What does heaven smell like?  This morning I learned that, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

I usually rise very early on beach vacations. I make my coffee and then go sit on the beach to watch the sunrise. That daily unique experience has its own spiritual, heaven-like qualities for me as I sit quietly, sip my coffee, meditate and watch the sun break the horizon as simply a glowing red ball or in a panoply of multicolored clouds and exploding rays of new light. The wind may be blowing, it may be hot, cold, or in-between, wet or dry, but it generally smells like sand, salt water, moldering shells, and sea wrack.

However, today was quite a bit different.

After watching the sunrise and finishing my coffee I went back up to the house and made myself a second mug of joe. I was enjoying a pensive mood while sitting on the sun porch in an overstuffed chair overlooking the beach, when I heard the boys’ 3½-year-old feet padding up behind me and the words, “Good morning, Grandad.” In a few seconds both Andrew and Patrick were up in my lap cuddling and wiping the sleep out of their eyes, and I was immediately in heaven.

So what does heaven smell like?

Heaven smells like two small boys fresh out of bed on an early summer morning at the beach.  They smell like still warm pajamas, summer sun-baked blonde hair, yesterday’s sand and surf, and little boy sweat with an ever so slight tinge of stale pee-pee. Sitting there in the early morning light with the scent of heaven wafting all around me, being kissed on the face and hugged by arms far too short to encompass my rotund girth I had an epiphany. My life is not about me. My life from here on out, whatever is left of it, is about my boys.

What does heaven smell like?

It smells like two little boys with an entire lifetime before them. It smells like hope, promise, potential, joy, heartbreak, and the prospect of a better world in which compassion and loving kindness is the norm and not the exception. It smells like a new generation for which we old men and women must fight so that they may reach their full potential and bring about the new earth we have failed to make manifest.

Many of you who read my missives know that I hold some radically progressive views on politics, economics, religious and societal structures, and that I have despaired of the determination of our current institutional systems’ efforts to maintain the status quo or regress into a type of 21st century feudalism.

You know that I have stated, and will continue to hold, that to settle for the lesser of any evils is still to choose an evil. Therefore, I see it as my duty and obligation to do everything in my power to abolish the greediness, hatefulness, intolerance, violence, and duplicitous nature of our currently faltering systems. I knew I was devoted to this change for many reasons, but this morning those reasons coalesced into a single, unified vision and determination of purpose.

I now know what heaven smells like, and one way or another I will work to be sure that the two small-boy sources of that divine epiphany inherit a very different world. So, you see, I will not be bullied, intimidated, guilted, threatened, or shamed to change my convictions under any circumstances because I know what heaven really smells like.