Perhaps the present life is the only place where we can find - and follow - our "bliss."

Joseph Campbell:  Have you ever read Sinclair Lewis' "Babbit"?

Bill Moyers: Not in a long time.

Joseph Campbell:  Remember that last line?  "I have never done the thing that I wanted to in all my life."  That is a man who never followed his bliss . . . You may have a success in life, but then just think of it - what kind of life was it?  What good was it - you've never done the thing you wanted to do in all your life.  I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go.  When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don't let anyone throw you off . . . The religious people tell us we really won't experience bliss until we die and go to heaven.  But I believe in having as much as you can of this experience while you are still alive.

Moyers:  Bliss is now.

Campbell: In heaven you will be having such a marvelous time "looking at God" that you won't get YOUR OWN experience at all.  That is not the place to have the experience - HERE is the place to have it . . . If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.  When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you.  I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be . . . If you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.

Photo: A magpie sits at sunset on the topmost branch of a Ponderosa Pine snag, with Long's Peak and Mt. Meeker looming in the background; Westridge, Lory State Park, CO; November 6, 2012.  

As I listened this past weekend to the interview between Moyers and Campbell from which the above passage is taken.  I was struck by the fact that we are called to find and live our "bliss" RIGHT NOW.  Before this point, I'd always thought of the afterlife as a place where the bliss we are experiencing now will be intensified and unhindered by the challenges and distractions of this present life.  But what if - instead - the afterlife is a place where we will be so devoted to the process of SERVING  "the face of God" in others - i.e., in the living - that we will have no time to focus on our own experience?  And what if the reservoir out of which we will draw strength for that kind of giving can only come from the bliss we experience HERE AND NOW?  Something to ponder :)