For some reason my mind has wandered to Heaven today. Much has been said of Heaven and it's anti-thesis of Hell. Much has been said lately on Hell and Heaven by church-folks Rob Bell and John Piper and, well everyone. I have little time for them. It'll do me little good to focus on what they're saying even if we are in any sort of agreement, which we may or may not be. I truly don't care. Heaven will be what it is. Hell will be what it is. We can think what it is. We can hope what it will be. But that allays nothing in this life. It'll just make you a visionary.
But yet my mind wandered to the possibilities of Heaven this morning as I drove the the kids to school. Overhead the sky was painted blue, splattered with the white paint of the clouds. Billowing clouds too. Spread out in clumps like mud across the sky. But as the sun broke through them bright and yellow, it had all the effect of appearing like a split atom. Parts scattered asunder, ripped and torn by supremely fast collisions. The sky, the clouds, the sun, the detritus of something split apart.
Yesterday Isaac and I wrestled across the living room while it thundered and showered and the dark room was rent by bursts of lightning. We wrestled. He was flung from couch to couch. Flipped and torqued and hurled. He jumped and grabbed and giggled. And then, just as suddenly as the collisions we were engaging in had happened, he curled up in my arms. He closed his eyes and we just laid together on the floor. Him snuggled up against me, breathing hard, eyes closed shut, squeezing and holding me, laying eternally still on my chest. I remain unable to explain the giant-esque of that moment. Except to suppose upon you how suddenly something so perfect had been assembled out of something so completely the opposite.
Maybe these thoughts are connected. I'm no pastor. But I will say as I drove home from school, the car empty except for the blazing sunlight, my thoughts connected it somehow with Heaven. That the beautiful sky will be something I will forget. Maybe even by the end of the day. Yesterday I don't suppose I'll ever forget. Such was the crater it left upon my memory. Our lives are detritus if we think about them. Our memories yield us only bits and pieces of our experience that time has split apart and cast about. We remember bits. We remember pieces of certain moments. But we very seldom remember the whole moment. And so what if that's Heaven. What if Heaven is that which makes us uniquely human: the ability to remember. And so in Heaven we remember, with exactitude, every moment. Some experiences we could stand to forget. Others we could die again and again to be able to remember just once.
But somethings been split apart. I am sure of this. And I much think it's time that's rent us. As C.S. Lewis supposed himself, “Do fish complain of the sea for being wet?... Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time… In heaven's name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something about us that is not temporal.”
How we will be restored? When. Where. I don't know. But in certain moments, like yesterday, like this morning, I feel a shudder of that restoration. Maybe that's Heaven. Perhaps it's Hell. But today will go on. The memories dance behind me mockingly, knowing I can never experience them wholly in this life again. Heaven will be what it will be. So as I move forward in this day, I have this quote from the movie "Leaves of Grass" in my mind: "We break the world. But it's also up to us to repair it."
