Searching for Heaven

When I started this blog, I intended to be faithful about writing in it every day or so. Well, like most good intentions, that one went by the wayside. Well, here goes again—I want to use this blog as a discipline, a spiritual discipline of sorts, writing as healing, writing as a way to focus on the holy moments in my life and in the lives of those around me.

All day my mind and heart have pondered a rather amazing book by Barbara Brown Taylor. Taylor is a a former Episcopal priest, now a college professor and a famous keynoter and guest preacher. She speaks and writes with profound eloquence; she's one of those "shining star" preachers, a celebrity in preaching circles, and rightly so. Her words often bring a lump to my throat, sometimes tears and laughter, and once in a while, the thrill of discovering something truly holy.

This morning I read the intoduction and first chapter of one of her latest works, "An Altar in the World." She speaks of how God's true home is in the world, out here where people live and breathe, drink beer and curse, call their children home from their play, build cities and bomb them into oblivion, make love and babies, live out their years. More often than not, at least the people I've accompanied on that last journey, more than anything, on their deathbeds, they wish for one more day on this earth with those they love.

Barbara Brown Taylor has done what every preacher aims for—she has disturbed my complacency; she has held up a mirror and for just a moment, I've seen the face that hides behind the veil, read thoughts that I only dare speak in private. I'm a pastor. A lot of my work happens in a church. It's a beautiful church—built of redwood, circular with an altar constructed of an enormous polished redwood trunk and a gleaming slab. The altar sits in the middle of that circle; it rests under an eight-sided peaked roof that reaches toward heaven, or where some folks say heaven is.

But sometimes I can't help wonder if people somehow think the place is magic… if I think it's magic. Is this God's home? Is God here somewhere in the dark, or did we miss the sweep of wings, angel escorts protecting God from the press of the crowd? Do we come to this place with the hope that if we pray the right prayers, sing the right songs, put our hard earned dollars in the brass plate, we'll win that lottery ticket to heaven? Or is heaven what we seek when in our last moments we yearn for one last day, one moment, of life… with its toil and tears, its heartbreak and its joy, life on this holy place we call earth, God's home filled with all the good things God spreads before us.