Mark Eddy Smith is an internationally known writer of books about books. He lives in New Hampshire with two parents, a family of bats, a whole mess of spiders and at least one mouse. He also is the fiction editor for WordFarm, a small, independent literary press based in Seattle, not to mention the Marketing Coordinator for the Remick Country Doctor Museum & Farm. Read more from Mark at LovesAnarchy.com.

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Heaven's Heart

by Mark Eddy Smith 08-28-2012

As a fiction writer, I tend to think of God as a novelist writing this epic story wherein every bureaucrat, cicada, and horsehead nebula could accurately be described as the main character. As a novelist, it's God's job to bring all things together toward a happy (or at least satisfying) end, but that doesn't mean that we the characters are mere puppets.

Novelists who write about their craft often speak of characters taking on "a life of their own" and thereby taking the novel to different places than the author intended to visit.

So this "soul" that we speak of — this part of our selves that isn't grounded in physical being but is spiritual (whatever that means) that we expect or hope will live on after our mortal coils shuffle off — what if it's simply God's memory of us? What if the afterlife takes place in God's heart?

If God's memory were like human memory, that too would feel like a cheat, but I suspect that God's memories are not dissimilar to God's prose. In other words, as real as spiders. As real as continents.