What heaven was, what it could be

Heaven was always to me the afterlife alternative to hell. Now comes Justin Moore's "If Heaven Wasn't So Far Away" to speak of heaven as the afterlife itself. Indeed, what kind of being would God be if she consigned anyone to hell?

Let's be clear. I know full well that the mature Christian understanding of heaven is of unimaginably joyful wonder in the presence of the God for whom we have yearned in every yen, want and lust; and hell as the prison of one's own unfulfilled obsessive anxieties.

Until recently, I always despised the twangy, syrupy sound and simplistic lyrics of country music. I still dislike the sneaky conservative and low-church evangelical agenda of some singers. I cannot be proud of where I was born, since I had nothing to do with that; and heaven deliver us from "bahble"-based values, such as hypocrisy, self-righteousness and hateful looking down on others.

In recent times, however, rediscovering God as wonderful beyond imagination, creed or philosophical system, I find the old theological categories I discarded years ago useless. I'm not convinced by Christian moral theology, much less its teleology's heaven.

Moore provides a more palatable image when he sings of packing up the kids and driving to heaven for a day to introduce them to their grandpa. (I once woke up with precisely that thought.)

He touches markers familiar to Baby Boomers: Vietnam and those who died too young. He also evokes the intimacies of Everyman, imagining meeting with his deceased bird dog Bo (a bow to the President Obama's daughters?) to go "huntin' one more time."

It's a heaven so close you can go there for the day and drive back. A heaven I could believe in, with healing and recovery and laugh and love. Amen.

"Death Day" was 31 years ago

I remember it clearly. I was sleeping in southern California. I'd been to a farmworker camp the day before and planned to discuss my moving experience with my father when I got back to Washington. Persistent ringing. Who in hell ...? It's 6:30 am! I was awake. 

I had to go to the rectory ASAP. I was staying at a church facility in San Bernardino. Only nuns and priests would call me out of my slumber at six-effing-thirty. I was told to call home.

No answer. My wife was pregnant: had anything gone wrong? Because "wrong" was beginning to be the word rising up in my mind. Something was ... um ... askew. But it was six-effing-thirty, maybe 6:45 by then.

Called my mother-in-law. "Your father is dead."

The priest and a nun were looking at me as my face crumpled and I set down the phone. Everyone seemed to be speaking to me at once and I just ran out of the building and out to an avenue and lit a cigarette.

Nobody walks on sidewalks in California. Certainly not that early in the morning.

I returned, let me be sleepwalked to the airport and to an all-day cross-country odyssey to ... what? To confront the debris of my father's life, ended at 59 years of age and nearly 10 months. Five months older than my age today, 31 years later.

No more stasis

There's a time for everything under the heavens, wrote the much-quoted and little-known Qoheleth. This time is the time to break out of stasis, to do something about the lingering global economic toothache, to speak up one's frustrations, act on needs, think of solutions.

I've been studiously avoiding saying a word about the Occupy movement and the various bits of startling economic news, in part for professional reasons, in part because I have so very little to say that others aren't already saying.

I don't think it's too sectarian to see in all of them signs that the reign of God is "at hand." Although I borrow from the New Testament, when I say "God," I mean the unimaginably wondrous one who is the ground of all being. Of whom I can say next to nothing otherwise. Similarly, her reign is as unfathomable as herself, except that it is exceptionally different from everything as we know it and would be as much of a surprise as meeting her face to face.

I think this is the message of the Occupy movement: the order of things wants changing. To what, ask the pundits?

We are slouching toward something that reaches out to all and in some way gathers us all in the folds of God's robe and the warmth of her breast. The new arrangement calls for a world of loving, caring, respecting, life giving, all flowing from us with abandon without thought for tomorrow, for efficiency or for gain.

We just need to begin to live in it, like OWS, ready to weather weather, cops, anything, all with the expectation that everyone will be provided for and fed.