Jesus promised us Everlasting Life, if we wanted it - but it is usually hard for us to imagine what we could possible find to do forever that would not become utterly intolerable sooner or later - and probably sooner...
I regard the idea of 'Nirvanah' or suchlike to be a response to this intolerability - the goal of losing self-awareness in a permanent bliss state... But this is not what Jesus offered - and Nirvana is not a solution to giving each of us everlasting life, because it entails us no longer being us... Eternity is made tolerable by obliterating awareness of it and of ourselves.
I am not arguing against Nirvana for those who want it - but to want it is to want Not To Be to want to escape from being.
Nirvana is not a solution to the problem, it is a deleting of the problem.
So, let's get back to what Jesus was offering, or meaning by offering everlasting light on the understanding that it would be A Good Thing and would be experienced by each of us, as selves and personally. What kind of a thing might this be?
Well, I'm not happy with saying that we will be changed, perfected, and that will make the difference. That - because of our sins and other imperfections, we cannot yet imagine what everlasting life would be like - but when we have been resurrected and saved, we then will understand...
That is another evasion. Yes, we do need to be changed, perfected to enjoy everlasting life - but that does not make it clearer what kind of a thing that our perfecting will make enjoyable. Jesus clearly expected people to know what he meant, the kind of thing he meant, when he gave the Good News of everlasting Life.
The only kind of a thing that I personally can imagine being Good to experience Forever, is something that endlessly grew and changed in such a way that there was continuity; it remains the same kind of thing, while getting greater...
Jesus told us the key - which is Love. For myself, this is loving marriage and family - plus close friendship... Families grow by procreation and are linked by lineage - and these families become linked by marriages and by friendships.
I can quite easily imagine that a situation of love can change, expand, develop - while remaining itself; and I can imagine this going-on forever and remaining not just tolerable but getting better and better forever.
I am fortunate enough to have experienced reasonably close approximations to this exact situation in my life to recognise that - with love as the basis - the complex of romantic love, love between parents and children, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and between siblings... the whole 'network' of relations... that this is the kind of thing which would be an eternal delight as the core of a larger life of creativity.
There seems to me a reciprocal relation between this extended concept of family-based human relations and creativity: our personal creativity is for the extending family. They are the necessary 'audience' for any act of personal creativity.
I can see that individuality needs to grow from the embeddedness in family - such that we develop our own distinctness by growing-into the niche we envisage. By our own personal growth and development, we make new and unenvisaged actualities...
What is creativity, in this ultimate sense? Creativity is personal participation in reality - in everlasting life (and sometimes in mortal life, partly and briefly) we live realty; and because we are individual 'agents', by participating in reality, we change reality.
The archetypal creativity which makes possible all other is God's creation. God's is primary creation and we are sub-creators in and from God's creation - but to be a subcreator is to be a real creator - a creator working in the medium of reality...
And when God's creation is understood as something with which we can personally participate; I find it easy to imagine waking up every morning forever with unflagging delight at the prospect of the day ahead - because each day will be new, and yet there will be the continuity of love; we will retain what we most value, yet the scope of everything will expand; and the expansion of everything will be in a loving harmony with what already-is.
In sum, I have experienced sufficient in the way of partial and temporary approximations to it, to recognise that an everlasting life embedded in a loving and growing family, 'cross-linking' with other such families by marriages and friendships, is the kind of medium or basis of a wholly gratifying Everlasting Life; and that within that medium or on that basis the completion of life would be creativity - of an unique and personal kind; with loved people who that creativity is for.
When, and equally, there is the creativity of others for us ourselves. There is our own unique creativity, and there are the unique (and developing) creativities of everybody else...
How might such a vision be related to Jesus? In what sense did he enable us to have this, and give it to us?
Without getting too detailed, I see Jesus as having been the first actually to do this; and by that act beginning the whole process, making it possible for all other men and women. Both in its general sweep and its specific details; both in its literal surface and in the intuited depths; in its full pre-mortal, mortal and post-mortal context and scope... the life of Jesus was a beginning of the eternal and divine and human family; linking mortal Men with the already fully-divine.
The creativity of Jesus can be overlooked, but it is there. Every day was different, every day was a development of his nature. Each conversation, each personal interaction, each parable or lecture, each surprise and twist that is immediately seen as 'right'... there is a continual and personal creative growth in action in the Life of Christ.
Of course, Jesus being in mortality and among flawed men and evil powers - there is a great deal of the horrible too: Jesus experienced many sins of others, pain, sorrow and other flaws. Such experiences were a necessary learning.
But - having learned, having experienced mortality and death; I do not find it difficult to imagine a world, an everlasting life, in which these aspects were absent; yet life was open-endedly and forever a learning and creating in that context of loving family and friendship.
It is what I already know, raised and refined to a 'perfection' that is a dynamic and evolving perfection - and its dynamic and evolving nature is its perfection completed for eternity.
