On the Perpetual Strangeness of the Bible by Michael Edwards;

Author:Michael Edwards;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

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The question is not whether heaven is different from where we are, the reply to that being obvious, but rather: how should we live the idea of heaven? As a remote otherwhere, or as a world infinitively near? In special circumstances humans have had glimpses of heaven; most of us have not. But then neither have we heard valleys that “shout for joy” and “sing” (psalm 65:13), nor heard the sun and moon praising God, nor mountains and hills, nor cattle and birds. We are deaf to the continual song of the creation, which we know from Psalm 148 to be a fact; perhaps we are blind, through sin, to the unceasing presence of heaven. According to the “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” Wordsworth discovered on reaching manhood that a “glory” had passed away from the earth (line 18), whereas, in what he took to be a universal experience, “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” (line 66). Many must indeed recognize themselves in this famous line, even if they also carry in their memories the fact that they lived, as children, in a cruel world of which they were themselves a sign. That sense of an earlier “heaven” is, in any case, a realization of the adult, an effect of memory, and what one experiences is more accurately the loss of Eden, the knowledge of one’s exile. Each of us enacts, provided we are thus blessed, the Fall, here and now, the being refused a world of presence and “glory.” If we are even more blessed, by becoming Christians, we sense that what “lies about us” here and now is heaven. And not only in Wordsworth’s “Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves” (l. 188)—though the earth is indeed alive with heaven’s praise—since in any circumstances we may awaken to the presence of God and of his world. We do not need to be told that we are not in heaven; we do need to be told that, in a sense, we are.

Laying aside my book during a seemingly endless autumn afternoon in our Burgundy garden, I became aware of the quiet complexity of the leaves, branches, and twigs of the hazel tree under which I was seated, of the slow avalanche of green in the lawns and in so many other trees conspiring with the blue of the sky, and of the strength of the sun in the darkness of the shadows. By ceasing to think and absorbing what I saw, I felt the scene deepen and become prodigiously itself, more real than usual and with a different kind of reality, and time dispersed through having no hold. The very notion of being gradually changed. Everything I saw and heard simply was, at once withdrawn into itself and part of the whole, while I myself was no longer a self-consciousness, was no longer important, but simply the partaker through whom the phenomenon could be observed. The stillness of the moment seemed to admit a kind of eternity, and the presences around me, including an old stone wall, to be touched with infinity.

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