As a group, you all exhibit a sense of humor often criticized as “infantile.” You have a secret sweet tooth. You enjoy playing around. You show a passion for collecting anything from salt-cellars to orphans. There’s real talent at empathy, a quiet yet profound interest in sex (more about that later). You’ve each kept a garden, if only a windowbox. The amount of fund-raising you did, we angels first admired, then pitied. Your virtue runs alongside a scofflaw’s hatred for paying parking tickets.

And, today there’s the surprise element. First, you feel astonished at the fact of a Paradise, any paradise. Then you’re shocked on being picked for it. But, see, that constitutes your righteousness, you silly willies!

Yes, there is a Hell. And it’s becoming quite the crowded spot just now. But why bother your pretty little heads about that? My job is to situate you here. —Even so, is it not delicious? Picturing the pain endured by certain lowlifes who divorced you, overborrowed from you, and, in forty-nine cases present, killed you! —They’re finally really paying. Hell is their constant root canal. Torture will keep them screaming through eternity. (Never doubt God loves you.)

We find our entering class gets annually smaller. Even so, what still ascends to us, it deeply edifies. You constitute whatever center of the moral universe still holds. Lately, little has. Attendant rewards await you.

It is those I wish to sketch. Among your group, find no representative of the Executive or Legislative branches. A handful from Judicial did squeak through. As usual, very few of the professionally religious made our last cut. There is some fairness, after all. A shocker in itself, no?

—Odd, but Immortality is quite easy to embrace (especially one’s own). What’s harder to accept is justice.

(This, you’re in, is the indoctrination for Westerners. We have an African and an Asian session going on concurrently. Though you can now speak every language, God considers certain rewards untranslatable except into the language that you used most recently. —Even here, nobody’s everybody.)

How does it feel, opening your eyes on pure vista-possibility? It’s all horizon here, and never dark, and your very feet are planted on gelatinous light. What is it you miss most? That too shall find you on high. Room service knows your every wish; it’ll be up shortly.

Let’s call this Freshman Orientation, shall we? You will soon learn house rules for The Conversation. It is my joy to describe certain literal facts of your sudden exquisite setup.

Magna—Blue: II

Shall we begin with your new shapes? I see a few in back starting to notice each other. No criticism implied, go on. True, you’re altered. Actually “transformed” (to do the Miracle full credit).