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SERMONS Mark Burrows — 7/10/07 “Thy Kingdom come . . .on earth” “. . . as it is in heaven”: it is strange that so little is said, these days, about heaven, a theme that lies at the heart of the prayer we call “The Lord’s.” At least, this seems to be so among the mainline churches, even though it remains a staple of the religious vocabulary among fundamentalist churches as the desired escape from the strongly leveraged threats of hell. But in our sort of churches, heaven – to say nothing of hell, for the moment – rarely makes an appearance, aside from the occasional hymn, the creeds if we are in places that voice these, and the wandering diet of the lectionary readings. And yet despite such regular sightings, heaven has become a theme conspicuous by its absence, seldom approached from the pulpits and swept into the silent margins of the generally unspoken. But there is something in the human imagination that refuses this silence, and poets among us seem not to have noticed our ecclesiastical dis-ease. They continue to think and write about heaven – along with those other boundaries where words fail and the imagination must finally rise to do its work. So it is in one of Czes?aw Mi?osz’s poems, “How It Should Be in Heaven,” included in a marvelous collection entitled Unattainable Earth (1986). It begins with a bold claim: How
it should be in Heaven I know, for I was there. The poem goes on, enticingly, but this first sounding of what it means to create our lives through the lure of imagination should not go unnoticed – and not least in the pulpit, since it is one of the hungers that brings many of us back week by week into the silent, waiting pews – avid to hear a word that lifts us from the unimagined ordinary, one that might lure us to abandon the flat and merely managed world. A century earlier, Emily Dickinson envisioned redemption as a life of dwelling “in Possibility,” A
fairer House than Prose – and went on to speak of the poet’s vocation as one of .
. . spreading wide [our] narrow Hands Indeed, heaven is a steadily articulated theme in Dickinson’s verse, which often yields to such “possibility” against all of the cogent rational arguments against. We hear her working this out in a poem which begins with a question: Which
is best? Heaven – By which she means, in the first line, the “heaven” already edging into our lives, an epiphany of the possible for those with “eyes to see” what is already among us and not defer to what may (or may not) be beyond death’s margin. Is this simply the collapsing of the transcendent into manageable terms of our present experience, an understandable enough strategy for a recluse who rarely strayed in her latter years into the public view but kept to her upstairs room and the enclosure of her garden? She goes on: . . . I cannot help esteem The “Bird
within the Hand” In another dazzling gem, she addresses the same prospect, here compressed into the economy of a single stanza: Who
has not found the Heaven – below – And, in yet another: Heaven
is so far of the Mind ‘Tis
vast – as our Capacity – She seems to be saying, with the allure of art’s invitation: don’t wait to choose until it is too late. Seize this day, in all its yet unrevealed ordinariness. Look around, and especially at what lies close to hand. Choose to inhabit your life by paying particular attention to what you can see of beauty, mercy, goodness – and offer this as a gift for others. The alternative may not be hell exactly, but it may well be experienced as an indifference to the possibilities of change and growth, for us and for others, and result in a lethargy no longer capable of living into or out of a larger imagination. For us her readers “of adequate desire,” there is still time, she is saying. It is not too late to inhabit our lives as if it they were vessels of the sacred, as if we like the children could live out of an enchantment that extends precisely to the heart of the ordinary. How might we live in the power of such “Possibility”? How might such a receptive posture open us to wonder in the face of the terrible burden of our own inhumanity, call us beyond docility in the face of fear, and offer us courage to keep pointing to life against the forces of death? Our “capacity” is what lies in question, not some metaphysical geography we can neither locate nor finally prove. Heaven is still for us an imaginable world in our midst, at least for all who know as the Belle of Amherst put it in one of her exquisite two-liners: Not “Revelation” – ‘tis – that
waits, Where are we to look for heaven, then, but “on earth”? The poets keep telling us this, echoing Jesus’ words and ways. And perhaps what the Nazarene calls the kingdom of heaven may be just like this, here and now, a reality “owned by the imagination,” one which is ours to choose (or not). Given the alternative, even if “the site of it” cannot be proved, I’d say living as if it is already among us is worth the wager. For as Mi?osz puts it, .
. . how could the mind
Mark
S. Burrows
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