Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

Metaphors like these are the best - probably the only - way to get at a truth beyond language. I remember my early quandary about numbers. How could God attend individually to billions of men and women! Then a few years ago 1 heard a story that gave me my own metaphor.

I can't remember where I heard it, just that it concerned a young mother so totally wrapped up with her first child that when she became pregnant again, she was afraid she could never love the new baby as much. "There's just no room in my heart," she worried over the phone to a friend in another town.

Some months after the second child arrived, the friend came to visit. The new child was obviously the delight of her mother. "So you found room in your heart after all!"

"Not at all." The young mother shook her head. "There wasn't room, just as I knew there wouldn't be."

The friend stared at her. "Then how are you handling it?"

"I grew another heart."

Yes! I thought. That's what it was like for me with our second child! The total love I felt for newborn Donn subtracted nothing from my love for three-year-old Scott. The new member of the family occupied his own inviolable space labeled Donn's alone. And when Liz arrived a few years later, so did a special heart filled only with love for her.

Not long after hearing this story, I stopped to look at a display of religious pictures in a window on Lexington Avenue in New York. One was the familiar image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus - the kind of too-sweet, too-literal Christian art that I've always especially disliked. Pleading eyes fixed on the viewer, Jesus points to his breast where a heart burns with flames of love.

Turned off by the style, I'd never asked myself what the image stood for. But that day I found myself remembering the young mother's answer. Perhaps, I thought, what's true of physical birth is true too of each New Birth. This is the heart I grew for you alone, the garish painting seemed to say. Without you this heart would be empty.

I went inside and bought the picture.

Metaphors. Efforts to lay hold of realities too big for definition. Our friend Bill Bair told us about taking a little boy to see the ocean for the first time. Seven-year-old Ted, Bill said, stood speechless on the New Jersey shore, staring out across that limitless, ceaselessly moving panorama, a million flashes of sunlight glinting from the surface. For perhaps five minutes the boy simply gazed without a word.

"And that," Ted pronounced at last, "is just on top."

It's only the "surface" of heaven we glimpse from earth - and even this as different from anything in our experience as the dynamic ocean from the fixed land where young Ted stood marveling.

We're like the famous blind men arguing over an elephant. "A spear," said the man by the tusk. "A snake," insisted the one at the trunk. From a leg, "a tree," the tail, "a rope," the flank, "a wall," the ear, "a great leaf."

And all were right.

Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known.
                                 1 John 3:2

God can't show us heaven's side of the cloth yet, but we can seize on what he can tell us. With or without literal bodies, what kind of creatures does the Bible say we will be in the life to come? Not angels, certainly, that totally separate creation.

I have a shoe box where I keep cartoons about heaven, departed souls decked out with wings, white robes, and halos. Behind two of these comic conventions are good biblical concepts. Wings because in the next world we'll be free of physical limitations. White robes because in his Revelation, St. John saw the redeemed clad in robes "made white in the blood of the Lamb."