Go ahead, check yours out. Flex those digits. Your hands are more fully yours than was your face. Our nail-biters will find those nails yet gnawed. Your wedding rings? They vaporized in transit, dear ones. But the grooves still dent and dignify. Laden with typing skills, able to tie fly-fishing lures in the dark, still so attuned to others’ genital pleasures—your particular hands were more instinctually clever than your head’s best try. Manual labor matters mucho to our Lord. Your hands contain your own most automatic kindness: your soul. Maybe touch your very own underparts for starters? I know I never tire of doing so. Oh, the memories!

Your surviving portions are made of slightly finer stuff than that first rude stab at getting them right. Here they’re more satiny, slightly sleeker, euphemized. Plus there’s a wee bonus: So much sudden time, such distance as you just blurred through in getting here, mercifully served your lower body as a depilatory. That helps, design-wise. It was patchy, pubic hair, admit it. Even ours.

—So this, my dears, is how we separate our two classes of the Angelic. You are all now Angels Republican Second-Rank (that’s honorary, just “for showing up”). But, way far higher stand the Angels Imperial-First-Class.

Though I do belong to that crowd, I was not consulted in the matter of celestial “haves and have nots.” Paradise should not feature such elitist structure, I’m sorry.

You, future Angels Imperial-First-Class, will be immediately subsumed as God’s minions, His/Her Teacher’s Pets, Her/His Handpicked Gofers, the confidantes to Utter Knowingness, Complete Enfolding Compassion. And, in my experience, I swear, the best Company, like, ever. You cannot imagine the level of God’s Smartness and Steadying Quantum Joy. God, however tasteless, is the Original Sense of Humor. Total Recall for All Jokes. And, you alone, of your opaque crowd, “got” it.

How will some few of you become Angels Imperial-First-Class as, unexpectedly, yours truly did?

—Simple.

If, among the other wandering angels, those newly transformed and those already recodified/refined—if among the millions greeting you, there should chance past you any—any single soul who, upon doing a “high-five,” feels your original palm-to-palm portrait energy, one who—on glancing at your telltale lower regions Knows you and can name your name, then that—even amid this level of piled-on cumulus virtue—marks yours as a soul judged Ultimate Good.

It proves you did the maximum while still so painfully earthlocked.

Your discoverer-namer might be your predeceased spouse or lover. Perhaps an overadoring elder brother or sister. Some intimate friend. Maybe your gynecologist or even some diddling scoutmaster with a great memory for detail, up-close and personal. Maybe simply a regular customer whose hand you shook every week for sixty years.