In Heaven’s Shadow

We are spiritual adolescents. Steven Millhauser remarks:

What’s fascinating about adolescence is that it’s an in‑between state. It feels a tug in two directions: back toward the completed world of childhood, from which it is permanently banished, and forward toward the unknown realm of adulthood, which it both craves and fears. Because it’s an in‑between state, adolescence is fluid, unformed, unsettled, impermanent—in a sense, it doesn’t exist at all. Fiction conventionally presents adolescence as a time of sexual awakening, but for me it feels like the very image of spirit in all its restless striving.

Substitute birth for childhood and death for adulthood and you’ve got us. Born to walk a crumbling path that ends with us crumbling to become part of that path ourselves. Birth and death are the two gates between which we labor and each one opens only once. Little wonder heaven seems unreachable at times.

What we know of perfection, what we know of beauty for that matter, is fragmentary. It shimmers like portions of the sky held captive in still waters. We reach for it and it runs through our fingers like sand. Beauty casts her shadow indiscriminately. Magnificent sunsets grace both churches and cemeteries, as David Bentley Hart insists. Gorgeous twilit hues burned just as urgently above concentration camps as they do above pastoral havens. These prodigal traces of beauty shouldn’t mislead us into thinking that death and decay form a necessary part of perfection’s landscape. Rather, they should alert us to the fact that there is a storehouse from whence beauty echoes in which death is less than a trembling reflection on still waters.

Perfection is not a thing, like a flawless tree or a perfect circle. It is a state of being. In heaven, it is my conviction that the splendor we witness will be incidental to the way in which that splendor, that flawlessness, persists without inhibiting anything else around it. It will be a harmony where difference does not engender any kind of violence or any sense of diminishment. The flawless tree, with its leaves like the scales of some magnificent creature, will do nothing to detract from the scenery around it, holding all attention hostage as beauty so often does for us. Rather, everything subsists in a state of mutual enhancement, without conflict or rivalry. That is perfection. Unity without conflict. Difference without violence.

The “restless striving” of our spiritual adolescence makes us cling to what we think is part of beauty’s very landscape. Though we abhor death and destruction, we often take delight in them as well, and we often display a peculiar nostalgia for its claws when we strain our imaginations to see a world without it. But beauty falls on all of it not because it is a part of it, but because beauty is dominant. God’s perfect beauty, God’s sovereign splendor, occupies a state of uninhibited priority even in our temporal wastelands. So radical is beauty’s dominance, that all our efforts to overcome it end in undisputed failure. No death camps with their abominate smoke can undo the glory of the skies, no iron regimes can silence the scandalous variety of the seasons, and none of our industrial nightmares are more than a whisper amid the roar of many waters. Beauty always wins. One day it will no longer have to:

And He shall wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there shall no longer be any death; there shall no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away. And He who sits on the throne said “Behold, I am making all things new.” And He said, “Write, for these words are faithful and true. (Rev 21: 4-5)”

We wait in heaven’s shadow.