What to do in Heaven

 

I did not get on the earlier flight from Canberra to Sydney as I had hoped. An earlier flight would have given me more time cushion for my layover in Sydney, which, as scheduled, left precious little time to change terminals, get through immigration, and clear security. If I missed my outgoing flight to LAX, who knows when I would eventually get back to St. Louis and my own bed. However, all earlier flights out of Canberra being full, I would just have to let it happen as it would. This left a long wait at the Canberra airport, not to mention the nagging knowledge that I really could have slept a few more hours at my brother Keats’s house. Water “down under” the bridge, I suppose. No worries. Where’s the coffee? Make it a flat white.

En route to the airport café, I stopped at a small bookstore and scouted the non-fiction walls. I had already finished this trip’s book, a fun little book called “A Blistered Kind of Love.” That book left me pining for the Pacific Crest Trail, or any trail for that matter, and reminded me that my taste just isn’t for fiction when there is so much wonder in the real world. Thus, the non-fiction shelf. I picked two books. The first, called something like “The Pig Who Sang to the Moon”, chronicled anecdotes and histories arguing that some of our classic farm animals have souls, personalities, and emotions far beyond what humans commonly know. I have always envisioned myself retiring to raise goats and sheep, so a chord was struck. However, the first chapter was about pigs, and knowing that I wasn’t quite ready to give up the bacon (which I know I would after reading about the sow’s siren song), I opted to start the second book, a small paperback called “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking.

Hawking is fascinating if not enigmatic man, challenged physically by ALS and voiceless from a trachea operation after a bout with pneumonia, but certainly epic in mind. He set out to write an equation-less book on the universe, aimed at the layman reader. I am not sure if he accomplished quite that, but his book certainly hit home for a lay physicist, something I guess I had become after years of neuron numbing in corporate America.

I started the trail into Hawking’s book. Just strides into the book, and cobwebs began blowing off my mind. A crossfire of concepts shook me raw, and I saw it all again, for the first time.

It was a peaceful tornado.

Scary Heaven

People perhaps live their lives like three childhoods in series. The first is the true childhood, the childhood of innocence and wonder. The second is the adult childhood, where wonder is too often replaced with stubborn pride and a huge set of seemingly very important goals that take up a lot of time and energy. The third childhood is perhaps the blessed childhood, the childhood of wisdom and perspective, but one following a parabolic arc back to where we started in the true childhood, with a bunch of questions and wonders. (Let us hope that we seem them still as wonders and not as frustrating territories that our life did not conquer, understandings that we did not master. Let us also hope that we graduate to the third childhood in the first place.)

I imagine that the third childhood, at some point, turns our minds to heaven. Surely the second childhood might have been spent avoiding this notion altogether – thoughtless acceptance, or perhaps disinterest – save for those moments around death of friends or family, when we at least shake hands with the question. But the first, true childhood…ah, there you first wondered about heaven, didn’t you? I know I did. I think I was interested in where God lived, so I thought about heaven a lot. I drew him in a rather uncomfortably looking chair on a puffy white cloud. He looked alarmingly like the white, bearded Jesus from all the church pictures. I probably should have drawn God a more comfortable chair.

Even as a true child, the questions of heaven come hand-in-hand with the questions of eternity, of infinity. And the obvious questions that spring from a child’s perspective, such as: How old are you in heaven? Are people married in heaven? Will our dogs and cats be there? What do you do all day? Is there food? Oh, the list goes on, and honestly, infinity seen from our human perspective is terrifying! What an utter bore, to sit there forever, being perfect and ageless and…my goodness, I’m scaring myself even considering it. It seems less like paradise and more like an infinite, flat weight to carry on my shoulders to some unknown destination, forever. Every movie is rated G and, oh, those chubby babies that fly around, where did they come from? They freak me out, man. Oops, am I allowed to think rude things like that in heaven?

Anyway, you get my drift.

The fault of this heaven-perspective is exactly that – the perspective. Of course eternity seems burdensome when we deal constantly with our absolute concept of time. And blessed be that creative and ingenius God of ours for giving us some modern day “prophets” of sorts, men like Einstein and the like, to reassure us that our concept of time is all mixed up. Time, as we know it, is not what it seems. Not at all. As silly as the notion of a flat earth will seem our notion of time someday, when we venture onward.

A Ripple in Space-Time

Hawking woke me up. When he took the equations out of the physics of the universe, he let back in the wonder, he uncovered the spirituality. Time and gravity, as they seem to us, are absolutes. So absolute is our quantification of gravity that we can precisely predict the pattern of the planets near to us, the location of stars in the night sky, how to build the Golden Gate Bridge, and the trajectories of flying objects. So absolute is our use of time that we gauge a lmost everything we do by our placement in the moving ether of time, as if our watches hold us down in a comfortable, known reality.

Let’s see, how to start this. Well, just like it makes no sense to belabor a commentary on an inspiring, wonderful song, it also makes no sense here to belabor the scientific discussion of “space-time.” Accept it, for it is true, even scientifically so, and yet without bounds of science. Let us rather listen, eyes closed, and hum along with the melody of space-time. In this melody, time is a prominent note that lingers together with other notes, such as gravity. They glance, they coincide, they bounce, but neither itself is the song, and neither is static. They exist together, yet they exist not at all! They exist like the bones in our inner ear – they simply make tangible our interpretation of the song.

In the physical world, time and gravity interact. Believe it or not (and it was proven long ago and many times since) – a clock at the top of a tower will eventually read further along than a clock at the bottom…(Bear with me. Hear the notes, interplaying). Gravity created by the massive earth pulls at time, and slows it down, or so it seems, when they get nearer. A twin living a lifetime at the top of a mountain will age faster than his brother at sea level, and should they meet again, the mountain twin will be older…(Don’t fret, just close your eyes and hum). Our earth, moving seemingly in an orbit around the sun in our concept of space, really is moving in a straight line in space-time fabric perturbed by the massive sun. From an earthling’s perspective, chained to that concept of time, it is an orbit, but from somewhere else…(Just enjoy the music of the violin, without analyzing the resonance of each string’s vibration). If the closest star other than our sun flickers into itself and collapses, it would take four years for us to see that star removed from its constellation. Other stars, much farther, would take much longer. In sense, we are absorbing the past of every star we see. (The cello, the snare, the flute, they are but consequences to the stirring of the song).

Our earth, as if some strange gift to us, has put a ripple in space-time, and allowed us to discern a few notes in the symphony, such as time and gravity. But each of these notes is created by a multitude of instruments in unison. And somebody passing in a car will hear, in coming, a higher pitch, and in leaving, a lower pitch. It all depends on perspective. Time moves, and space curves, and we sing along.

The Wind of Heaven

When I was about three, maybe four, I peeked into the workshop at 2000 North Allen Drive to see my mysterious birthday present in the works. My dad was putting something together. It was a Big Wheel, in all its red and yellow glory, with its right handbrake that sent a motoring youngster into a delicious spin, hard plastic roaring on coarse concrete. I was ecstatic. I feigned surprise when the true moment of presentation came. I remember fondly of peeking at that Big Wheel prematurely, but I sometimes wonder what my memories would be now, had I left it a surprise.

God has left a delicious surprise for us in heaven. He has left an intuitive understanding of space-time just slightly out of reach. We cannot touch it, and we can hardly fathom it. Think of the aging twin on the mountain, a proven concept, and try to make it “fit” with your perspective of time – your head will break in trying! Disrupt the concept of time at all, and your world is thrown off completely, and thankfully. We have eternity planted in our minds and hearts, but the windows to the workshop are covered up. It must be a surprise, because God knows it will be even better that way. He spreads out space-time like an infinite workshop, and waits for our birthdays, one by one. I’m guessing that He enjoys the looks on our faces when the windows and doors are flung open.

Yet we can feel the wind of heaven, can’t we? Like Moses saw the shadow of a passing God and glowed as a result, we too get our glimpse, not with our five senses, mind you, but in other ways. The songs that inspire us, the laughs that revive us, the loves that feed our hopes from our infinite memories, these all strike a chord in no sensory organ other than our very ageless soul. The dances, the tears, the joys of arms thrusting upwards and spinning visions…these are the winds of heaven, ripples from another dimension.

What to Do in Heaven

My re-awakening into space-time reconciles the concept of eternity and gives me peace in my soul. Eternity cannot be defined by what we know as time; rather, eternity must be allowed to be that which we cannot yet grasp, like the surprise in the workshop. In eternity, we finally walk in space-time as does God, and everything connects.

And there, we will need infinity, for infinity will fuel our adventures. There, we can connect with Moses in space-time, and venture off with Joshua and Caleb to see just how big those grapes really were. There, we can take aim at Goliath ourselves, to see the color of his hair and feel the weight of his sword. There, we can watch Elijah talk trash to Jezebel’s goons, teasing them about their gods taking time off to crap in the woods. (My money says Elijah cussed and laughed at those 300 losers, and good thing I’ll understand all languages in eternity, so I can know for sure!) There, we can visit other planets, and know the answers, and understand the physics like a familiar tune we have always known but never remembered. There, we can ride a dinosaur or swim with the leviathan. There I can finally run with the wolves.

There, I can hold a cat named Kijzh, or a dog named Tennessee. There, I can hear a curly-headed, freckled Beth (my mom) sing in her college choir and steal a pass on the basketball court. There, I can coax a seven-year-old called Mank (my dad) out of his chores to instead go skip rocks and walk barefoot in the creek.

There, I can walk with a teacher and hear the parables for myself. I can ask anything. I can teach perhaps. I can be there when the sky goes dark and the earth shakes, and then when the rock rolls away. Maybe I’ll see that first, the entry gate to space-time. Maybe I’ve seen it already.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. That will be a glorious beginning, as it always has been.

 

bn (May05)