Heaven on Earth – Where the Heck Is It? by Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz, Sept. 13, 2009

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Heaven on Earth – Where the Heck Is It?

         Religious people have always gathered by water -- rivers, oceans, lakes – or baptismal fonts, if they were inside a building. The sacredness of water – shape-shifting water, which symbolizes both blessing and destructive power – crosses cultures and millennia. The Dagara people of Africa believe that water signifies the presence of the otherworldy, we might say Heaven, on this planet. In mystical Judaism, water is the mirror of heaven, and in the Judeo-Christian tradition in which our faith has roots, the original Paradise – Eden, Heaven on Earth -- was located where four rivers converged.

         So it is good that we have gathered here by the water representing our collective spiritual journeys, as we begin our yearlong consideration of Heaven on Earth in a Unitarian Universalist congregation, this one, perched near the Potomac River, on the edge of the power center of the world.

         Christopher Columbus thought he had landed in Heaven on Earth when he sailed across the ocean blue and found, not India but the West Indies. “I am firmly convinced that The Earthly Paradise lies here,” he wrote to his sponsors, Ferdinand and Isabella, and then his sailors and explorers proceeded to massacre, maim and enslave the native populations they encountered. A few decades earlier, other sea captains in search of a mythical, righteous and heavenly realm known as the “Kingdom of Prester John” sailed from Portugal to the coast of Africa. They captured the people they found there and set up the trading posts that became the infrastructure for a worldwide slave trade.

         The Puritans, forbears of our Unitarian heritage, were looking for a place to “raise Eden in the wilderness,” when they landed on the shores of Massachusetts. Their ideas of Paradise became part of our nation’s founding myth, along with their notions of salvation by individual effort. They could not have survived without help from the native people already living there, but our Puritan ancestors made war and then tried to convert their new neighbors to be “praying Indians.”

         “You tell us fine stories, and there is nothing in what you say that may not be true,” a Huron Indian told a Jesuit missionary in 1635, “but that is good for you who came across the seas. Do you not see that, as we inhabit a world so different from yours, there must be another heaven for us, and another road to reach it?”

         We know very little, I am sad to say, about those other roads.

         In the 19th century, Unitarian Henry David Thoreau took the search for paradise into the woods, and Ralph Waldo Emerson took the Puritan obsession with individual salvation into a new interior space. We could think our way into Paradise, Emerson taught – the ultimate self-reliance. According to Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, this legacy helps drive modern consumerist society, where the present is never enough. We are taught to long for a past of pristine wilderness or a better future --which we cannot define, so we let the advertising media define it for us.

         I spent my summer diving into this fat book of theology, “Saving Paradise,” by Brock and Parker, who wrote of their quest to discover the earliest images of Jesus in ancient Christianity. What they found surprised them – for the whole first millennium after his death, they found not a single image of the crucified God/man. For ten whole centuries Jesus appeared alive in images, often in blooming meadows formed at the crossing of the four rivers, amid lions lying down with lambs.

         Paradise. Heaven on earth.

         Christian communities were focused on the spirit of the living Christ, present with them, showing the way to the gates of heaven. They thought of their churches as teaching communities, places where they and all who came to them with open hearts could learn the arts of living in paradise – the “how” of walking together in the ways of love. Heaven was not something to be achieved after death, but a state to be experienced in the here and now, in loving community.

         It was not until after Christianity became a state religion, not until after it became a tool of colonization and suppression of indigenous culture, not until Pope Urban in the 11th century invented a call to Christian arms in the bloody Crusades, that what had been a pacifist, egalitarian community centered on creating heaven on earth became a warlike religion focused on sacrifice, martyrdom, and a promised heaven after death for its faithful – a heaven for them alone, and nobody else.

         It was our Universalist ancestors who imagined a way out of this painful legacy.

         In 17th century England, Universalist mystic Jane Leade wrote of church as a renewed garden of paradise, where humanity’s “beautiful diversity” could flourish. She taught that salvation was not a matter of faith, not a matter of works, but is to be “accomplished through the life-giving power of God’s love, which embraces all people.”

         On these shores, Universalists like Judith Sargent Murray and John Murray founded a church that countered the prevailing Calvinist theology that God had pre-ordained some for heaven, others for the torments of hell. The Murrays preached a God too good and loving to send God’s beloved, God’s created beings, to burn eternally.

         A generation later, Hosea Ballou argued that God was not an angry father-figure who would allow his own son to die a terrible death to atone for humanity’s sins; in fact, Ballou said, people who followed a God like that would themselves become cruel – and would, in their cruelty, create hell of an earthly paradise. Instead, God sent his son to Earth to be an example for us all of a perfectly loving being – a role model to help us create heaven on earth.

         Are you still with me? I’ve taken you on a wild romp through western salvation history, to show that our ideas that heaven is here on earth are not exactly new. Heaven as a community in the here and now, a community of wholeness, is deeply rooted in many cultures, and was embraced and practiced by our theological ancestors. Wholeness: where the entire human family, in all its singularity and multiplicity of ages, cultures, ethnicities – all – all – can belong.

         Now I’ve heard people say – people in this congregation even – that such a community is a utopian fantasy, and we’d be better off protecting the culture that we have, instead of opening our doors and hearts to the multiplicity implied in the term “Beloved Community” as it was used by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. But I say that we can live all the colors of the rainbow; in this time and in this place, we can live into the full implications of the theology of our Universalist ancestors. I say the hope that we can, the intention that we will, is what makes life worth living. We can build Heaven on Earth right here, in this church. Let it begin with us.

         This is the question before us today, and every day: Do we align ourselves with love? Or with fear? With our Universalist ancestors, who point us toward salvation by a community of wholeness? Or with our Puritan ancestors, who believed that only some of us would be spirited into heaven after death, and the rest would be left behind?

         I found evidence for the communitarian view of Heaven in a most unlikely place – post Katrina New Orleans. In “A Paradise Built in Hell,” Rebecca Solnit writes of the extraordinary communities that arose in that beautiful city in the aftermath of the floods. Are you surprised to be hearing this? –you might well be, because most of what was covered in the media was the breakdown of society that happened after the flood. And on the level of government, that was certainly true.

         How many of you have been on one of our church work trips to New Orleans? You who raised your hands, you know what I’m talking about. Because if you went to help rebuild a year, two years, even four years after the disaster occurred, you could still feel it, couldn’t you? A sense of possibility, a sense of what it means to reach out to help another human being, a sense that we are all in it together on this blue boat home.

         Solnit argues that this longing for community, this will to reach out – this is our natural state, and it is papered over, muffled, drowned by media and culture that urge us to consume, to privatize, to isolate, to accumulate and protect what we have. Solnit studied not only post Katrina New Orleans, but records of San Francisco after the 1906 quake, post 9/11 New York City, and a handful of other disasters. In every case, solidarity arose. Not charity, only, but solidarity, which erases difference and separation between the helpers and those being helped. In every case, communities of joy and justice rose from the ashes, as if people were just waiting to shuffle off the cocoon of isolation in which they had been living.

         Perhaps, Solnit suggests, it is everyday life where the real disaster lies.

         But people, we do not have to have an explosion, a flood, an earthquake, in order to be that community for one another, to be that community to our neighbors and to the world. It is here. It is now. Reach out for it. Reach out to one another. This is the heaven that we know.

• What is your vision of heaven on earth?

• What can you do today to get more of your heaven into your life?

• What can this church do today to get more of heaven into our community’s life together?

• What can this church do today to get more of heaven into our neighborhood, and into the world?

• Rita Nakashima Brock & Rebecca Ann Parker, Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire

• Parabola Magazine, Summer 2009, Water

• Rebecca Ann Parker, “Building Multigenerational Faith Community,” video of 2008 LREDA Fall Conference

• Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster

• Malidoma Patrice Some, The Healing Wisdom of Africa