NO GREATER LOVE: THE CONTEMPLATION OF HEAVEN AND EARTH

 

 We know that this earth is not heaven and yet heaven is here.  In order to understand this, we need to contemplate heaven and its relationship to earth and especially our earthly activity. Theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar explains for us the relationship between heavenly contemplation and earthly activity.

 

Contemplation makes present the heavenly dimension and truth of the Christian life; action is the working out of this truth in the transient conditions of this world. Contemplation is Mary, sitting timelessly at the Lord's feet and doing "the one thing necessary", whereas the active Martha is distracted in the temporal multiplicity of tasks demanded by the love of neighbor, and has to accept the Lord's rebuke. Contemplation is John, who beholds the Logos in the beginning and perceives the eternal Word of Life by hearing, seeing and touching him; in Revelation he sees the eternal Person of the Word with snow-white head and hair, his voice like the sound of mighty waters; Peter represents action: his temporal service is that of pasturing the Shepherd's reluctant and fickle flock. The former contemplate imperishable bliss (delectatio) by way of a foretaste, the latter are engaged in transient toil, enduring its burdens by the power of the foretaste which contemplation provides. The Middle Ages so boldly made action dependent upon heavenly contemplation that, in its Christian theology, politics and art, it constructed the earthly kingdom of God as a transient image, with its lights and shadows, of the intransient realm it had glimpsed. Cathedrals are the tangible embodiment of a contemplative vision, only intelligible to us if we are prepared to enter into their contemplation of heaven.  

 

Ultimately, heaven is God’s presence, but God is here on earth in many different ways.  For example, God, and, therefore, heaven, is present in cathedrals and churches and in a different way in the Eucharist. When we pray the Lord’s prayer, we say “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” (Mt 6:10) When we do God’s will, heaven is here. We need contemplation to know God’s will for us, but we also need to do it.  Mary and John show us how to know God’s will, yet they also did it as the Lord’s prayer requires.  Scripture shows Martha and Peter doing God’s will, but they also needed to contemplate it to know what to do.  The four New Testament persons which Von Balthasar mentions all contemplated God’s Divine Revelation but also did God’s will.

 

What is the proper relationship for us between heavenly contemplation and earthly activity? Von Balthasar tells us more about this question.

 

The first epoch, the Patristic age, was so convinced that contemplation was a participation in heaven for its own sake that it was inclined to see practical, everyday Christian life almost as a preliminary stage, a tool, helping man to reach the necessary purity of heart. In the second, medieval period, primarily, it was seen as means of increasing the vessel's capacity to hold the superabundant riches of contemplation. The modern age has the opposite tendency, equally one-sided, to subordinate contemplation to action, treating it as a means of recollection, of deepening one's understanding of the mysteries of faith, and of thus making possible a more measured, enlightened and grace-filled apostolate. This attitude is expressed in the concern that every period of contemplation should issue in some particular practical decision. The correct balance is to be found between the two: it is from the contemplative vision and the great Yes to God's entire, eternal truth that a person's mission grows, with its Yes to God's concrete, personal will. In heaven, absorbed in adoration of God, Isaiah hears the word: "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?", and he replies: "Here am I! Send me" (Is 6:8). In Christianity contemplation on the plane of essence necessarily implies realization on the plane of existence, for heaven becomes earth, becomes everyday for us. But this does not mean that it becomes a function of earth. Heaven is the form which penetrates and informs everything; it can only reveal its power on a large scale if it retains the "breadth and length and height and depth" which are native to it.

 

What need was there for Isaiah to be absorbed in heavenly contemplation except that it was needed for him to know what heaven wanted from him and put it into action? Contemplation and action in accordance with God’s will cannot be separated.

 

When we are really praying to God, are we not already in heaven since heaven is simply the place where God is? Von Balthasar tells us that our being in heaven when we contemplate is real. When Ignatius pursues his seminal contemplation "before the whole court of heaven", he is not embroidering or exaggerating, nor is he translating into ordinary terms an experience which is only valid in the mystical order: he is contemplating truth in its proper context; he has come, as Paul says, "to the city of the living God".

 

Even in our general contemplation of salvation history we need to keep heaven in mind.

 

Christian contemplation only starts at the moment when the deep heavenly gold begins to glint through the turbulent surface of earthly affairs. This beckoning mystery which compels us to worship is not something put there by those who contemplate. The eyes of faith detect it immediately, whether it is the simplest parable, the most natural gesture (perhaps not even recorded) on the part of the Lord, or something as peripheral as the fact that Paul forgot his cloak in Troas-for it is bitterly cold in the Roman prison in winter, shortly before his execution, and in bringing the cloak Timothy will be bringing the love of Christ, which will warm the old man better than any blanket. Here contemplation does not strain away from the earth; the apostles and saints are not daydreamers in flight from the world, living in a fairyland divorced from reality. The Acts of the Apostles is sober, serious reality in the midst of history, but the breath of the Holy Spirit breathes through it, blowing believers where he will; they must take him seriously as the principal actor as they make their calculations and decisions. That contemplation is realistic which seeks the reality of heaven, yet not by dissolving or allegorizing away the reality of earth. It endures and holds the tension between the two, which is ultimately a christological tension.

 

The tension between heaven and earth always remains. Which of us earthly beings can also be a heavenly being?  Yet there is one who did just that, Jesus Christ.  The sharp contrast between heaven and earth is shown to Peter, James, and John when Jesus takes them up a mountain and is transfigured before them. Jesus speaks with two heavenly beings, Moses and Elijah in the presence of the “cloud” of the Holy Spirit, and the Father speaks and tells the three apostles to “listen to Him”. Right after that they see Jesus only. (Mt 17:1-8, Mk 9:2-8, Lk 9:28-36) In a brief period of time, the three apostles see the Trinity in the glory of heaven, but then they see only Jesus.  Soon after that these three apostles saw this same Jesus mocked, spat upon and crucified. They must have been puzzled by all this.  Early heretics resolved the tension by claiming that Jesus was Divine but only appeared to be human.  Modern theologians resolve the tension by saying that the heavenly exaltation of Jesus came from the early Christians. Both views are, of course, wrong. Hans Urs Von Balthasar tells us how humiliation and glory can go together in Jesus Christ. Humiliation is itself the epiphany of glory, earth is the manifestation of heaven, so that, together with Christ, our earth shall be found worthy of heaven. Nor is this a rhythmical alternation between what is "unshakable" and what is "shakable", as if even the "unshakable" were subject to a law of alternation: "This ... indicates the removal of what is shaken, as of what has been made, in order that what cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship ... "(Heb 12:27-29). We enter into his rhythm. He, the heavenly Man who is from above (1 Cor 15:47), fashions us according to his image; indeed, as the Word of God, he mysteriously becomes our food. To us who strive from earth heavenward, he thus communicates the gift of grace which strives from heaven earthward: "for it is well that the heart be strengthened by grace, not by foods, ... We have an altar from which those who serve the tent have no right to eat" (Heb 13:9-10). In the rhythm of Christ, and built up by his word, it is possible for our earthly existence's remoteness from God to be itself a form and an expression of heavenly existence; the experience of abandonment by God can be the expression of a love which is impossible on earth and can only be understood in the context of heaven.

 

Only Jesus Christ can resolve this tension by doing what no mere human could do.  Indeed, He is the One who opened the gates of heaven for us. – Jim Nugent, CFP