But What’s It Really Like?

My favorite book growing up was Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, about a futuristic school that trained kids to command fleets in space.

The school centers around the Battle Room, a zero-gravity space where competing “armies” of students fight with laser guns and special suits. To an eight year old boy, nothing seemed cooler than what was essentially space dodgeball with guns.

Years later, Ender’s Game was made into a movie, and I got my chance to see the Battle Room in “real life”. But I didn’t. There is something magical about how I imagined it that would be lost by letting someone else’s vision into my head. How could any director do it justice?

Imagine that someone offered to show you what Heaven looks like. The place where your loved ones have gone, and where you hope to be someday.

Would you want to see it?

I don’t think that I would. Because my vision of Heaven cannot be recreated with human images. My grandparents aren’t sitting next to each other in their recliners, watching TV. They aren’t eating caviar and drinking Dom Perignon. Heaven has to be something more than that. Otherwise there’s no reason to look forward to it.

As C.S. Lewis said:

“[Christianity] is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up.”

Even Jesus won’t show us what Heaven is like. Instead, he just tells us how people react to it when they get there.

“The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, which a person finds and hides again, and out of joy goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.”

Think about that for a second. A man finds treasure buried in a field, and rather than taking it for free, he re-buries it just so he can come back and buy it. Joyfully. That tells you much more about Heaven than if Jesus had said the angels all wear cashmere robes.

Faith in general is like this. It can’t be pitched to someone like a restaurant recommendation or a new morning routine. “The mass at Saint Paul’s is incredible. Pray twice a day and the anxiety goes away.” What is the equivalent of that for a relationship with God?

There isn’t one.

I spent my early adulthood looking for ways to grow as an individual. I journaled, I read self-improvement books, I set exercise goals, and I paid attention to what I ate and how I slept. And it worked. I’m not the same person I was ten years ago.

But Christianity isn’t just one more arrow in the personal growth quiver. The Gospel isn’t about self-improvement. It’s “good news” - buried treasure waiting for us to find it if we’re willing to look.

It can’t be described. It has to be felt.

A few weeks ago, Father John told us about his mother passing away while he was in high school. He was napping on the couch when the call came, something I did hundreds of times after school. That stuck with me. It’s impossible to hear about tragedy and not think of something similar happening closer to home.

But the homily wasn’t bleak. I actually found it comforting. Death will come for me and the people I love, and likely not in the way I would choose. But something better awaits.

And the people who find it are filled with joy.

See you next week.

Emmett

Matthew 13:44-52