The picture was one of the things I treated myself to, when I renovated my office (just finished--ta-da!) It's a print of a painting. I don't know who the original artist was, but the original looks like it should be Italian Renaissance. I think it's likely a detail of a larger work.

It shows an improbably Umbrian landscape with villas and a lone chapel high on a theatrical mountainside. In the foreground there are formal gardens, full of roses, and pollarded trees, including, strangely, one dead elm-like specimen, delicately bony against a sky aswirl with apricot and pearl-grey clouds. But clearly this is heaven, because everyone in the painting--and there are many people in the painting, at least thirty--is wearing a halo and a pair of wings. They're quite attractive wings, made of richly tinted peacockish feathers, much more interesting than the standard white goose fluff. Very fetching. The wings are clearly functional, too, since one group is gracefully airborne. (I wonder how their draperies stay up?)

But I didn't buy the print because of the wings, nor because of the huge garland of roses that three of these people are putting together, nor because of the mountains or pollarded trees. I bought it because all the people in the painting are so sharply individual. These are all people--not generic angels, a dollar a dozen, all stamped out by some celestial cookie-cutter. So far from being dressed all alike, they are wearing a lively variety of colours, gorgeous with different embroidery. While most have the conventional curling golden hair of the period, no two are wearing it quite the same way.

Above all, no two faces are the same. There's the lively young woman in the front of the largest group, with her sharply intelligent smile, apparently flirting with a calm, attentive young man. There's the man behind her whose serene face looks worn by age or illness or pain, and the dubious-looking young man looking upward, right next to him, and two behind him who look almost shocked. Some faces are full of intelligence; others are placidly bovine. Some look like quite ordinary children my younger kid's age. There are one or two faces I might see in the local supermarket.

They are mostly deeply engaged, fully attentive--to each other, to something before them on their path, to some inner thought or voice, to something above them in the heavens. Each is both occupied within him- or herself and also very much with the others. And they are clearly going somewhere. The rose-workers aside, there are two groups on foot, densely crowded, one following the other, and they and the airborne contingent are all heading in the same direction. They have a purposeful air about them. A company of pilgrims, perhaps?

But are there pilgrimages in heaven? The traditional vision had us all sitting about on clouds in snowy muumuus, playing harps, a monochromatic prospect that would, I suspect, appall more people than it might attract (although the notion of being able to SIT DOWN for a fairly prolonged spell is something that most mothers dream about a lot). We don't think of the heavenly host as being a bunch of real individuals. Yet that is what this artist has depicted.

Is this the company of saints? It might be, although nobody's carrying any trademarks--no St. Sebastian as pincushion or St. Agatha with her breasts on a tray or whatever. I have the definite feeling that whoever these people are, they were once living and breathing on this earth. They have that real-ness to them.

We're called to journey too, in the company of pilgrims, and called also to become our fullest selves, not cookie-cutter saints. That, like goose-fluff wings, would be boring, and I have the strangest certainty that God doesn't like to be bored. If God prized uniformity, we wouldn't have all those beetle species. No, we're meant to become as fully individuated as these lively travelers, as richly coloured and sharply alive.

Each of them, it seems, carried a different soul from this life into that one, and that is what we too will have to do. It is work--the hardest and most satisfying work in the world, to make your own soul, day by day, in small and quite ordinary ways. But that's what we should be doing, because the only thing we get to take with us out of this life is who we have become in it.

This soul-making process is both like and radically unlike the secular hobby of "finding yourself." It involves knowing yourself--taking that famous "fearless inventory". But it also involves losing yourself. The more time you spend nuzzling your nose deeper into your own navel in self-preoccupation, the further you are from making your soul. Forgetting yourself in love for others works much better.

It involves satisfaction, but also sacrifice, going through a whole lot of necessary small deaths--starting with your ego, the need to feel nice about yourself at all costs. It involves community, but also periods of deep aloneness. In fact, it is a way of paradox, of opposites and contrariness: sometimes intense involvement with others, sometimes time spent alone in the desert; sometimes joy and richness, sometimes emptiness and desolation. For it is often through the desert that we find the City of God.

Of course the painting could be one of those things painters did by the yard, weaving their patrons' faces into the scene--my lord as St. George, my lady as St. Catherine, the palace chaplain as St. Jerome--and painted with all the spiritual insight of a cheese souffle. (But it doesn't feel that way!) And of course no one really knows what lies on the other side of the River, or what we will find when we come out the other side of death. We all tend to think of it as being what we most love and value in this life. But of course, we're only seeing "through a glass darkly."

I'd like to think of life in that kingdom as being full of unimaginable colour and variety. I'd like to imagine, as this artist has, a landscape full of interest, a place of still waters and the deep green of forests. I fancy it as being full of the best sort of company--a place for "conversations and jokes together, mutual rendering of good services, the reading together of sweetly phrased books, the sharing of nonsense and mutual attentions." And always with God's glory washing through like the golden light of the picture.

I won't know in this life whether the artist, whoever he was, actually felt and saw something and managed to get a hint of it into his painting. The reality is apt to be as far beyond our present understanding as the calculus is beyond a kindergartner who's just starting to learn her number facts. But I bet he's right about one thing: it's going to be a blast.