on home and heaven
I've been thinking a lot lately about heaven. That's probably not normal for the average 30-year old. Word on the street if that most people don't go there until, well, they're getting close to going there.
Like most concepts, heaven is an idea(l) still very much under construction, inasmuch my own sense of faith and pilgrimage are. What I continue to find is that at each point in the trail there is a mass-media explosion of song and verse, images and visions. Even trying to put it all together in these few words on a screen seems doomed. Still, it's only fair to try and trace this idea and whether or not we're going there, it's coming here or how we'll know the difference.
I'll Fly Away:
The Theme Park Heaven
I was at a conference last week where the speaker was telling a story where a colleague was bemoaning the way in which the Church's songs betray its' own theology. His object of attack in this case was a sort of hee-haw rendition of I'll Fly Away. After lampooning the song, the professor went on to say that visions of a heaven that's "out there", beyond what we can see or experience, natively shift our perspective from the suffering in our midst, to the point of giving us a way out. His point was that we can become disengaged from the suffering around us.
Fortunately, one bright student pushed back a bit and asked the professor where that song came from. The professor gruffly muttered "some sort of spiritual, I don't know..." (it was actually written in 1929 by Albert Brumley, a white cotton-farmer from Oklahoma as a "gospel song"). The student pushed further.
"I understand what you're saying, but that song and more like it were instrumental during the civil rights movement. Many of them took their sentiment from earlier spirituals. When you're being tortured and oppressed, hearing that heaven is just like earth isn't a message of hope--in fact, it sounds a lot like hell."
Truth be told, while I'm not a fan of the way in which the professor mocked I'll Fly Away, I get where he was trying to go. He was reacting against something that had nothing to do with the civil rights movement and liberation. I was raised in a suburban home outside Atlanta, so rural country churches were not my experience, but many of them had informed and nurtured the faith of many members of our congregation.
Their spirits soared anytime the Music Minister dared to pull out "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?", "When the Roll is Called Up Yonder" or "Beulahland", a song my father-in-law has sung at more funerals of these good folks then he could count.
But it wasn't just the songs. The songs were a sort of soundtrack to a divine, as-yet-unseen glistening city, with gates of pearl, streets of gold and crystal clear rivers and streams. I remember hearing one evangelist detail exactly what each "mansion in glory" would look like while still another used the visions of Ezekiel and Revelation to draw a heavenly blueprint.
To my child-like brain the closest thing to a gold road was the yellow-brick road in The Wizard of Oz which worked, by and large because it appealed to those most basic flights of fantasy. I couldn't imagine what I would see and do, but it sounded like an incredible theme park of mansions and buildings, a new attraction around every corner.
It sounded like Six Flags but better.
And when your 8, 9, 10, 11 years old, what kid doesn't want to go to Six Flags?
Heaven is a Place on Earth:
The Front Porch Heaven
The promise of mansions and gold may have been enough motivation for an 11-year old to walk an aisle, but they're not enough to force allegiance to an idea. This happens all the time. We get a desire for a certain item, we work for it, and as we get closer to attaining it something else catches our attention. The original item isn't good enough anymore, and we begin to question why we ever wanted that in the first place.
For many people this is the place where they "lose" faith, though it's debatable whether or not faith was ever part of a picture--aisles for conversion, prayers for golden tickets--there's an implicit risk of making a transaction, not a commitment. While most of my adolescence was spent in prophets of Baal-like blood-letting to show my commitment, I eventually found that the scandal of grace didn't require sacrifice, just an acknowledgment of mercy.
This remains the most spiritually significant epiphany of my faith-journey to date. Running headlong into grace and then kicking against it, begging for ways to prove your worth is exhausting, and that's something of the point. When you tire of kicking and screaming and fighting, there's always only the embrace of a loving Creator. Eventually, we rest in that.
The danger of this end is that it feels so liberating, so comforting, so life-giving that we lose a bit of our imagination. One of the triggers for this article was an interview I heard a few weeks ago on NPR . The Irish actor Gabriel Byrne was being interviewed and asked about a good many things, including his time growing up in Ireland, as well as entering (and subsequently leaving) seminary. When he managed convey that his home life was in some way lacking, the interviewer pressed. After a brief pause, the wizened actor mused "I think when most people think about heaven, what they are really thinking about is an idealized version of home."
I spent the better part of an 80-minute commute thinking about those words. I recalled sitting at my grandmother's house, crying like mad, longing to go back to my own home and sleep in my own bed. She would hold me and rock and softly sing "In the Sweet By-and-By." I can't hear that song to this day without thinking of her.
More specifically, I can't hear that song without thinking that that was, in that very moment, heaven. Unconditional love and acceptance wrapped up in a grandmother's embrace.
And that's when I thought Gabriel Byrne was onto something.
Hunger for the Great Light:
The "Not-Yet" Heaven
When I'm honest, the notion of heaven being like lying in my grandmother's arms is still appealing. That image has not left me and I still find a great deal of truth in it.
The problem is somewhere in the embrace of God I thought "Everyone should know and understand this!" And somewhere along the line all that well-intentioned zeal became the ardent belief (which I still maintain) that as people who have been redeemed we are to take an active role in the work of redemption.
To this day I find myself fascinated by "re" words--renewal, restoration, reconciliation, revolution, restarting, rebuilding, reusing, reducing...the list goes on forever.
In fact, this idea is so heavily ingrained in me at this very minute that I feel myself giving way to it--to the belief that we could get there--or at very least get a glimpse--of what the kingdom (of God, of heaven) could actually look like.
Add to this mix a providential "shuffle" of the old iPod while still weighing the words of Gabriel Byrne that yielded the following song.
There's a longing in Emmylou Harris' voice that is utterly transcendent. It speaks to something known only in glimpses and in dreams--a certain hopeful wistfulness that points to something still beyond, still greater.
I was soaking in the goodness of the song when I found my lips uttering the very words that challenged my musings on heaven and home.
We drink our fill and still we thirst for more
Asking if there's no heaven what is this hunger for?
There's still an ache in us. Despite our best efforts at doing the work of redemption, what we see in those most sacred moments are only a taste of what someday will be.
And a few years ago, I think I would've cursed that. I would wonder why we have to toil--why do we have to work so hard in such a painful, broken world--particularly if we'll never get there.
But if we could do it--if we could actually get there--what would we do then?
Where would the drive and the ambition, the relentlessness of a heart weighed down by injustice--where would it go?
Ecclesiastes says simply "God has placed eternity in the hearts of humanity."
Our sense of longing...of hunger...of thirst...these things are all tied to the eternity locked up in our hearts.
They are the very thing that push us to dream of another world.
They are the visions that tell our soul that it's actually possible.
They are the foolish things that shame our self-preserving "wisdom".
They are the things that push us forward--toward something greater and bigger and more true.
They are the driving force that makes the "re" possible.
They are the power that rose Jesus from the grave.
They are the grace that wrecks our lives and holds us while we rage against it.
They are the forces that call us heavenward in Christ Jesus.
They are the dreams of the Kingdom and
they
are
ours.
