A Foretaste of Glory

The philosopher, Peter Kreeft, says that touching eternity in this life is like hearing an echo. The old hymn, "Blessed Assurance," calls this "a foretaste of glory divine."

We smell the salt air of the sea, even here, far upstream in the river of time.  Whenever we touch wisdom or love, we swim in salt water.  Earth is God's beach and when we are wise and loving, we are infants splashing happily in the wavelets of 'that immortal sea.'  But when we are spiritually full grown, we will buoyantly plow its breakers of wisdom and be borne up by is bottomless depths of love.  Boredom, like pain, will be remembered only as a joke when we are drenched in joy.

                                              (Kreeft, Heaven, 1989; p. 96)

 

Do You Believe in Aliens?

The Apostle Peter describes "God's elect" as being "strangers in the world" (I P. 1:1).  The Apostle Paul says this is because our "citizenship is in heaven" (Phil. 3:20). 

Have you had the experience of "earthly alienation," a sense that this earth is not your final home?    A Puritan prayer describes it this way:

O Lord,
I live here as a fish in a vessel of water,
only enough to keep me alive,
but in heaven I shall swim in the ocean.
Here I have a little air in me to keep me breathing,
but there I shall have sweet and fresh gales;
Here I have a beam of sun to lighten my darkness,
a warm ray to keep me from freezing;
yonder I shall live in light and warmth forever.

(From Arthur Bennet's The Valley of Vision as quoted in Joni  Eareckson Tada's Heaven: Your Real Home, 99).

How Close Is Heaven?

I think most of us think of heaven as something that's "out there," i.e. both from the standpoint of distance and time, it is far off.  But I can't help wondering if that's an illusion.  Maybe heaven is much closer than we realize.

Several years ago I read a book by Karen Mains called The Fragile Curtain.  In it she told of her extended visit to a refugee camp in southeast Asia.  Several times while she was there, she felt she could almost see through "the fragile curtain" that separates this life from the next.  She talked about those times when the curtain fluttered. 

In a similar way, Celtic Christians used to speak of "thin places," those locations where the distance between heaven and earth had been "thinned out" and where a person could simply sense that God was near.  These usually became pilgrimage destinations.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning once wrote:

    Earth's crammed with heaven,
    And every common bush afire with God;
    But only he who sees takes off his shoes . . .

How close is heaven for you?

Higher Ground

Here is an excellent review of the new film "Higher Ground."  It's a movie I plan to see.  I have copied Frederica Mathewes-Green's review in its entirety from the August 26 edition of CT Entertainment:

When evangelicals hear that there's a new movie about their brand of Christianity, they get nervous.   All too often they are presented as idiots or villains. Stereotypes about narrow-mindedness, intolerance, cultish mind-control, and harsh subjugation of women abound.

Carolyn Briggs' 2002 memoir, This Dark World: A Memoir of Salvation Found and Lost, hit a number of those notes. When their church leaders counsel her not to get a college degree; when they counsel her husband to forgo a plum job opportunity because they instead need the headship of the church leaders; when she refused medication during a complicated pregnancy and scoffed at taking shelter during a tornado—well, it sounds to many evangelicals like a pretty kooky church, if not a cult. But don't expect the general public to make that distinction. CT's review of the book said it was "likely to win plaudits for its savaging of evangelical Christianity as the source of one woman's oppression, and her abandonment of that faith as a fount of liberation."

Vera Farmiga as Corinne

News that This Dark World, retitled Higher Ground, was coming to movie screens did not cause Christians to throw out the red carpet. And yet—what a surprise. This movie presents a church that is really endearing. It's a small community, and we meet them first in the 1970s as a gang of Jesus Freak hippies, gathered for a joyous, noisy river baptism. The guys are long-haired and bearded and have amiable, sweet expressions. The women wear prairie dresses and have personalities.

Corinne—the lead character played by Vera Farmiga, who also directed the film—is extra-bright but subdued, an observer. When, in an early scene, her boyfriend makes love to her in a meadow, he has an ecstatic experience while she waits it out, occasionally furrowing her brow.

The character in the film who lights up the sky is Annika. She is funny, creative, shapely, sensuous, and mischievous. Her husband describes her as loving "drama, art, and nature." She counsels Corinne not to let the sexual fires in marriage die, and imparts that she likes to draw pictures of her husband's penis. (We see Annika's bedroom later on and yes, she certainly does.) When a cop pulls the two over and tells Corinne she was exceeding the speed limit, Annika puts on a foreign accent and explains to the cop that she was having an underwear emergency and that Corinne was trying to help her.

Annika (Dagmara Dominczyk) brings much joy to Corinne's life

When the two are relaxing in a boat on a river, Annika begins to pray aloud in tongues. Whatever your opinion of that gift may be, it certainly sounds beautiful here. This is a Hollywood movie, and a woman is praying in tongues, and it is beautiful, and she is beautiful. Wonders never cease.

In fact, prayer and worship are consistently shown as inviting, peaceful, and joyous. A small group sits in a living room singing "The Sweetest Name I Know," and they're practically floating away. Any viewer would get the impression that those who don't love Jesus and pray with others are missing one of life's great joys.

Realistically enough, there are a couple of negative figures: an overbearing pastoral counselor who announces "I consider myself a prophet," and the pastor's wife, who corrects Corinne a couple of times about proper feminine behavior. But even she is well-meaning, not vile. The tension here is not between Corinne and an oppressive church, not at all. The tension is within Corinne.

Corinne often turns away from Ethan (Joshua Leonard)

She can't make her faith work the way she thinks it should. She can't pray with relaxed whole-heartedness, like Annika does. She can't grab hold of the gift of tongues, though she stands in the bathroom coaching the Holy Spirit as you would a little league batter: "Come on Holy Spirit. Come on Holy Spirit," followed by a stuttering, but self-extinguishing, blast of consonants.

She can't hold still when her husband wants to kiss her—she can't keep herself from turning her lips away at the last moment. And, when tragedy strikes, she has a hard time fighting her way through to a survivor's faith.

Bill Irwin as Pastor Bud

This is, to some extent, a movie about doubt, and that's a topic most Christians already know about. It's a commonplace around churches that "everybody has doubts," and knowing that it's common actually helps. So we support each other when we're struggling. We pray for each other. We just keep on showing up for prayer and worship, even it seems God doesn't. Sometimes, we just have to wait it out.

So Christians will empathize with Corinne's struggle. When she pours out her heart to the church she says, "I need all this to be real but I don't know how to make it real," and the camera cuts away to show us the pastor nodding. It's a blessing to see that—to have permission to admit that.

Some reviewers have compared Higher Ground to Robert Duvall's The Apostle (1997), and it is a similarly positive portrayal of Southern evangelical faith. But before you organize a congregational outing with the church bus, note that R rating. Among the tools employed by this clever and sometimes very funny movie are flashes of raunchy humor that are definitely not for children, and probably not for every adult at your church either. Apart from that, this is a movie that will be touching for anyone who ever asked Jesus into his heart, and years later felt, as Corinne confesses, "I'm still waiting for him to make himself at home." Yet, she concludes, "I won't let go until he blesses me."