Becoming Heaven

Over the years I’ve taught Sunday School many times, and I can tell you with certainty that there is one activity that is sure to elicit groans and rolled eyes from the kids: ask them to draw a picture of heaven. “Oh Gawwwd,” I’ve heard more than one of them complain. “Not again. Here’s the bright golden sunshine, here’s the rainbow, here are all the angels. We’ve done this a million times before.” (I learned early on to never assign this activity in my classes.)

Why do they hate it? Because it’s too facile, too simplistic, too goody-goody. And I would imagine that some of us might respond the same way. Trying to conjure up an image for heaven either descends into a hopelessly cheerful stereotype, or presents us with the maddening prospect of trying to give visual form to something that is inexpressible. Maybe we would be irritated or impatient with the very question. Is it perhaps that the notion of heaven itself seems hopelessly saccharine—naïve in the postmodern age, irrelevant to the scientific worldview, too Christian in a world of increasing religious pluralism? Does it feel as if it would be a lot easier to simply let the shimmering notions of the afterlife fade away, as relics of less evolved time? And since the notion of heaven necessarily invokes the choice between its opposite, hell, and thus also would seem to point to some kind of terrifying judgment day, doesn’t it feel that it would certainly be easier to leave behind the whole convoluted mess, and go sashaying off into a cleaner, vaguer, spiritual understanding?

Well, I’d like to suggest that we not give up on heaven quite yet. With a little help from the spiritual theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, we can come up with a new interpretation of heaven that can be very powerful for our lives. These ideas suggest that we might see heaven as a nuanced, psychological and social concept that is anything but simplistic.

I think that this concept of heaven can be applied to our family systems as well in some really powerful ways.

Basically, the idea is this: heaven starts within us. Heaven is not a place but a state of being. It is a state of being in community that is conscious, relational, dynamic, loving, compassionate and alive. This is how we are meant to live. This is how we have been designed. Swedenborg said that the purpose of creation was for human beings to form a heaven.

This is how we have been designed individually as well. Each of us has been created with the capacity to be really, fully, truly spiritually alive and healthy. It’s just as much a part of us as our DNA. The trick is, learning how to get there. And getting there is the purpose of our lives: learning how to love. Learning how to be in authentic, giving relationship with those around us. Learning how to be truly useful to the world. It’s a beautiful prospect.

But the trick is, we have to believe it for it to become real. We have to deeply, truly, authentically believe that wholeness has our name written all over it if we want to journey there. The belief has to be fully internalized into our minds first. And then slowly, bit by bit, we will start to notice changes in the people and situations around us. We will be building heaven, little by little, through our conscious choices in our lives. The only way to get there is through our real, everyday, mundane and fantastic lives.

And this is eminently applicable to families. Families are complicated systems. Oh, aren’t they ever. One individual is complicated enough, but then get three or four or five or more all growing and changing under the same household and yikes! There is all kinds of opportunity for suffering. People get hurt, people have struggles, grown-ups don’t unpack their childhood maps, and then other family members compensate in sometimes unhealthy ways, and that creates more problems. Pretty soon we can have quite a thicket of family dynamics.

I am sure that all of us want to have healthy families. I’d like to suggest that the first step to really building a healthy family is to believe that yours is fully capable of becoming one. You have the capacity within you to be a wonderfully fantastic parent. You have the resources within you to figure out loving solutions to problems, to welcome kindness and compassion into your family, to practice generosity to your community, to forgive the wounds of the past and to create joy. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that nothing bad will happen to your family. On the contrary, I’m sorry to say this, but it will. But heaven is not about perfection. Heaven is about love. Heavenly community is where struggle is taken on collectively and moved through with as much love and good spirit as possible, so that the bigger perspective is always held up—the bigger perspective being that all is held in a wider net of ultimate love.

So often, consciously and unconsciously, we carry around with us expectations of brokenness. We’ve all been wounded in one way or another, and often times our response has been to flee from that pain, and to put up a wall so that it doesn’t happen again. We start to feel like who we are is an incomplete person. And if that carries over into our family self-image, we start to feel like our family is incomplete. Maybe we wonder what is wrong with us, maybe we feel lonely and hopeless, maybe we start to feel like our family is screwed up. And if we start feeling that way, we might stop asking for help or being with other people, or we might simply avoid being present with our family members, and the whole thing gets more entrenched.

What we need to do is to shift our conception of what health is. Health—or heaven—includes the brokenness. It involves a discernment and a removal of that which does not serve our growth. A true vision of a healthy person or a heavenly community is one that has learned how to incorporate its pain and to move through it to embrace a wiser, more loving understanding of itself and others.

I know all this stuff because I’ve lived through it. I suppose that story will come out in pieces in this blog, but suffice to say for now that I am currently working on re-engineering my internal map of what my family can be. I believe now that we can be heavenly. I’m working on it these days, and being amazed at what happens when I bring out my new expectations. I’ve got great plans for us. I hope you do for your family too.

Can you believe that you are made for wholeness?

Can you believe that your family can be a slice of heaven?

I’d like to hear what happens if you try.