June 6, 2022
Welcome to many new Post Script readers this week. Thanks to Lore Wilbert, a favorite writer of mine, you’ve found your way here, and I’m grateful. (Now is the time to pre-order Lore’s wonderful new book, A Curious Faith.)
Long-time readers will know that I try to write weekly Monday letters on a variety of similar themes: on habits, on Scriptural reflections, on books, and other odds and ends. Recent readers will also know that despite how systematic and regular I try to be with these letters, I also occasionally disappear, as I have in the last several weeks. Life has been full: with grief and the readjustment of family life. Several weeks ago, we buried my mother’s husband of 28 years, and in the weeks that have followed, we’ve welcomed my mother here with us in Toronto (until we move back to the States in July) and begun helping her prepare for an uncertain future.
I must admit that the heaviness of the news last week—the horrific shooting in Uvalde—was something I mostly avoided. I saw the headlines and couldn’t bear to know much more. How could I open myself to more swallowing sadness when I was already limping through the days? Everything seems like loss right now. I was confronted with my own fragile state when, speaking on the phone with a kind care coordinator at another potential assisted living facility for my mom, she asked, How is this affecting your family? and I immediately started to cry.
I wish I had enough capacity for earnestly grieving every war, every natural disaster, every act of horrific violence, every death. I wish I could have lingered over every face of those beautiful children posted on social media and grappled earnestly with the losses their families and friends will now forever face. I wish I could have set aside my own petty hardships to enter more attentively into prayer for them. But the truth is: I couldn’t and still can’t.
But here’s one habit I continue keeping, a habit that matters for events as horrible as the murder of schoolchildren in Uvalde. It’s the habit of praying the Lord’s Prayer: with my first cup of morning coffee; with the first moments I sit at my desk; with the brief interlude at lunch; in the final waking moments of the day. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. To pray this prayer is to believe that God’s kingdom ushers in the reign and rule of peace. And somewhere in the world today, beyond the veil of the seen, peace does in fact reign and rule. We call that place heaven.
There’s lots of confusion about this word, heaven. Does it simply mean the place we go after we die? That’s what I’d certainly learned growing up. But I’ve grown far more convinced that the Bible doesn’t support this view. If it did, what would Jesus have meant by “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand?” (Matt. 4:17).
I’m more convinced by N.T. Wright’s explanation of heaven in Surprised by Hope. “Heaven, in the Bible, is not a future destiny but the other, hidden, dimension of our ordinary life—God’s dimension, if you like. God made heaven and earth; at the last he will remake both and join them together forever.” Heaven suggests the realm of God’s perfect rule, the place where he is worshipped as King. Heaven is a real place, and it really exists now. Every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we’re asking God to bring his perfect kingly rule into this broken world—a world in which a teenager can enter an elementary school with plans for bloodshed.
N.T. Wright says that Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven “remains one of the most powerful and revolutionary sentences we can ever say.” I think there’s hope in that declaration. We know our own power to be small in the face of the world’s greatest griefs, and yet we know that prayer somehow allows us to participate in the establishment of righteousness. “As I see it,” explains Wright, “the prayer was powerfully answered at the first Easter and will finally be answered fully when heaven and earth are joined in the new Jerusalem.”
We pray for God’s kingdom to come when life’s crises are as ordinary as the repetitive motions of caring for an aging parent. We pray for God’s kingdom to come when we receive the most unimaginable news. We pray for God’s kingdom to come—and we remember the miracle of Easter morning, when Mary Magdalene, when Peter, when John ran to the tomb and found it empty.