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| Dallas Willard |
Dallas Willard died this morning after announcing Stage 4 Cancer on Monday.
Dallas--a USC Professor of Philosophy, a man whose writing has greatly magnified my view of beauty and goodness and hope in this life, and a lover and beloved of God--awakened early this morning into the full experience of the brilliantly abundant life with God. His last two words were,
“Thank you.”
This morning, as his life-light dawned into full day, I think Dallas was welcomed into rest and love and praise by the voice of God; a voice which he once described as recognizable through its "spirit of exalted peacefulness and confidence, of joy, of sweet reasonableness and of goodwill."
And I think the voice sounded something like this: "Well done, good and faithful servant."
Here's something he wrote about the intersection of God and love and death, from Hearing God, 1984:
"Thomas à Kempis speaks for all the ages when he represents Jesus as saying to him, 'A wise lover regards not so much the gift of him who loves, as the love of him who gives. He esteems affection rather than valuables, and sets all gifts below the Beloved. A noble-minded lover rests not in the gift, but in Me above every gift.' The sustaining power of the Beloved Presence has through the ages made the sickbed sweet and the graveside triumphant; transformed broken hearts and relations; brought glory to drudgery, poverty and old age; and turned the martyr's stake or noose into a place of coronation.
As Saint Augustine has written, when we come to our final home, 'there we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise. This is what shall be in the end without end.' It is this for which the human soul was made."
Thank you, Dallas.
