How to Look for Heaven in Earth

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In Plato’s Republic, Socrates tells the story of a cave and of a group of people living in it. The people are seated facing the wall of the cave; behind them, a fire blazes; between the fire and the backs of their heads, many shapes are dancing, and the light of the fire throws shadows onto the cave wall. The people in the cave gape and wonder at the shapes on the wall; they believe that these shadows are ultimate reality and that there is nothing beyond them. Of course, that is not true; not only do the shadows on the wall merely mirror the shapes casting them, but the shapes in turn simply mirror the true, real world, which exists outside the cave.

This is how Nature, God’s created order, can work. We see the beauty of Nature, and we are drawn to it; we stare at it and study it. All that is good. We should marvel at the world around us. But like the people in the cave, we can make the mistake of believing that this world—these beautiful shadows—are all there is. We can come to love the created order for itself and make the mistake of thinking the good things of the world are the best we can have.

An (equally erroneous) alternative to this mistake would be to ignore the shadows, to close our eyes against them, and to refuse to recognize that they are able to reveal truth to us—partial truth, but truth nonetheless.

This second approach presents quite a challenge for people whose occupations or passions are concerned with “this world”—art, construction, science, indeed, nearly every vocation besides church ministry. They (or their friends) often struggle to see their work as relevant and meaningful, both to God and to people around them. How are they to avoid treating their endeavors as meaningless, if this world is secondary to the next?

The two alternatives, however, need not be pitted against each other as if they were the only two options–as if we had to choose between the mistake of idolatry and that of indifference. Whenever such a binary is given to us as a choice, we are asked to either ignore God himself or ignore his works. Neither can be right.

The world God has made is neither spiritually irrelevant nor spiritually ultimate. He made us for more than we have yet seen in this world—and yet he placed us in it. So, we must explore the nature of that world. It is only by grappling with the possibility of a third way that we come to understand what it means to be human.

This third way allows us to love the created order while not making it ultimate; it puts the created order in its proper place as a theophany—a means of revealing God to us. Only when we understand creation this way can we relate to it rightly. Only then can it serve us the way it was meant to.

Nature is not, in other words, going to be shoved aside to “make room” for Heaven. Instead, it is going to be transformed; it is going to fulfill its purpose of indicating, as fully as it was created to do, what really exists.

God gave us the gift of creation for us to glimpse truths, with our young eyes that cannot yet bear the true Light. The shadows on the cave wall truly intimate something of the shapes themselves, which in turn truly reveal some dimension of the reality outside the cave. The shadows deserve our attention—but not ultimately, for there is something beyond them that deserves more than our attention: it—or he himself—deserves our deepest love.

So how are we to live in this beautiful shadow-world?

Further Up…

J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a fairy tale about this (as did George MacDonald, Andrew Lang, Hans Christian Andersen… indeed, all fairy tales are about this in their own way), called “Smith of Wootton Major.” It is a short story about a young man who is blessed, in a roundabout way, with a gift that grants him entrance into the land of Faery, where he sees and loves the created order more deeply than most of us do. As his peers grow up and abandon their childlike love of the created order for adult pursuits like wealth and power, Smith dwells with one foot in human society and one foot out—or rather, with one foot planted in the created order and one foot out. The story says:

In Faery at first [Smith] walked for the most part quietly among the lesser folk and the gentler creatures in the woods and meads of fair valleys, and by the bright waters in which at night strange stars shone and at dawn the gleaming peaks of far mountains were mirrored. Some of his briefer visits he spent looking only at one tree or one flower; but later in longer journeys he had seen things of both beauty and terror that he could not clearly remember nor report to his friends, though he knew that they dwelt deep in his heart. But some things he did not forget, and they remained in his mind as wonders and mysteries that he often recalled.

This is not some hidden pantheism of Tolkien’s; nor is it merely a pretty tale. Smith encounters “wonders and mysteries,” words we associate with the deeds of God, through God’s created order (elevated to a level of dramatic strangeness through the title “Faery”); and these encounters “dwell deep in his heart.” His encounters with the beauty of Nature change him; they transform him, and ultimately they ready him for the Great Encounter with Nature’s maker himself.

… and Further In!

This is very different from the way many Christians have been taught to think about the relationship between Heaven and Earth, between the spiritual and the physical. Many of us have learned to think of Heaven (or the spiritual) as most important, yet somehow less real than the world of the senses (or the physical). Our faith tells us that Heaven is most important, while our observations inform us that Earth is more real.

Can it really be that we should give our allegiance to what is most important (Heaven), while nonetheless we claim that something is most real (Earth)? How do we deal with this tension? Let’s explore in some detail what Scripture says about the heavenly Kingdom of God. The words used in the Bible function as hooks, if you will, to hang our imaginative impulses on as we try to embrace the reality that life does not end with death. That language is earthly, even earthy in places. It uses elements of the created order to give us a sense of what God’s Country is like. Look at the Book of Revelation, where St. John receives a highly detailed, descriptive vision about the City of God. This vision is specific enough that it is possible to do a proportionate rendering of the City; the angel gives John dimensions and architectural specifications galore. John also provides other sensory details about the heavenly City: it smells of incense (“the prayers of the saints”) and it resounds with beautiful music from harps.

God is showing us his Country using images that we can grasp: rivers, animals, cities, clouds, harps. It is clear from Scripture that Heaven is a weighty affair, heavy with reality and significance.

Of course, no one should think that in Heaven we will literally be playing harps while seated on clouds. But the “harps and clouds” language is there for a reason. The ethereal character of the imagery reminds us that we ought never be quite at home in the beautiful world we inhabit. Instead of working to make this world our ultimate home, we should strive to make ourselves at home in Heaven now. And instead of transposing Heaven into the world, we should use the world as God’s gift that is meant to remind us of Heaven itself. Sometimes Christians speak about Heaven as simply a better Earth, a place where we will get to drink beer just like we do here, except that it will be perfect beer; where we will get to gather with friends and family, except that these will be perfect gatherings. Our lack of imagination makes us think of Heaven in purely natural terms.

That is not the real story at all. To go back to Plato’s allegory of the cave, when the people in the cave begin to realize that the shadows on the wall are just that—shadows—they imagine the shapes casting the shadows as simply better shadows. That does not begin to get to the truth of the situation! The shapes themselves have a reality that the shadows do not: you can hold them and touch them. They have three dimensions, not just the two dimensions of the shadows. The shapes exist quite differently than the shadows they cast; the shadows do reveal something of the truth of the shapes (their outline, their size in relation to each other, etc.), but only in part. In Plato’s allegory, there is even another layer of reality. The shapes, in turn, manifest something of the really-real things, which exist in the world outside the cave. To say that the world outside the cave, the world of sunlight and grass and water and mountains, is essentially a world of even better shadows would be laughable!

Heaven is not simply a world of better shadows. The Earth is beautiful because it is a world that manifests God. (The term theophany means “manifestation of God.”) We dare not neglect God’s good creation as something indifferent or bad. Neither, however, should we turn the physical world into an idol: once we join God and the saints, we see God’s heavenly throne room itself. Heaven is a thing of more dimensions, more reality, and therefore more meaning than the Earth we experience today. From our experiences on Earth, we can begin to trace the outline of Heaven. But to fill in the outline, we have to wait till we’re there. Only then will our longing be stilled and will we see Beauty itself.

Christ the Light

St. Athanasius, a Church Father who combated the heresy of Arianism, famously said, “God became man so that man might become god.” This is a challenging assertion, one that might make many Christians recoil. That man might become god? How can we talk that way?

This assertion is more than poetic language. It is the whole crux of the relationship between Earth and Heaven. God created the natural world so that we, his image-bearers, could come to know him in a unique way through the creation we see all around us. But we ruined that creation; through sin, we dragged it down from its theophanous aim. Now we vacillate between ignoring creation and worshiping it—and both responses are wrong.

God was not content to leave us to flounder blindly through the beautiful world he gave us. And to restore our vision, he sent the Light of Heaven into the created world, so that we might learn the truly godly way to relate to the gift of creation he has given us.

In the person of Christ, God himself entered this world. God walked among the shadows, and taught us how to seek the realities. In Christ’s life on Earth, God participated in the activities of Earth: He talked, ate, worked, walked. He slept on a boat rocking on the waves. He loved gardens and mountains, like many of us do, for he returned to these scenes of nature throughout his ministry. He attended parties and contributed to the joy of them (think of the Wedding at Cana). We know from Christ participating in these things that they are good, that they have a genuine usefulness, that they are worthwhile. But they are not enough. They are not ultimate. They are not, in short, Heaven. And therefore they cannot give full satisfaction, for only God himself satisfies our deepest desires.

The Incarnation gives us two mysteries. The first is that through Christ, God became man. This is the culmination of the downward movement begun at Creation: God coming down and giving himself, first by making the heavens and the Earth, and then by becoming embodied in the fullness of time.

But this is not the whole story; we must not lose sight of the other mystery: there is an upward movement as well, a return of the poured-out flood of God’s creative love, in which God is drawing things back into his divine self. God is making all things—and especially humanity—divine.  This mystery was central to the early Church. The very first Christians placed great emphasis on Jesus’s divinity; we modern Christians tend to focus on his humanity. Both are wholly true; but this shift in emphasis has a ripple-effect on our whole conception of Christian living. The center of Christianity is that God is transforming us into himself: he wants us to join the triune life; that is the deepest mystery of the Incarnation, of salvation itself.

Heaven Here and Now

Let’s go back to the allegory of the cave. In the story, Socrates tells of a person who realizes that the shadows on the wall are just that: shadows. He turns to find the source, and sees behind him, backlit by crimson flames, the shapes themselves. He contemplates these for a long time, learning to understand and appreciate them; he learns to love them more than he loved the shadows, because they are closer to the truth.

If the created world is the shadow, the embodied Church is the shape: it is nearer the reality. Learning the stories and the teachings of the Church and allowing those things to shape our imaginations, our judgments, our day-to-day decisions, brings us closer to reality.

But God has given us something even better. Socrates tells of how, after learning to love the shapes, the person in the cave suddenly realizes that beyond the fire, there is a tunnel. There is a Way Out—and that means that there is a World Out, a whole different depth of reality that the shapes only indicate. So he begins to climb. The climb is difficult; he is not used to walking, as he has spent his entire life crouched before the wall of the shadows. He falls often, cutting his hands and knees on the rocks. He does not know where he is going. Behind him, he hears the mutterings of those he used to call his friends, those with whom he loved the shadows; none of them is stumbling or bleeding. But he presses on. And at last, he sees a Light: a Light like nothing he has ever even begun to imagine, a Light in which the brilliance of the flames would fade and become pale. He emerges from the cave, into the Real World, and for a long time he cannot see it because his eyes are simultaneously seared from the sun and blurred with tears.

Seeing Heaven is hard. But God gives us a way to do it. Alexander Schmemann, a well-known Orthodox theologian, writes in his classic book For the Life of the World that the liturgy is Heaven itself, is Paradise. When we step into Church, we step into Heaven. This may be hard to believe. But throughout Christian history, great saints have attested to this reality: Church is a unique glimpse of Heaven.

When Revelation talks of harps and clouds, it gives us a peek into eternal worship itself. In Revelation, Heaven is a never-ending liturgy, a never-ending chorus of praise to God. “Harps and clouds” are far from abstract or unreal. They are the very best, the most real of all things. They are the liturgical worship. And on Sunday mornings, we get a taste of this final glory, which is the worship of God.

Now, of course, harps and clouds are no more literal than heavenly beer or parties. Language about Heaven is always God accommodating himself to us. Scripture uses the best that we know here to give us a sense of what Heaven will be; it is not telling us exactly what it will be. Harps and clouds are significant and weighty metaphors, for they tell us that Beauty itself—God in Christ—is the true and final reality. He alone satisfies the aching longing that throughout our lives we have felt.

A too-earthly imagination stunts our vision of Heaven. We must have heavenly imaginations—accepting that Heaven reaches beyond our earthly existence, for only the experience of otherworldly Beauty is worth sharing on Earth.

Sacramental Creation

How, then, shall we live? How then shall we rightly and truly love the divine gifts of this Creation all around us, while also stretching our souls and our imaginations towards Heaven?

St. Paul reminds us that “our citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. 3:20; cf. Eph. 2:12), which means that our eyes must be fixed on another world. Earthly things place their rightful demands upon us. This world is not empty or worthless, something to be discarded. As Schmemann says:

Christ came not to replace “natural” matter with some “supernatural” and sacred matter, but to restore it and to fulfill it as the means of communion with God. The holy water in Baptism, the bread and wine in the Eucharist, stand for, i.e. represent the whole of creation, but creation as it will be at the end, when it will be consummated in God, when He will fill all things with Himself.

Nature is not, in other words, going to be swept aside so as to “make room” for Heaven. Instead, it is going to be transfigured. To return to our story of the cave once more, the shadows will be put in their proper relationship to reality. They will indicate, as fully as they were created to do, that which is really-real. That is why Schmemann speaks of creation “as it will be at the end, when it will be consummated in God, when He will fill all things with Himself.”

When we think of the relationship between Earth and Heaven this way, it becomes clear how we are to live. Our lives on Earth, within this creation, have a two-fold purpose: we are meant to act to manifest God’s grace in the world, and we are called to contemplate God’s love in the liturgy, so as to shape our imaginations and accustom our eyes to Heaven itself. In Plato’s allegory, the man who leaves the cave spends many days walking about on the grass, staring up at the sky, marveling, rejoicing. He has found the really-real—Heaven itself, we might say. But eventually, he feels a tug in his spirit. He remembers his companions in the cave, those who stare at the shadows and love them wrongly—love them not as shadows but as ultimate truths. And so he makes the difficult decision to go back down, to bring word of what he has seen into the cave. This way, he hopes to help his companions realize the proper meaning of the shadows and shapes, so that his companions may begin their own journey towards the Light.

The lesson for Christians is simple but paradoxical: the more we love Heaven, the richer our lives here on Earth. Only by striving to participate in another world can we rightly engage with this one. In “Smith of Wootton Major,” the most worldly character is also the laziest, the least engaged with fruitful human activity; the most otherworldly characters are the most active, whose many deeds shine out with excellence, because their hearts always seek Heaven.

We are called to seek Heaven always. That does not drive us to abandon this world; instead, it leads us to return time and time again to this world. Creation is good; it will be taken up into the divine life. We, as God’s witnesses in this world, have a calling to participate in that upward motion. We are blessed to be able to bring things from this life into the divine Life itself. True, we walk through what C.S. Lewis called “the Shadowlands.” But we need not walk in darkness. Wherever there is a shadow, there is also a light. And the heavenly Light directs us to itself, already on Earth.

Originally published at the Anselm Society.
Image by Archivio Storico Ricordi