In Heaven

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church --
I keep it, staying at Home --
With a Bobolink for a Chorister --
And an Orchard, for a Dome --

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice --
I just wear my Wings --
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton -- sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman --
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last --
I'm going, all along.

--Emily Dickenson

I teach a high school journalism class and, as my students learn (even if they learn nothing else), the most important questions are the most basic questions: who, what, where, when, why, and how. So maybe we should start with What is Heaven? Where is Heaven? When is Heaven? Why is Heaven? How is Heaven? Maybe not. Some questions just don't have answers that we can get to. Some questions are best left for the monastics who might be getting bored after counting the number of angels on the head of a pin. Maybe I am just copping out because I cannot even begin to answer these questions.

Or maybe it is that I agree, at least a bit, with Miss Emily's take on Heaven. I am not saying that Heaven is not a place, that there are no pearly gates or streets of gold. I would never suggest that Heaven is or is not any particular thing. I know what little I know, and that's about it. However, I think that Dickenson might be onto something about the nature of Heaven.
Emily Dickenson suggests, in the coda of her poem, that Heaven can be found in Nature, if we are willing to take the time to notice. I would suggest that we can take that idea one step further, that Heaven can be found anyplace.

God is omnipresent; He is everywhere. God, we also know, is in Heaven. If God is everywhere and God is in Heaven, then is Heaven wherever He is--like the President and Air Force One? Air Force One is the designation of whatever plane the President is passenger on. Does whatever space God inhabits, then, become Heaven? Is everyplace Heaven? I don't think we can go that far, but we can at least move down that path.

When I was younger, my mother told me something that has stayed with me for these many years. She said, "Remember, wherever you go, you are taking God there with you." On one level, this is a very comforting message: wherever I go, God will be there for me. On another level, the one I suspect my mom was suggesting back in my high-school days, this message is a kind of warning: don't go into places that you would not be comfortable taking God into. Whichever reading of this we choose, we still have the idea that God is there. And if God is there, wouldn't there also be a piece of Heaven?

So, if everywhere that God is is Heaven--everywhere--then the job becomes to find the Heaven in whatever place we find ourselves in. Or, to approach this from another perspective, is the God we are praying to distant, or is He with us? Are we praying to God who is beyond the Primum Mobile of the Ptolemaic Universe, someplace beyond the reaches of the stars, or are we praying to God who holds us in His loving embrace and so must be right here where we are? Is God both inside and outside Heaven? Of course, He could be, but why would He be? As Emily Dickenson suggests, the Heaven we experience here is not the final destination, but it is a "getting there."

In the scene Miss Dickenson paints for us, hints of Heaven are evident. We can easily find Heaven in an orchard with birds singing, bees buzzing, sunlight warming our cheeks as a gentle breeze plays across our face. We can think of Heaven as we watch waves roll onto a stretch of beach, as we listen to the quiet of a wood filling up with snow, as we marvel at the multitude of colors on a single tree in October. We may easily believe we are witnessing something of Heaven when we are privy to a baby's laughter or when we receive a smile from a friend, when we get a good snuggle with our kids or when we laugh long and hard and deeply with people we care about. Heaven is easy to imagine in a sunset or in a field of thistle and Queen Anne's lace or in a star-filled sky.

Oddly (or not), finding the Heaven in adverse conditions is not that far removed from these idyllic scenes. Like the little girl in the red dress in Schindler's List, the glimmers of Heaven stand out in bad situations. Like a crocus peeking out of a snow drift or a ray of sun shining through the clouds on a rainy day, glimpses of Heaven in bad times, in bad places shine forth in ways that grab our attention. It is Heaven in the mundane that we have trouble seeing.

While we cannot help but see Heaven in certain wonders of our lives, and we search desperately for signs of Heaven in the dark places we experience occasionally, it is in the everyday, in the common, in the part of our existence we inhabit most of the time that we usually don't see Heaven. Perhaps this is because we tune everything out in our normal day-to-day. Perhaps it is because we take so much of our lives for granted. Maybe we just don't pay attention.

If Heaven is anywhere God is (which is just one way of looking at things), and if God is everywhere (which is accepted generally as true), then our finding glimmers of Heaven in our everyday life is akin to finding God in our lives. Like the Puritans in search of signs of grace, we also should be looking for signs of Heaven. We may find them in Nature, as Emily Dickinson did. We may find them in one another, or we may find them within ourselves. Wherever we find them, we have to remember that they are there because God is there.

Dickinson says that instead of getting to Heaven at last, she is going all along. Heaven is a journey, it is our relationship with God. In that case, these glimmers of Heaven in our lives are not so much the destination--we are not going to stop along the way and not continue with our journey; these Heaven sightings are signposts, reminders of which way we should be going and that we need to stay on the path.

Father

Not to get mired in the New Age gender issues of political correctness or the DaVinci Code parlour tricks of a rousing game of "What if," but gender is not really the issue here. It is not about whether God is He or She; it is about the relationship.

I know that many many people disagree with me about this point, but I am not that concerned with the whole masculine/feminine thing. I think of God as male because that is how I grew up thinking about God. So far as I know, the only pronoun God used in referring to himself was I, and that does not shed any light on the subject. Nor does it need to.

The significance of the word Father is not that God is male; it is that God is parent. Most of us probably have heard the word intoned in that solemn and stoic tone assigned to middle schoolers playing pilgrims in a Thanksgiving pageant. We aren't used to the word's having the warmth and the love that we (hopefully) associate with our earthly fathers. We don't think of the word so much as a word of relationship as we do as a word of distance.

My pastor, Tiger Pennington, sometimes speaks of God the Father as Daddy, a term that we from the South understand to encompass both the reverance and awe we have for our paternal units when we are young and the deep love and affection we have for them; it also suggests that we are children, even though many of us may use the term all our lives.

Without getting into a long discussion of the Trinity, we need to think of this word as referring to God the Father. What does that mean? Why not Lord or God or Yahweh? All of these refer to God, but each has a separate connotation, each carries its own baggage for us. In this prayer, our model for how we should be praying, the word used to address God is Father, and that has to be significant. For Christ, it had a very direct significance, but what about the rest of us? What message is packed into this word?

Everyone's relationship with a parent is individual, is slightly different from everyone else's relationship. Even our relationships with our two parents are different from each other. But there are certain characteristics that all healthy parent-child relationships share, and there are characteristics that describe both the giving and the receiving aspects of the relationship. The basics all seem to focus on love, respect, and security.

Central to the relationship is love. English is so limited with this word. We have a multitude of words to describe hate--loath, despise, dislike--but we use the same word, love, to describe our relationship with our spouse, God, and pizza. I may be guilty of a bit of hyperbole, but not much. Love is a much abused word. Or, perhaps, it is used not nearly enough. Maybe it is that we should love more, especially our Father. God pours out his love on us, and we soak it in. His love manifests itself in so many ways, in so many blessings, many of which we take for granted each day. God's mercy and grace are examples of God's unconditional and awesome love for us.

But what about our love for God? If we stick with our focus of God as parent, then our love for Him is akin to our love of our parents: we love because He is our Father, because He is there for us and always has been there for us, because He loves us and we cannot help but love Him back. God's love is immense, and we cannot hope to love Him back in like measure; but, God does not expect our love for him to equal His love for us. It is like Christmas presents: our friends, our siblings, even our spouses may expect our presents to them to match up with their presents to us; however, our parents are overjoyed with whatever we give them. I know that I am so delighted with the small gifts my kids give me; they may not cost much, but they are priceless. The same holds true with our love for God: so long as we are giving it with our hearts, God treasures it as precious. And we are called to love God. According to Christ, loving God is the first and greatest commandment. Love is a two-way street. God loves us constantly, no matter what we do, even if we do not love Him back; but, when we do love Him, it opens the floodgates of His love.

So, we're smothered in love. We are covered up with it. What now? We are already loving God, which is how we got this massive blessing of love to begin with. Is there anything else? Part of the wonder of being human is that we can experience multiple emotions simultaneously: witness the emotional stew we go through with people we love--how much more complex could it be with God? I am afraid that many of us distance ourselves so much from God that we force ourselves to make our feelings for Him as simple as possible; we love Him, in a distant and "reverant" way.

Reverant isn't bad, of course. We are told to honor our fathers and our mothers; and, this transfers to honoring our heavenly Father. We are supposed to respect our parents, and this, also, applies to our Father. Remember when you were a small child and you thought your parents were perfect? You believed your parents could do no wrong; that whatever they did, they did well; that they were always right. Remember? That's the same respect we should feel for God. Do we always feel that way? Probably not. We probably experience doubt, occasionally. We may try to second-guess God. We question God's authority. In short, we treat God as if we are teenagers. It doesn't mean that we don't love Him; it means that our human-ness is rebelling. We feel that we are grown-up enough to handle things on our own. We mess up.

Christ suggests that we should come to God as little children. Little children love unconditionally. Little children respect their parents unquestioningly. Little children experience their emotions purely. We may think that being as children is easy, but most of us have a hard time giving up our "maturity." We may have gained knowledge, but, like Adam and Eve, we have gotten it from the tree at a price. We give up our innocence but later realize that we want it back; fortunately, we can regain our innocence--in a way--through the amazing grace of Christ Jesus. We can regress from adolescence to childhood, and we should, but it takes a little effort--it takes giving up our selves, which most of us find pretty difficult to do.

So, aside from following Christ's admonition, what is the benefit of being childlike? Aren't we supposed to become mature in Christ? How can we do both? To begin, we cannot put human limitations on God's love. Like something in a Zen koan, we find that becoming mature in Christ means becoming childlike. And when we do, we achieve the final piece of the parent-child equation: we find security. When we accept that we are a child of God, we can curl up in His arms, we can feel safe in His embrace, we can rest in His love. God will hold us just as our parents held us, just as we hold our own children. And there is no better feeling possible.

Of course, I am not naive enough to believe that everyone's parent-child relationship is perfect--or even that any parent-child relationship is perfect. I have seen enough after-school specials and read enough high-school student personal narratives to know that not every person out there has a great relationship with his or her parents. However, we can fall back on the archetypal parent. We can say that the parent-child relationship is what it should be because, after all, we are talking about our imitation of Christ, and Christ would have the perfect relationship with his Father. So, when we say the word Father as we pray, we need to be aware that the word is loaded, just as our lives are loaded with love from our heavenly parent.

Our

Maybe it is the high school English teacher in me: when I see a pronoun, I need to know the antecedent--what is the thing the pronoun refers to? In this case, who is the group our refers to? Or, as Pogo Possum might say, "Who is us?"

This group, this we, must include at least one person for certain--the speaker. That is, whenever anyone says our, us, or we, he or she is including himself/herself in the group. The speaker of this line is, of course, Jesus Christ. This collective pronoun, then, at least includes Jesus. Moreover, this group also includes anyone who follows Christ, for the admonition from Christ is that this is how his followers are supposed to pray. So, anyone who says the prayer, anyone who follows the directions of Christ, is part of the us.

The way I see it, this information has two implications: first, we are in a group which includes Jesus Christ, and, second, anyone can be in that group. Both of these are staggering realizations which suggest some pretty important ramifications.

The first idea, that we who say the prayer are in a group with Jesus Christ, is a pretty overwhelming concept, especially for someone like me. Groucho Marx said that he did not want to belong to any group that would have him as a member. I think that a lot of us probably share something of this outlook--and the idea that we, as individuals, can be considered a part of a group that counts as one of its members Jesus Christ might seem too frightening. In our culture, we stress the importance of equality, but we do not always understand equality. Being in a group with someone does not automatically mean that we are identical to that person--or even that we are on the same level. It means we have something in common with that person. We may belong to the same political party as the President of the United States, but that does not make us president; it means that we share a set of beliefs, more or less. In the same way, being included in a group with Jesus does not make us perfect; it merely means that we profess the same beliefs.

This us, then, is open: it is whoever wishes to be a part of it. There is no lottery, there is no engraved invitation, there is no exclusive offer; anyone can join. Again, our society pushes us to have a conflicting set of responses to this kind of open invitation: on the one hand, we expect things to be open to everyone and to have no restrictions; on the other hand, we want to feel special and we want to think that somehow we have won. The miracle of God's mercy and grace and love is that these two seemingly exclusive ideas are bound up as one: we each have our own individual invitation to join the club, we each have been chosen out of all the possible candidates for this honor, and we are all in this together, each sought out one by one.

We, then, by our choice can enter into a group that counts among its members Jesus Christ. We then have to think about the import of that membership. Not only are we in the group with Christ, we are in the group with every other person who professes belief in Christ. This gets at the heart of the second implication: anyone can be in this us. Once we are past the shock of being included with Jesus, can we then accept that all those people around us are also in the group? Jesus accepted all those around him: tax collecters, prostitutes, invalids, and even the Pharisees (if they had wanted to be in). Can we be that accepting? Can we embrace the others in the group? How can we not?

If we are truly a part of this group--and not apart from this group--then we have decided to share the beliefs of the group, beliefs embodied by Christ. We cannot be in the group if we don't buy into what the group is about. We cannot be in the group if we pick and choose the ideas we want, discarding or ignoring the ideas that we just aren't comfortable with. Central to these beliefs is the idea that we are all in this together. Love your neighbor. It may have come in second in the commandments race, but that means it still made it onto the platform--and besides, all of the commandments, all of the beliefs of the group, are important. It's just that, for whatever reasons, many of us have a hard time with this idea of accepting all the others in the group.

In The Ragamuffin Gospel, Brennan Manning points out over and over that we are all ragamuffins, we are all flawed. God loves us anyway. God embraces us just as we embrace our own children--and just as we usually don't embrace ourselves. Maybe it is because we have so much trouble accepting ourselves that we have so much trouble accepting others. No matter. We have to open ourselves to the idea that everyone who accepts Christ is in our group, is part of the our. Because if Christ can let us in. . . .

The Lord's Prayer

For a few years now, I have been--for lack of a better word--meditating on the Lord's Prayer. I did some lessons on it once upon a time when I taught a high school Sunday School class, and even then I had been thinking about it for awhile. I did not look at the whole prayer so much as each word and what it means. My meditations have been on the implications of each word.
I am not suggesting that I have discovered some secret code or that the passage was intended to be read this way. This has just been a way for me to think about ideas, and I need all the help I can get.
There are many things that this is not: it is not a scholarly exegesis; it is not a learned and informed explication; it is not a revelation of the truth and meaning of this passage; it is not a historically accurate reading; it is not the final word on this topic. Likewise, I am not a biblical scholar; I am not clergy; I am not a spokesman for any particular group. I am a believer in the mercy, the grace, the love of Jesus Christ. This is a collection of my meditations on this passage.