As it is in Heaven
Our concern is not so much about getting to heaven but in discovering and revealing its incarnate presence here and now. The light of a radical shift in theological perspectives and at time of daily revelations regarding cosmic mysteries – our world views, our faith perspectives are undergoing a radical transformation. When we understand the love-energy of evolution to be the very grace of the Holy Spirit, then our understanding of almost everything has to change. Informed by the belief that the world is birthed in God’s love and is precious, sacred and one, the true spiritual quest is to discover that anew each day.
‘It was dark and I was taking the washing off my line. The light streamed into the darkness from the kitchen where my three girls were sitting around the table, cups of tea in hand, chatting about their day. I watched the interaction between them, saw their animated discussion and suddenly knew that right there, in the heart of my own home, Gods’ incarnate spirit was present – a beautiful presence that set the place into radiance.’ Paula was recognising a sublime moment of that heaven on earth called Incarnation.
Faith provides a kind of 3-D to our perception of everything. It uses imagination and depth to detect the traces of the Artist everywhere. As children reveal so much about their parents, the world reveals the nature of God. Pope Francis, a passionate interpreter of the meaning of Incarnation, reminds us that ‘the Lord of life, who loves us so much, is always present’ in the heart of the world, in the music of what happens. God is inextricably woven into the texture of our days and nights.
Many believers desperately resist the notion of the ordinariness of our ‘Everyday God’, a God of the flesh, who comes to us disguised as our very own lives. But that is how we experience our divine Lover and Saviour in this life. Maybe it won’t be all that different in heaven. If we are all so carefully fashioned in the image of our Creator-Mother, if humanity and all creation is the key to our understanding of heaven, then perhaps, instead of being a ‘vale of tears’ (as, indeed, it often appears to be) this world is a kind of raw material to be transformed. This short poem by Emily Dickenson points out that heaven is not somewhere ‘out there’ in the future. It is here, now, within us, and surrounding us. Heaven is far more earthy than we suppose. If we fail to find it here, we won’t recognise it anywhere else. Poet Emily Dickinson wrote:
‘Who has not found the Heaven – below –
Will fail it above –
For Angels rent the House next ours,
Wherever we remove – . . .
‘God has united himself definitively to our earth, and his love constantly impels us to find new ways forward . . .’ God is forever infused, incarnate, and utterly inseparable from the world of our senses. Is Pope Francis persuading us about a new way of looking at creation and all our experiences not as a preamble to heaven but as already the experience of it? ‘Eternity has little to do with the hereafter,’ wrote mythologist and Catholic writer Joseph Campbell, ‘This is it. If you don’t get it here you won’t get it anywhere. The experience of eternity right here and right now is the function of life’. Maybe our future Resurrection will reveal that we have been experiencing it all our lives. We will have already felt it, ‘proved on the pulse’, as John Keats wanted. In his True Resurrection Fr Harry Williams wrote, ‘Heaven will be recognised as a country we have already entered, and in whose light and warmth we have already lived’. According to these writers then, we will definitely have a sense of deja vu when we get to heaven!
There is a heresy called ‘Universalism’ that Pope Francis seems to be flirting with in these quotations! One aspect of it is the belief that everything God has ever created will be eventually reconciled and saved for all eternity. Mystic Julian of Norwich was accused of this lovely (and apparently dangerous!) opinion. Pope Francis puts this attractive belief as only he can, ‘Eternal life will be a shared experience of awe in which each creature, resplendently transfigured, will take its rightful place . . . all the good which exists here in this earthly home will be taken up into the heavenly feast . . .’ (Laudato Si’, 245) It is really an effort to portray the holiness of the earth, that nature too is heaven-bound. These words again remind us that if we never have glimpses and experiences of God’s loving presence in the real presences of this life, then we will not recognise heaven after we die. All of this is not really surprising when we remember that God needed and desired to become our bodies, our senses, our emotions, our relationships in time and space, so that divine being could be actually experienced everywhere, by everyone. It was with a view to experiencing an astonishing and redeeming intimacy with all of us that God created the world in the first place.
Poet Vladimir Holan wrote Resurrection:
Is it true that after this life of ours we shall one day be awakened
by a terrifying clamour of trumpets?
Forgive me God, but I console myself
that the beginning and resurrection of all of us dead
will simply be announced by the early crowing of the cock.
After that we’ll remain lying down for a while . . .
The first to get up
will be mother . . . We’ll hear her
quietly laying the fire,
quietly putting the kettle on the stove
and cosily taking the teapot out of the cupboard.
We’ll be home once more.
After all, if it was God’s wish to become human through a mother who got up early to provide breakfast for her divine baby, why should we be surprised if that is how we meet God again? Yes, we’ll know full well when we’re truly home.