THINKING ABOUT ETERNITY

“God don’t never change. Always will be God.” (Blind Willie Johnson.)

“No object has ever done the experience of being touched.” (Michel Henry.)

“And I’m thinking about eternity. Some kind of ecstasy got a hold on me.” (Bruce Cockburn.)

The glory of the Incarnation is not that it somehow constitutes an ontological change in God but that it doesn’t. “God don’t never change.” God is Spirit and Spirit is not part of any duality. God isn’t half of anything. God is not an object of any kind and neither are we. If I have to define myself I am going to do so with reference to what is true about me eternally. Anything less, pre-ascension, seems like idolatry – trying to make eternal that which is by definition transitory. Anyway, about eternity …

1: Heaven isn’t in your future or mine. Heaven doesn’t begin at some point in time because it is not in time, although time might be included in it. This means that folks in the past, like Moses and them, were no further away from Heaven than are we, or closer. Why do I find this important? It reminds me that those I love but see no longer are as close to me as Heaven, and God.

2: If we are to inherit it then what is true of Heaven must be true of us. What is true of Heaven? When we recite the Creed we affirm our belief that Heaven means eternal life in the Communion of Saints. And so, if our ultimate destiny is eternal loving union and communion it must mean that every issue, controversy, and disagreement is transcended and overcome. Our divisions are merely temporary; hardly the sorts of things worth killing each other over. What is more, if Heaven is limitless then so are we. Jesus told us that the Kingdom of God is within us. It’s what Rumi meant when he wrote: “In this house is a treasure which the universe is too small to hold.” We feel intimations of our eternal vastness in our desire not only to survive but to keep growing. Unfortunately the materialistic mindset of our time expresses this as a sad, Cyclopean pursuit of expansion. We want more – more land, more money, and more power. In the world just now there seems to be no such concept as ‘big enough’. The problem is that we do not understand our spiritual nature. If we could remember who and what we truly are and live with a sense of boundlessness even here in the midst of the restraining confines of daily life knowing the peace and joy that belongs to eternal Spirit we would bring a wonderful and mysterious quality to this world. We would be a light to enlighten the people. We would manifest timelessness in time. We would be truly and profoundly free. We used to call this sort of thing salvation.

3: Contrary to motion pictures and popular misconceptions, Heaven doesn’t wait; it is complete, entire, and perfect. It has always been so. To put it another way, when we declare in Holy Communion that we join our voices “with all the company of Heaven,” we mean it; we’re serious. Let’s give Thomas Traherne the last word: “The contemplation of eternity maketh the soul immortal, whose glory it is, that it can see before and after its existence into endless spaces. Its sight is its presence.” (Centuries: 55.)