A Strange Intimacy

On Friendship, at Pentecost

Pentecostés, El Greco (via)

No rush of light, no sign of belonging
No joy in building, love in the finishing
Chasing down an anodyne and half reflected radiance

To hide below the ancient barricade
In chambers like the rooms a swallow made
For an animal life

Charging down the maw of the ocean
I wanna come close, I wanna come closer
I held your name inside my mouth
Through all the days out wandering

— Shearwater, “Animal Life” (YT)

Maybe these things are destined to happen once a year; these epiphanies — I’m tempted to add “of mine”, but they couldn’t feel less like “mine”, in the same way that a car T-boning into yours at high rate of speed could ever feel like yours, or a nuclear bomb quietly and then suddenly, all at once, exploding over your city, forever changing the course of your life — these are events that just happen to you, not with you, and not necessarily involving you-as-a-person, and certainly not of your own volition, and the scale at which they happen are so expansive, almost transcendent, that it is so highly depersonalized an experience you could hardly use so personal and possessive a phrase like “of mine”, as if it were some sort of bedraggled tabby cat you’d taken in during that lost year of your bad decisions.

So it is, however, with the oft-neglected third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. It seems His fate to move among us without much notice or acclamation, which affords Him the opportunity to arrange such shocking epiphanies. The Bible-thumpers, cessationists the lot of them, proclaim the central tenet of the Protestant Reformation: that man does not need a mediator between himself and God, and here they seem to understand God as the Father alone, even for their ostensible belief in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. “You can pray directly to God,” they say emphatically, opening their spontaneous prayers to “Father God” each morning at quiet time over their Bibles and coffees. For the Catholics, the large crucifixes in every nave speak to the focus on Jesus, the Crucified One, at the very moment of His most intense sufferings. It is only in the strange, weird charismatic churches that litter Appalachia and the American South, filled with recovering drug addicts with arm-sleeve tattoos and Trump voters and women in long denim skirts and Life is Good t-shirts, that the Holy Spirit receives much attention at all, set to keyboard music with arms outstretched before PowerPoint presentations looping videos of falling water.

The Holy Spirit does seem to prefer this arrangement, being a kind of underground band, the kind of Person who knows that He’d be really famous if He wanted, but He enjoys the secrecy and the intimacy of being known by people who really love Him, of having and living in dialogue with the real fans. I’d helped a friend, a wonderful man who is (though, hopefully not for too long), as I understand him, a kind of Christian atheist, a man who believes in Christian values but struggles with the actual belief-in-God-is-real part. To him, it was a notable favor, and so he was thanking me for it, but to me I had just been following the dance step leads of the Holy Spirit — and all of it had happened in a very Holy Spirit kind of way, where absolutely no advance warning is given, plane flights must be booked at the last minute, and the plans for the next six months change on a dime and everything still works out more than perfectly and tasks that would seem absolutely monumental to accomplish on one’s own simply clink into place effortlessly, like Glenn Gould playing Bach. “Don’t thank me, thank the Holy Spirit,” I said, shrugging. “I was just doing what I thought the Holy Spirit wanted me to do. This is how the Spirit works, you know,” I added, pressing into my evangelism a little. “You see how well everything worked out for you….?” I raised my eyebrow and gestured.

He grinned at me, perhaps because he was a little taken aback by my evangelical presumption, and nodded. “I mean… I have to admit, it is hard to deny it. The Holy Spirit does seem like a good place to start with belief in God.” And there it was — the Holy Spirit working in that underground band kind of way, like I’d passed on a fan’s homemade cassette tape recording of a unannounced, pop-up concert played at someone’s house and said, listen to this.

But this time, rather than being a vessel of the Holy Spirit to someone else, to watch the winds of the Spirit blow through the room and upset all the papers and slam one door shut and force another wide open, I found myself the recipient of the Holy Spirit’s actions. I’d had another realization at Pentecost, and found myself being compelled to write this post. I could feel a sudden, pressing, unplanned need settling in, and, sitting down to write, thousands of words began to pour out over a matter of days, while the time spent away from my laptop where I could write this passed like a glacial eternity as I constantly itched to return to writing. I am certainly not granted such ease in writing that often, so on the rare occasions that writing feels as slippery-smooth as rubbing oil between one’s palms, I am forced to acknowledge that it is not my doing, but the Spirit’s, and that it comes upon me by a divine grace rather than any skill of my own.

Even hijacking my Substack is a very Holy Spirit thing to do. As I drove back in the car after the events transpired, and felt the sudden urge to write, I — in my fallen state, east of Eden — was a bit more irritated than anything else as I tried to feel out with the Spirit what exactly was going on. I felt an incessant pressing on my heart that writing this post, not at all in my plans just an hour before, was the very next and most important item on my to-do list.

You’re supposed to be helping me figure out how to keep my now Titanic-sized Ayn Rand post from hitting an iceberg and disintegrating into a bunch of commentary on The Birth of Tragedy, not coaxing me into whatever this is, I said to the Holy Spirit, fuming a little. Are people really going to read yet another self-reflective piece and not the heavy-hitting Bible-amateur-philosophy-reading-meets-future-tech journalism they surely signed up for? I know better, though, even against all my own natural will and instincts. To paraphrase the red-letter words of Our Lord, what would it profit a woman to gain Substack subscribers but to forsake the wild plans of the Holy Spirit? He is greater than I, white letters in Helvetica cut in a decal on the back of a Subaru remind me, written in that very cute, very Protestantized “HE>i” fashion, and no one really knows what the Holy Spirit is up to when He upsets our plans and bids a surrender.

To surrender — who am I, a sometimes weak and fragile thing, and other times even a wild animal, to not give the Holy Spirit His due? To deny Him praise on His Feast of Pentecost? Wend Your way like an eternal water through the cold, iron-laced stone of my heart, and make a Grand Canyon out of me yet, something that people would at least marvel to behold, to see Your invisible but ever-present work in me. Let it be done unto me according to Your Spirit. That my life would mean something, that all these years and all my foibles would amount to something. “I have come to set the world on fire, and how I wish it were already burning!” Jesus said, the Savior Himself longing for the coming of the Paraclete. A noble goal, to set the world on fire, and articulated with the kind of frenzied zealotry I crave in that teeth-set-on-edge way, so why not start with me first? Why not set my writing plans on fire, too?

A Pentecost, for You, here and now, in these last days.

---

This time, then: my friend must keep, I am certain, a list in her Reminders app titled something like “All The Catholic Things” — to be a godmother of a multitude, to make a pilgrimage here, there, and everywhere, to have her marriage blessed by the pope — which she seems Heaven-bent on crossing off. One such thing was certainly having a private Mass said in her own home, and when the opportunity arose, she jumped on it with the fervor of St. Joan of Arc hopping on a horse to lead the army against the English. After negotiating dates back and forth with us and the priest, it eventually came to pass that she invited her pack of friends, myself included, for the private Vigil Mass on the Feast of Pentecost. Ever one to seize a theme, she texted us our instructions: “Wear red.”

I’d fished out a red pendant and strung it on a cord and donned a pair of red flats to accent my typical writerswearblack-core. I arrived at her house with a group of our friends from dinner, only to realize that I’d left something at the restaurant so I flew back and forth down the streets to grab it before Mass started. By the time I returned, the priest had arrived and everyone was about to get settled in. We were in my friend’s living room; the heavy wooden dining room table had been moved over and draped with a red tablecloth for an altar, and an potpourri of chairs and couches lined the walls for our small group to sit, and we almost all were bedecked in some shade of scarlet red, and the light of the long summer evening sun against a blue sky came in through a high second-story window.

The Liturgy of the Word

Almost at the outset, as the priest welcomed us and was speaking with one of the children, the child inadvertently made a subtle joke that almost sent me into howls of raucous laughter not at all befitting the solemn air of the event, and I had to force myself to breathe slowly, covering my mouth and grabbing at the wooden frame of my chair to stave off the involuntary contractions of laughter.

Slowly but surely, I gathered myself, and something settled over us, shifting, at least for me, as I eased into the Mass. What was it? Something was going on, and I was aware of it and tracking it in my intuition, but I couldn’t quite bring it into words. Then the realization hit me. Oh, hi. You’re here. Of course…, I said to the Holy Spirit. Oh…. Understanding then dawned on me. You arranged all of this, so that first few dates wouldn’t work out the group. You wanted this Mass to happen on this date, on the Feast of Pentecost. You wanted us, me, here, in this house, for this moment…. Why?

I’m always a bit unnerved on those rare occasions when the Holy Spirit becomes manifest when I haven’t been explicitly inviting Him in, when I’m not expecting Him. I had just been wanting to get through the day and had been checking my watch, curious how quickly Mass could be said with such a small group and no music. If you’ve no experience with the Holy Spirit, you’d think me a little delulu, but I’ve had experiences where I consecrated my entire will, being, knowledge, and intellect to the Holy Spirit and then found myself on the phone four hours later, learning, for the first time, that I had six weeks to move. The Holy Spirit is good, of course, but one cannot escape the fact that it is in His Nature to be a chaotic good. Even though I am a planner, and attached to my plans, I am still a Christian, so I welcomed in the Spirit even as I steeled myself for what might be happening. One day, perhaps I will have dropped this flinching habit whenever He shows up, and maybe even one day after that I will even eagerly anticipate and pray for the Spirit ‘s divine chaos.

So I waited on the Spirit, while one of us stood up to read from Genesis:

The whole world spoke the same language, using the same words.
While the people were migrating in the east,
they came upon a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there.
They said to one another,
“Come, let us mold bricks and harden them with fire.”
They used bricks for stone, and bitumen for mortar.
Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city
and a tower with its top in the sky,
and so make a name for ourselves;
otherwise we shall be scattered all over the earth.”

The LORD came down to see the city and the tower
that the people had built.
Then the LORD said: “If now, while they are one people,
all speaking the same language,
they have started to do this,
nothing will later stop them from doing whatever they presume to do.
Let us then go down there and confuse their language,
so that one will not understand what another says.”
Thus the LORD scattered them from there all over the earth,
and they stopped building the city.
That is why it was called Babel,
because there the LORD confused the speech of all the world.
It was from that place that he scattered them all over the earth.

I couldn’t help but smile as he read, as I’ve written on this passage before, and he and I had both read and talked quite a bit about Girard, and when he said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city”, I knew that, for the first time, I was hearing that read in Mass by someone who knew what it meant, to build a city of Man….

Next was our hostess, our schemer of the evening, to read a psalm. A perfect fit, I thought, as she went to take the iPad adorned in a Pepto-Bismol-pink protective cover from the Genesis reader. Her voice is like bells, and she is a skilled singer. Her husband and she were at the same Mass years before they actually met, where she sang in the choir for that Mass and I always like to imagine that somewhere, in the back of his mind, he’d had the thought, whose voice is that…

She is like a Disney princess out of its Silver Age, and later, after Mass, I would watch her glide across the kitchen floor in a red maxi dress, effortlessly switching between babies and cupcakes and sippy cups. It was in large part owing to her influence that I became Catholic, due to the simple fact that the first time I met her, years ago now, she then had the kind of jaw-dropping five-days-a-week commute that was nearing onto feature-film length just one-way, and yet she seemed so happy. When I expressed my shock, she did nothing but chirp, “Well, you know, I have a Rosary CD in my car and it’s just more time to pray more rosaries for everybody!” When I confessed to her much later and after my conversion the story of her witness, she responded, “Really?”, almost gasping in surprise before her face rearranged itself into one of happiness. “Wow! All that suffering was totally worth it, then!”

The kind of woman who, when I texted her last year, “If I buy you dinner sometime, will you drive and let me blabber at you over margaritas about whether I’m an anarchist anymore?”, she had only one word to text back, and immediately: “Saturday?” Making impossibly tall cakes filled with flavors from fruits I’ve never heard of, bringing together elaborate parties and baptisms and themes and Vigil Pentecost Masses with a seeming snap of her fingers.

But underneath all her joy and happiness, she is a human too — though she might try to fool you — beset, like us all, by the usual curses of the Fall. These pains and longings she only seems to allow herself to speak in rhyme, in waterfalls of beautiful poetry, or otherwise obliquely through three-act plays she scripts on subjects as obscure as the Herodian dynasty or else Mary at the Feast of the Presentation.

R. Lord, send out your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth.

Bless the LORD, O my soul!
    O LORD, my God, you are great indeed!
You are clothed with majesty and glory,
    robed in light as with a cloak.
R. Lord, send out your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth.
How manifold are your works, O LORD!
    In wisdom you have wrought them all
the earth is full of your creatures;
    bless the LORD, O my soul!  Alleluia.
R. Lord, send out your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth.
Creatures all look to you
    to give them food in due time.
When you give it to them, they gather it;
    when you open your hand, they are filled with good things.
R. Lord, send out your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth.
If you take away their breath, they perish
    and return to their dust.
When you send forth your spirit, they are created,
    and you renew the face of the earth.
R. Lord, send out your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth.

I was beginning to feel unsettled, despite the beautiful words so well spoken by our hostess. I wondered: why was I always grasping at everything, existing in a weird, frenetic state? Why was I constantly uncomfortable with myself at some deep level? Why could I not just rest and be? Being — such a strange word to me. To my mind, to perform well is to gain love, acceptance at least. But being — there could not be any love given in just being. I believed, effectively, in salvation by works alone, through forced smiles and choice words and lies and obscuring who I really was — because no one could love her.

Among us in the room were cheeky, lanky, growing children, babies in utero and babies ex utero, and babies in Heaven. We brought with us to that room — and maybe it was even the reason why we were there at all - invisible but still ever-present scars: parents who had divorced, fathers who had died, mothers who had failed, siblings staring down separations and losses.

I’d strung together rosaries for nearly all of them, or their children, and woven their concerns into my own, prayers for cross-country flights with children and anatomy scans and lost cats and mothers’ surgeries and beloved dogs. Their lives were knit in with my own — the Huntress’ extra copy of The Theology of Home on my own bookshelf, an icon of Jesus from the Poet, a drawing from the Artist, a memento mori skull candle from the Sleuth.

And how confessional had I been with them, I worried? I was too present here, too known, too familiar. The group was too small, and the horror of what I’d done began to sink in. If I am skillful in anything at all in my life, it is in guarding my heart, and offering one out to others that is made out of papier-mâché, painted red and thoughtfully textured in the hopes that it might pass for the real one.

I’d really no idea how I’d come to the group save by the machinations of the Poet, who, when she determines that she will weasel her way into your life, and probably convert you to Catholicism, will meet every success. When I am in groups, I revert back to my socialization, which is that I am at the bottom of every social hierarchy that exists — and that is why I so much prefer not to be in groups. I, the girl who was told by my fourth-grade teacher that I had to stop reading books at recess because I needed to go play, and I nearly burst into tears because it raised the inevitable, painful question — who would play with me?

So poorly coordinated and so unaware of physical space that I was the last picked for the dodgeball team, each and every time. One time, when I was picked dead last yet again and said, as a statement of fact to the P.E. teacher Mrs. B, “I’m always picked last,” she replied, against a cloudless but cold February morning, with what words of comfort she could muster for me: “Well, it’s better to be picked last, anyway, because the last shall be first in the Kingdom of Heaven.” I looked at her in a wordless response while I felt deep in my soul the utter unhelpfulness of her words to my eight-year-old predicament and thought it would have been so preferable for her to have said nothing at all. Or being teased in the cafeteria by a pair of smirking boys for things I couldn’t change while I avoided looking at them by staring down my blue lunch tray, my heart pounding in my chest as I hoped for nothing more than for the bell to ring so I had an excuse to leave. How could I be, in a group, anywhere, at any time? I am still too much, all too much, the same.

On the last and greatest day of the feast,
Jesus stood up and exclaimed,
“Let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink.
As Scripture says:
    Rivers of living water will flow from within him who believes in me.”

He said this in reference to the Spirit
that those who came to believe in him were to receive.
There was, of course, no Spirit yet,
because Jesus had not yet been glorified.

Father turned to the homily, which he focused on babbling from the Genesis reading — the idea that children babble and then we slowly learn to talk, properly, and form actual words. He developed this to say that, in prayer, God loves our babbling, and it is okay for us to babble, as one day, with persistent babbling, we might learn to speak more faithfully the proper language of Heaven.

The Liturgy of the Eucharist

“The Peace of the Lord be with you,” the father announced. “Let us offer each other the sign of the peace.” I turned to my husband, and the smiles crinkled in our eyes at each other as I leaned over across a chair to kiss him on the cheek.

In another life, when I dabbled on the fringes of witchcraft and the occult, I’d gone to see a psychic, an older woman who I’d been told, by several people very well-versed in the psychic circuit, was the real deal. One very ordinary afternoon, I made my way to a very unassuming, even dull strip mall. Keen not to give anything away to the psychic, I donned a simple outfit of a plain white t-shirt and jeans, no jewelry, no makeup, and swapped out my usual purse for one I hardly ever used.

When my turn came, I brushed past the long blue-beaded curtain, stepping across the linoleum floor which gleamed under the fluorescent lights toward the psychic. She was an ordinary, slightly slender woman in her early sixties, and the space the psychic’s daughter (not as good, I had been told, as her mother) at the front desk had referred to as a “reading room” was as ordinary as an agent’s office at the DMV, complete with a daffodil wall calendar behind her and a shiny silver Apple laptop that she pushed to the side as I came in.

I kept my expression and comments as neutral and as limited as possible as she peered out over me over half-moon glasses and pulled out a stack of tarot cards from a drawer to lay them on the desk. Very close to the outset, she drew the Hermit, a kind of wizard-like figure with a staff and a lamp. I looked to her with no comment, but she did not even look up at me, choosing instead to keep her focus on the card as she almost caressed it with her fingers, her outlandishly long mauve nails swirling over it. She spoke with a kind of concentrated quietness that was far more ordinary than dramatic. “There’s a man in your life — right now,” she said, “Romantically. He’s older than you. Reclusive and quiet too, like the Hermit. He is someone who is… He’s very intellectual, who likes to read, who has very many books. He loves you, very very much.” Finally, she looked up at me. “You’ll get married to him.”

That was all accurate, and that was shortly before she foreshadowed what would irrevocably fuse our lives together. From that moment in the strip mall on, I often thought of my husband in his manifestation in the tarot, as the Hermit.

A bad marriage might make a long-suffering saint out of one, but the great marriage makes martyrs out of both, and here, in the peace of Christ was space enough to accommodate our continual dying to each other, and rising and gasping out of the icy-cold waters to something greater than each one of us, again and again. His martyrdom is the plain and simple martyrdom of being married to me: I am a lot, in the sense that a highly reactive dog from the pound is a lot, with a rap sheet of abandonment issues, a skittish disposition, and a tendency to chew on the furniture. My martyrdom is being in any sort of intimate relationship at all, in the same way that being really vulnerable with anyone — not my cultivated, manicured vulnerability which I pass off occasionally to try and throw people off the scent — is a kind of crucifixion, and staying and forcing myself to dwell there, nailed against my failures to make the relationship what it could be, rather than taking the next flight out to Patagonia, dyeing my hair raven black and changing my name to revel in the complete lightness of living, at a safe distance, among total strangers. All of that would feel so much easier than dwelling with my own imperfections, my failings — my sins.

The Poet’s husband was deputized with a quick sign of the Cross by the priest as our Eucharistic minister, and, after I received the Body from the priest, I went over to him to receive the small gold-plated cup of the Blood. This man was now bordering on becoming one of my husband’s older friendships, and he and his wife had seen us through so much, been so interwoven with our own lives. Alongside his wife, he’d helped both me and my husband come into the Church. We’d shared too many meals, too many conversations, too many ordinary moments, too many baptisms and Masses, too much of our lives together. I couldn’t even make eye contact with him as he offered me the Blood. It would have been too much.

I came back to my spot to stand in prayer as our group finished receiving the Eucharist, holding the standard prayerful pause. In praying, I felt my heart — the real one, not the papier-mâché one — almost impaled by a strange intimacy, a sudden nearness of everyone here to me, a nearness that a more normal person might have expected or even welcomed, but a nearness that was almost horrifying to me.

I’d really tried hard, as I do most of the time, to keep some sort of psychological distance from everyone, to guard my heart with walls as grand and as high and enduring as the Castle Neuschwanstein. But here, in this space after communion, instead of giving thanks to the Innocent Victim, I was becoming obsessed by the fact that this extended group, some of whom I’d known for quite a while, might actually not have been fooled by my presentation, my cultivated, manicured vulnerability, and perhaps they knew or, even worse, had seen some of my flaws. I was certainly good enough at passing through the ordinary course of life as I do, but was I good enough to carry on an act for years and years across many different situations with the same group? It was occurring to me, for the first time, that perhaps not. And perhaps they had come to know me, against my own wishes. Perhaps they could tell, to some degree, that I was deliberately reserved, that I was insecure, and anxious, and then avoidant on top to accommodate all of that. To know that other people — beyond my husband, which was already difficult enough for me to manage — knew that I was a flawed human being, and even to know in what ways I might be flawed, and even worse, to have personal experience with my own flaws: that was a terrible intimacy, and one I certainly never wished for and certainly never would have invited.

But then again, I reflected, I knew their flaws and strengths too, I knew them as whole persons, and so I stayed there in the prayerful space after communion, and contemplated that I had been allowed to knit myself into their lives, and they had given me permission to knit their lives into my own, and that had to mean something. I stayed with the idea that I, as a person, could be held here, even acknowledging and owning up to my own imperfections — mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa — and be tolerated here, not to be kicked out, but maybe even accepted, and maybe, just maybe, if I dared to hope?… Maybe even a little bit loved...

The traditional axiom explain the Holy Trinity is that the Father is the Lover, the Son is the Beloved, and the Holy Spirit is the Love between the Father and the Son. “God is the space between us,” a pastor in college once said, a phrase so intriguing to me that I immediately inscribed it on my heart to carry it around the rest of my life. What if I, who had so come to fear intimacy and vulnerability, had somehow encountered the Holy Spirit on the Feast of Pentecost, and with Him this conviction that, in the capital-B-Being of Christ in the Trinity, there was space enough for intimacy between flawed and wonderful and struggling and achieving humans, space to be imperfect, and space to still be loved? What if the Holy Spirit was inviting me to surrender my control for His chaos, to give up manufacturing a version of myself to present in relationships and surrender it for an invitation to intimacy here, in this ordinary, sanctified place?

Afterward, in the kitchen, as our friends rolled off, I’d find myself commenting to our hosts, shyly, my foot leaned against the wall, choosing instead to stare at toddlers rolling around on the floor in their full toddler era rather than look up. Just maybe fifteen minutes before, I’d gotten sassy, hot under the collar, maybe even a little embarrassingly loud and spirited in my defense of Nietzsche, but now, in the quiet, a sudden timidity had overcome me. “You guys are our closest friends, so I guess I can say this…” I then went on to blabber about feeling vulnerable, and what it was like to take the Eucharist in such a small group of our closest friends. “It was… really intimate and special. Thank you….” I trailed off, feeling like I wanted to die inside for being so confessional, and let my statement hang there as I inwardly braced myself against the fear of being judged. But, surprisingly, I seemed to receive acceptance instead. The Poet’s husband responded, “Yeah, I felt that way, too.” The Poet walked over and gave me a big hug and a smile, and I realized that I had to hold space for her past too: she, too, understood about vulnerability.

We, this pack of friends of hers, would all claw our way back to each other, through outstretched hands with accepting borrowed books, arms of newborn baby clothes and pans of hot lasagna, favorite walnut fudge recipes and discussions around kitchen islands about the meaning of the state; we would start to find each other again, to sing from the same sheet, but this time the music is different, sanctified somehow, in a harmony, by the presence of the Spirit that lingers among us, the shared understanding of our common commitment: to live differently, that out of us, something new might be born. Maybe even, in the Pentecost after Babel, a new language would be required to speak about it.

Leaving the house as twilight fell, I felt an ache in my heart for that long moment after communion, in that Upper Room of ours, where I wanted to stay and nurse on the idea that the communion of love that is extended to us through the Holy Eucharist, through Christ who strings up all reality together, is offered to us because of our imperfections, not in spite of them. Because it is Love that calls to us through all the cobwebs and darkness of Sheol in our own souls, through the unmentionable things and darkest thoughts and well-buried secrets that lie decaying, slowly consumed by those glossy, slithering worms, that we would struggle and grasp at that bright, shining, ineffable Light that streams in on us through high windows, and somehow, in all of that, by an unfathomable divine grace of the Holy Spirit, still come to find each other, in a strange intimacy, anew.

Amazing grace! how sweet the sound,
  That saved a wretch; like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
  Was blind, but now I see.

When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
  Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
  Than when we first begun.

"I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh."

— Ezekiel 36:26