I read on someone's blog today, the following statement:

"Augustine knew, first of all, that Heaven is not a place of reward for a life
well-lived or some kind of a spiritual retirement home that one can pay one’s
way into with just enough earthly good deeds in the bank to keep himself out of
the fiery pit. (To even have such an aim, to live life trying to be “just good
enough” to make it to Heaven is hypocritical and false, and even childish
[behaving one’s self to get a cookie rather than because one truly wishes to be
a good person for its own sake]—and seeking to become “perfect” and thus
deserving of eternal bliss on one’s own merit is even worse, a megalomaniacal
striving after a delusion and a chimera, which, paradoxically, can only lead to
the deadly spiritual sin of self-righteousness.) Rather, as Augustine teaches
us, Heaven is something much better than a “final resting place” of physical
leisure (or an escape from hellish torture) or even a “karmatic reward for good
deeds;” it is the fulfillment of a love-relationship with the Divine for which
we have always longed and sought and which we have cultivated to the best of our
ability on earth—an endless existence in and of pure love, in which all things
transpire and are experienced in unadulterated, untainted love, the final
reunion of lover and beloved, a state of being striven for directly and for its
own sake. And so it is that good deeds are not what lead to heaven, but rather
loving and desiring love, seeking to unite oneself with the ultimate in Love,
which is God, with no motive other than this. (Good deeds here on earth may, and
will be a natural byproduct of this seeking after God, but they are not some
sort of currency, something one “has to do” in order to get something else—in
fact, a “good deed” done without love behind it or done in order to get some
sort of personal benefit, either here or in the hereafter, is just selfishness
and is dead and of no use whatsoever.)"

How true those words are.... and how I desire for a passion that would consume me until it's connsumation.

.Timothy