A Horizontal View

JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY urge followers to seek heavenly things, to model their lives on heavenly virtues, and to have hope in heaven. In the New Testament, heaven most often appears as the “kingdom of heaven,” God’s political and social vision for humanity, an idea that Jesus uses to criticize the Roman Empire’s oppressive domination system. Jesus’s own prayer, “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10), seeks to align earthly ethics with the divine order of God’s own dwelling place. Heaven is an intrusive reality, the ever present realm of God hovering all around, sometimes even synonymous with God, as Marcus Borg writes. The Bible says the kingdom of heaven “has come near” (Matthew 4:17), and if heaven is nearby, so is God. Heaven is here-and-now, not there-and-then.

To speak of heaven, therefore, is another way to speak of the earth. But the vision for the earth that “heaven” presents is not in keeping with the world’s violence, oppression, and injustice; rather, it is an alternate vision of peace, blessing, and abundance, the world as God intended it to be. Heaven has been depicted as far away, unattainable in this life.

If you think about it, however, heaven is not far away at all. We may walk on the ground, but the rest of our bodies move through the sky all the time—the troposphere, the layer of the atmosphere that extends upward from the earth’s surface to about 35,000 feet. The sky begins at our feet. Thus, we actually live in the heavens now, in the space in which earth and sky meet. God’s “heavenly” presence is with us now.

Some people might worry about losing a sense of the mysterious and transcendent aspects of God by making the divine presence too immanent, overly identified with the world (and sky) around us. There is a point to be made here, one even understood by the most passionate mystics. God is not completely accessible to us.

To say that God is the air we breathe in the sky that surrounds us does not negate the mystery of God. There is another location where earth and sky touch: at the horizon. Physicists talk about a “cosmic horizon,” the edge of the universe past what we see. Horizons retain an aspect of mystery, even a sort of transcendence. They are never quite where they once were; they always shift. To speak of God and sky is to speak of intimacy, but it also hints at a different sort of distance as well—not like God sitting far above the world, but perhaps more like God at the horizon. Just beyond what we can see, there is more. Not God above, but God at the edge, the edge of the visible world, the horizon of mystery.

Excerpted from Grounded: Finding God in the World by Diana Butler Bass, published by HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright 2015