness Now the meditations on heaven is something more It's to inspire a holy desire for everlasting life Who was St Anelm of Canterbury he was a Benedicting monk a brilliant theologian and a doctor of the church Born in 1033 he gave us the phrase faith seeking understanding reminding us that faith leads us deeper into truth As Archbishop of Canterbury he defended the church's freedom with courage even in exile We celebrate his feast on April 21st So today's meditation on heaven is taken from a wonderful book called the glories of heaven written by father Robert Nixon published by tan books It's an excellent book and in here this book uh father Nixon has translated some conferences given by St in Anslam that he gave in Clooney France to some monks and he's talking about the attributes of the glorified body at the end of time when the soul and the body reunite Now everything that St Anelm says is built upon his idea of heaven So here's the key understanding from him This is a direct quote Eternal life will be one in which all possible good things shall be enjoyed in the highest degree of perfection Key point All good things shall be enjoyed to the highest degree of perfection As every thought is built upon that idea And he makes the point and says well this kind of doesn't sound all that exciting because it may be a little bit more philos philosophical or theological And so he says what we need to do is simplify it into little parts to really understand And he gives a really good analogy He says if you give a child an apple they don't necessarily are able to eat that apple because maybe their teeth aren't developed or their gums are you know they don't have all their teeth And so he says we got to cut that apple into little parts so that child can then better eat that apple And then he says so this is what we're going to do We're going to cut up this idea into a whole bunch of segments attributes of the glorified body so we can better understand this idea of heaven that eternal life is one where all good things shall be enjoyed to the highest degree of perfection His first point is the beauty of the glorified body Now first off about beauty don't we all appreciate beautiful things uh what about you Janelle if I ask you what's something beautiful that you've seen in the last little while what might you respond with um I love flowers the colors the petals like the shapes of the petals or even like in the fall the leaves on the trees and just like a baby's face you know their cute little smile their giggle So everyone enjoys beauty It it's something within us because we're made in the image of the beautiful one So there's a longing for beauty And just think about how we strive to make our bodies beautiful Think about the great lengths that we go through in life to do this The Real Self-Culture Report did a survey in 2019 indicating that approximately 24% of Americans reported having had some form of cosmetic treatment or procedure with the percentage increasing to 40% among those earning more than 150,000 annually That's crazy I can't believe that quarter of the people The whole reason we share this is just to point to the fact that we long for beauty and sometimes we go to crazy lengths to try and obtain it But the reality is is that we will be beautiful in Christ in heaven St Anelm makes a real strong point here by referring to scripture He shall transform the body of our loneliness into the likeness of his own glorious body So when you look at your physical body how do you feel about it right now i am aware that as time is ticking on my body is uh wearing out and it's starting to look different That's the natural process that we go through in this life But God has promised us a glorified body Now what will that look like st Anselm writes "For it is known that those who attain heaven become a temple and a throne of the divinity and will be sused with the glory of God and illuminated by his radiance And yet the visible sun as splendid as it is is a mere created object and it is therefore certainly less radiant than the divine splendor and less beautiful than the glory of the God who fashioned it It consequently follows that the bodies of the saints suffused with this glory of God will surpass the beauty and radiance of the sun itself So in St Anselm's mind we will shine with a greater brilliance than the sun that shines when you look up in the sky because we are sharing in the glory of God whose glory is more brilliant than what he has created The second quality of the glorified body velocity I think this is the one that you're the most excited about You've heard me talk about Yeah You talk about like your ability to move once you get to heaven and can go anywhere Well well to clarify the be the ability to move with the glorified body at the end of time I I I just think this is going to be amazing I really do because I think we'll be able to move at will like the angels And I've thought about this by reading others before but now St Anelm emphasizes this point He says we're going to be able to move like the angels And the angels he says just move by will St Anselm writes "In heaven our own rapidity of movement will be fully comparable to that of the angels For we are promised that in all respects we shall be made the equals of the angels of God." And this is a promise that Jesus makes in Luke 20:36 Now in his writing St manselm uh makes the point of referring back to Daniel and the lion's den to emphasize his point I asked today the kids if they could tell me the story of Daniel in the lion's den and Janelle was away and um they did a really good job So they talked about how Daniel was thrown into the pit The king didn't want him in there but he was thrown in and the god shut the lion's mouth and he wasn't devoured And uh I I said "Well there's another miracle that happened." And they're like "What?" I said "What happened when Daniel got hungry?" And one of our children said "He ate one of the

lines." No no And I I forgot or I missed this miracle which is completely relevant to this point So Daniel's in the lion's den and he's hungry What does God do well in Judea there's a man a prophet named Habac and he's baked some bread He's put it into a bowl and he's going to bring it out to some people in a field And then an angel comes to him and tells him about Daniel in the lion's den in Babylon and that he needs to bring him food And Habac says "Well I know nothing about Daniel in the lion's den and I've never been to Babylon." Now if I was Habac I would have thought there's an angel But his response is I don't know nothing about lion lion and Daniel and the den and and I've never been to Babylon because Babylon is about 1,000 km away It's about 860 mi for those of you watching in the States So it's a long distance So the angel takes him carries him to the lion's den He sets him down and Dan and this prophet yells down to Daniel says "I got some fruit for you the Lord hasn't forgotten you And then the angel transports the prophet Habac back to Judea And so St Anselm is making the point Look we have a reference in scripture how the angels can just move bang bang thousand kilometers just like that It was kind that the angel didn't say to the prophet now you got to walk back But his point is that this is what it will be like in the glorified body because Jesus makes the promise and says you will be like angels The third quality of the glorified body the immensity of strength St Anselm writes "It is obvious that all beings naturally prefer to be endowed with strength than to suffer from weakness and infirmity For all those who attain the state of heaven and merit to be numbered among the citizens of the celestial Jerusalem they shall possess such immense strength and power that nothing shall be able to prevent them from performing anything they wish And there will be no force which is able to remove or overturn them from their state of eternal bliss in the love of God and they will be able to employ the enormous strength which has been granted to them with no more effort than it currently takes us to blink our eyes He goes on to say that we'll have the strength like an angel So very powerful He also continues on and makes the point that we won't abuse this power and that everything that we should wish to do with the power of the glorified body would always be in conformity with God's will Like everything in heaven everything will be in conformity with God's will uh our beauty the ability to move and the ability of strength So we'll continue on with these themes tomorrow but for now share with us below what stood out to you and why and we'll end with a prayer

Oh my Jesus oh highest good I repent of having so lightly esteemed your grace that I have barted it away for mere nothing When will it be oh Lord that I shall see you face to face and shall embrace you without the fear of ever having to lose you aid me with your grace This I hope for through your merits more and more increase in me your love and the desire to please you Amen