“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
Thus opens Genesis, the first chapter of the most read book in the world. It goes on to meticulously explain, even if a little ambiguous in places, God’s creative prowess starting from the outer reaches of the universe with “darkness was upon the face of the deep” gradually narrowing down to “every living creature that moveth”. The book mentions the creation of a firmament to divide the waters above from the waters below, which in layperson terms refers to the sky that separates the waters in the clouds from waters on earth; the dry land was to bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit while the waters were gathered together to form seas; God made lights in the sky as signs for day and night, seasons and years; there were to be moving creatures that had life, winged fowls that may fly above the earth, cattle, creeping thing, and beasts, and finally man, who would have dominion over every living thing that creepeth upon the earth.
But nowhere among these details, is there a mention of God’s own abode, the heaven. The word itself is loosely sprinkled around to refer to the upward expanse as a directional marker for the creation of heavenly bodies where clouds float and birds fly, but heaven, as a location with specifications, is pointedly absent in the text. Other than His admission in the very first line about the ‘creation of heavens’, in the plural, God has pretty much remained noncommittal about its details. The highly stylized, utopic version of God on a gilded throne surrounded by angels and saints, harp-strumming cherubim and seraphim completed with cumulus clouds on steroids is not by way of God’s words but through man’s overreaching imagination.
Heaven, as a place where the immortal human souls ascend to after death, was not supported by the Hebrew scripture, but it was a concept proposed by the ancient Mesopotamian, Grecian, and Egyptian cultures. In fact, any residual whiff of this narrative that may have been unintentionally plotted in the Old Testament was challenged entirely by the time the New Testament rolled around with a young rebel from Nazareth who took the Judaen minds by storm. To Jesus, the kingdom of heaven was more of a moral attitude or a way of life per the two greatest commandments, “Love Thy God” and “Love Thy Neighbor As Thyself”.
Then where lies this heaven as intended by God?
Like the needle pointer on an analog radio, we live our lives wavering from left to right and right to left, picking up and vibrating to every stimulus, every thought, word, event, or person that comes into our lives. We react to those stimuli from a place that is influenced by our emotions, perspectives, principles, and past experiences. Eventually, we learn that underneath the chaos of static noise and distracting soundbites is a home where the needle will come to rest naturally. We realize that this place has calming ease to it, a kind of gracious inaction in relation to the cacophony of living.
And then we ask ourselves, ‘Now what?’
There is a sense of pampering in this knowledge of an effortless existence. We are tempted to simply settle in the quietude and close the curtains on life. We wonder if it is easier to cut away from the theatrics of thoughts and retreat into the proverbial mountain cave than perform the balancing act of being while living. But when the corner starts to feel comfortable, rely on the out-of-the-box Franciscan priest of the New Mexico Province to shake us out of the reverie and plop us back on stable ground.
“The task of the first half of life is to build a strong “container” or identity for one’s life. The task of the second half of life is to find the actual contents that this container was meant to hold.”
Richard Rohr, Falling Upward
According to Rohr, God gives us our soul, our deepest identity, our True Self, at our own “immaculate conception” which is our unique little bit of heaven. It is our most important calling to find our true identity hidden underneath the many faces we wear on the surface and find our true purpose buried under the many roles we undertake. If we have been buffeting through life like a tumbleweed, grace is here to show us how to fill the container, because the calm beneath the chaos is not an endpoint in the journey but the means to move forward toward our personal heaven.
God created each of us with our own slice of heaven embedded within for us to discover. He fashioned us from dust and breathed life into us. But before He saw us off, He placed His brush in our hands, so we would put our own finishing touch to His creation.
“All we can give back and all God wants from any of us is to humbly and proudly return the product that we have been given—which is ourselves! This finished product is more valuable to God than it seemingly is to us.”
Richard Rohr, Falling Upward
