What if Heaven's not the afterlife, but rather, earth is the pre-life? This was the epiphany I had when reading Miracles by C.S. Lewis four Easters ago. This book made me consider the supernatural world at an entirely higher level. As a child, my idea of Heaven was a limited little dream world. I imagined flying over green hills, children playing, and a smiling Jesus sitting on a lawn chair. It wasn't a bad prospect, but I don't see it as worth dying a martyr's death.
What if Heaven's not the supernatural, but rather, earth is the sub-natural? This is a passage from the book that I will never forget:
Confusion between Spirit and soul (or "ghost") has here done much harm. Ghosts
must be pictured, if we are to picture them at all, as shadowy and tenuous, for
ghosts are half-men, one element abstracted from a creature that ought to have
flesh. But Spirit, if pictured at all, must be pictured in the very opposite
way. Neither God nor even the gods are "shadowy" in traditional imagination...If we must have a mental picture to symbolise Spirit, we should represent it as something heavier than matter.
A crude analogy of miracles in my mind is the idea of a 3-dimensional person strolling into a 2-dimensional world. He seems to break all the rules; he seems crazy and will probably be killed off. But he is the one with most substance; they simply can't comprehend it.
We are "real" because we are derived from the true Reality, the Existence, the I AM. The common cultural images of God simply won't do. If there is a supernatural Being like that, He must be absolutely terrifyingly unfathomable, but how many of us regard Him in that way?
Thinking about this makes me wonder about the growing belief in "spirituality," but not in God. It seems that we think that, if Nature is the only thing that exists, it must have existed forever self-sustainably, and is therefore somehow spiritual or supernatural. However, that leaves us with spiritual characterizations, but no Character, no Person.
I don't know if that will make sense to anyone reading this; I shied away from writing this post for a long while because Miracles has inspired me to ponder infinity more than any other book, and infinity is impossible to explain, only to expound upon...more...and more...and more...however, I think the expoundings of C.S. Lewis are well worth reading and re-reading.
