In "light" of this it only seems appropriate that, in this Easter season, I would write something about "light", as opposed to darkness. After all, isn't that what it's really all about?
Light, heaven, God. These all go together.
The problem I have in trying to write about these is to be able to "back up" far enough to get a sense of the big picture. With heaven it is sort of like looking at the ocean - from the shore, you see water, but you don't really have a sense of what you are looking at.
At times I think my conception of heaven is so poor that it's embarassing. It's somehow a hodge-podge of things I have seen in cartoons, sitcoms and movies. With verses like "eye has not seen, ear has not heard", I'm probably not alone in this regard.
The theology books say that the main "deal" about heaven is something called the "beatific vision". This is one of those things where I nod my head yes and say "OK" while looking around the room and thinking to myself "everyone else knows what that means except me". The fact is, I don't think anyone knows what the beatific vision is - not necessarily that there was never anyone who knew or that it is unknown to the human race, but rather that this isn't exactly the sort of thing you can take a class on somewhere. The silly thing is that most churches seem to treat this topic as if it's something that we are all well versed in - sort of like the way everyone refers to the "big questions" in life, as if we all know what those are and have put a lot of thought into them, even though I have never heard of a high school class entitled "big questions". I haven't heard of it at any college I know of either.
The theology books go on to say that the beatific vision is a "face to face" encounter with God - meaning THE GOD. But this doesn't help my mental conception very much - when I try to picture a "face to face" encounter, I pathetically imagine that God's face will be a lot bigger than mine and that He is emanating all kind of light and our noses are touching ("Yes, OK" ...nodding...everyone else in the room is getting this and I'm not getting it...).
I read a book recently that said that the "face to face" part means that we are knowing God directly, not thought any sort of intermediary, as must always be the case in this life. OK, fine, but what does it mean to "know God"? Well, for one thing, God is the source of existence itself, so if you "know God face to face", one byproduct would seem to be that you automatically know about all of creation (although "knowing" all of creation doesn't mean you know all of God). It's my understanding that, in the beatific vision, you don't even need to ask God (speech in this case serving as an intermediary), rather your mind is "plugged in" directly - like "high-speed heaven-internet". This is the "light inaccessible" to us here below.
But the part of heaven that I most wonder about is the "eternal rest". To be satisfied at last. To desire nothing more, to have no fear of future problems, to be at peace with a peace no one can take from you. It somehow seems that you must already have the beatific vision to even conceive of what this eternal rest is. The intermediaries of speech and language that we are so dependent on in this life can not capture it to allow it to be conveyed to us. If our senses in this world are so much darkness, the beatific vision in the converse - whatever is wrong here, somehow corrected there. The actions of those who have experienced beatific vision, albeit in fleeting glimpses, cast into relief a shadow of this ultimate reality for us to wonder at - St. Thomas Aquinas comes to my mind, who, after having an experience of the beatific vision, said to burn all of his writings, or St. Stephen who was stoned to death with a smile on his face. The traditional word used for Christians entering this state at the end of faithful living has been "triumph".
The "triumph of Nate Clyde" - may I live to see it.
