Lent 2009: The Lord's Prayer
Session 3: Who art in Heaven
To the deeply religious generations of the past, the word "heaven" was the symbol of joy and peace, and probably was the most meaningful word in the vocabulary of religion. To our generation of today, the word "heaven" is, I suspect a false hope. One generation has placed upon this word more weight than it can possibly bear, whereas the other generation judges the word to be incapable of bearing any weight or meaning.
With this in mind, let us attempt to explore this word "heaven," not as that word is employed in popular religious jargon, but in its biblical origins and use; and particularly to seek its meaning on the lips of Jesus of Nazareth when he taught us to pray, "Our Father, who art in heaven."
Our starting place for theological definition must always be the root of our faith, the experience of the Jewish people. Interestingly enough, in the Old Testament the primary meaning of the word "heaven" is simply "the sky," sky and heaven being almost synonymous.
"The heavens declare the glory of God," declares the psalmist (Psalm 19:1). Or again, "When I consider the heavens, the works of thy hands, what is man?" (Psalm 8:3-4). The Old Testament also speaks of God who sends forth rain from heaven (i Kings 8:35), and manna (Exodus 16:4) and dew from heaven (Genesis 27:39).
Heaven meant the sky, not some otherworldly sphere where God was to be found. For to the Old Testament Hebrew mind, God was the power experienced by people in life, in the world, and in living history.
The Hebrew was never a pantheist. God was found in life, but life did not equal God. God was found in creation, but he was more than his creation. The world was his creature. We must remember that the Bible was written in pre-Copernicus times.
It was a world, which believed literally that the created order had three tiers and that the sky was a dome over the earth, and beyond the sky was the Ultimate Power, the Source of Life and the Holy God. From the sky, the heavens, came forth the gifts of the beneficent deity and, on occasion, the acts of an angry deity in the form of natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and heat waves.
Above all, heaven, the region beyond the sky, symbolized for the Hebrew not the place where one looked for God, but the otherness of God, the transcendence of God, the fact that life had a beyond, a depth, a height, something more than that which was seen and felt and experienced in a sensory way. Only rarely in the Old Testament did being with God mean going to dwell beyond the sky.
In Hebrew thought generally, God was the omnipresent, inescapable Power that one found wherever he lived: "Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Where shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend to heaven, thou art there. If I descend into hell, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there, thy hand shall lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me (Psalm 139:73).
In the Old Testament, God was met in life. Only in the strange and mysterious story of the translation of Elijah to heaven can I find the implication that one goes beyond the skies to be with God at death.
Out of Persia, however, there came another definition of heaven; based upon a different view of reality, it was disseminated by Greek thinking and in time gained a certain dominance in Western thought. This dualistic view divided all reality into two eternal "verities," spirit and matter; and God, who was identified as spirit, was systematically deprived of contact with the material. More and more, people believed that to be in the presence of God was to be outside the physical world.
A passion to escape life came to be equated with achieving union with God. Heaven, the symbolic word, which to the Hebrew stood for the idea that the God of life was larger than life, larger than the world, larger than creation, now was thought of as an otherworldly place, the abode of God, the place to which one went when one left this earth.
When a would-be comforter tells a bereaved child not to cry for his daddy because he has gone to heaven, the primary meaning of such counsel to the child is that daddy has left God and he is alone in the world, for to be in heaven is not to be in this world. It is to be gone; to be removed, to be beyond the skies. To human experience, here and now, it is to be dead. This is the content of the word "heaven" familiar to most of us.
Our generation has been raised with this understanding, which is so different
from the biblical view, and when we pray "Our Father who art in heaven,"
we for some reason envision a God removed from life, a God in an alien
place from our world, a God shut away, otherworldly, who has retreated
to a haven called heaven.
Furthermore, the farther removed heaven came to be, the less real God
seemed. God was an explanation for the inexplicable. He filled in the
gaps of human knowledge; what we could account for in no other way, we
attributed to God. However, with each new scientific discovery the gaps
became thinner and thinner, and God more and more distant, and heaven
more and more unreal. Modern life began to lose all meaning, except the
meaning of the here and now. Thus, there is for the contemporary man or
woman no transcendence, no depth, no height, no hell, no heaven; and for
so many there is, finally, no God.
In only a few places has the word "heaven" been retained in our language in a believable way. William Wordsworth has stated: "To be young was very heaven" (The Prelude, XI). Youth meant life, love and vitality.
Poets and lovers recognize what some theologians have forgotten: that life and love are first and primarily experienced in human relationships. They seem to sense almost intuitively the biblical truth that God is first and foremost the Source of Life, the Source of Love. Hence where love is experienced and life is lived, there God is present and there heaven is real.
Heaven is the presence of God. God is in the love of his people. To be loved is to be called into being. It is to be free to love and to accept oneself without bragging on the one hand, or sympathy seeking on the other.
It is to believe that one has a self-worth to share with another and
thus one is free to give. It is in giving and receiving love and life
that God is found and life's deepest dimensions are discovered. This is
where heaven is first experienced, I believe.
Where else is the Christian God discovered but in life? Our Christian
story is of the God who so loved the world that he entered it (John 3:16).
Our Christ is the One who said, "I have come that you might have
life" (John 10:10). It is our Lord who says the mark of the Christian
is not piety, but love (John 13:35).
Wherever love is shared and life is lived, there the Source of Life is known and there God is experienced. The only place the biblical God is discovered is in the midst of life, but once we know God there, we find God in life everywhere, for to meet God in life is to know that he is bigger than life, the Creative Ground of Life, the Transcendent Dimension of Life.
He is not the God who lives in some otherworldly place called heaven, nor does he dwell among the religious trappings and pious platitudes of the church. The church celebrates God, worships God and points to God, but he is in the world. He made the world, yet the world that continues to search for God beyond the skies or in otherworldly places will know God not in our age.
Can we not then open our eyes to life? Can it not be said that when we find the love that gives us the courage to be, to love, to share, to give, to care, to live, then we will have discovered God? God is not identified with these things, but he is revealed through them.
Is it too much to suggest that to know God in life is to experience transcendence, meaning, timelessness? If this is not foreign to our life, can "heaven" be so strange a word or concept? We have known in our personal histories what it means to have our life touched with the love and joy of fulfilment that transforms our history. Is this not the meaning of heaven?
When you and I are alive to this reality, then we can pray to the God who is in heaven, for heaven will stand for any and every moment in which eternity touches time with the gift of love. Heaven will be to live in what Paul Tillich calls the "eternal now."
"Our Father who art in heaven": Source of Life and Giver of all things, you are with us in our world. Help us to see, to know, and to be alive to your love so that we may live now and forever.
© Fr Michael Fuller: March 2009