Celestial State of the Human Soul

The bleakness of gray constricts the hushed air; the mind’s inclination being a hazy mixture of ashen dismay. Desolation veils the on sight of creation. Is there transcendence beyond the bleakness of physical reality? As the fisherman sails, the resplendent helm of “Elohim” imparts the bleak eclipse(www.agapebiblestudy.com). With the dispersion of the metaphysical twilight breaking, “one seal particularly I have seen here evening after evening [appears]. He was curious about me” (At The Fishhouses Bishop). The fisherman captivates the being with a hymn of consequential importance. “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” lingers over the desolate waters..... “That word above all earthly powers, no thanks to them, abideth; The spirit and the gifts are ours through Him Who with us sideth: The body they may kill: God’s truth abideth still, His kingdom is forever”(nethymnal.org). The soul goes beyond the life of the human body. Although it at times appears humanity is the thin “tendril” in the boundless hands of a maleficent world, there is hope(Roethke). The seal sanctions the theory of life after death. With each emergence from the deadening waters, his presence heartens existence of Heaven. 

Just as Bishop deliberates the theory of life after death, Roethke, too, mulls over ambiguous meaning of the soul’s transcendence beyond the human body. In construing the death of an aunt, Roethke relates “who sat with the dead when the relatives left, who fed and tended the infirm, the mad, the epileptic, and, with a harsh rasp of a laugh at herself, faced up to the worst”(Elegy). A reoccurring query of post existence consumes the minds of humanity. Is this the only chance to live or do we simply experience liberation at the end of the physical body’s life? 

Unlike Bishop, Roethke conceptualizes the afterlife as a similar desolate state of being. From one entrapment we emerge into another. In the final narrative of “Elegy” Roethke states “I see you in some celestial supermarket, Moving serenely among the leeks and cabbages, probing the squash, bearing down, with two steady eyes, on the quaking butcher”(Elegy). Do beings simple move from from one monotonous state to another? Does Bishop portray veracity with her depiction of God’s all mighty arms securing humanity? Is Roethke merited in his findings of a mundane afterlife? 

"A Mighty Fortress is Our God" really stuck out to me in the reading of "At the Fishhouses". Here is a version of the Protestant hymn.