Do you believe in heaven? And if so, where do you believe heaven is and what exactly is it?
As an atheist I met a man who talked about his faith in Christ. I was curious and asked him questions. Whilst he answered I saw another person’s eyes looking through his eyes. The eyes were so radiantly alive the man’s face looked like dead flesh in comparison. I thought, this man has someone living inside of him and the person inside is more alive than him!
It has been an image that has remained powerfully in my memory. On that day, I saw that matter is not impenetrable. Spirit can penetrate matter and it does. God is literally within us.
The prominent 20th century scientist and Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, stated that two ideas about God confront one another. He wrote, “A religion of the earth is being mobilised against the religion of heaven.”
Teilhard’s passion was to understand the universe from scientific discovery as well as spiritual reflection. He saw and felt nature! For him all matter glowed; his love of nature felt like a fire burning within his heart!
As a palaeontologist, he looked at the skulls of early homo sapiens and researched the development of the human brain. From his findings he came to the conclusion that just as the universe is expanding and evolving, we too, are unfinished and in a state of becoming.
Teilhard saw matter and spirit as two sides of the same coin. He felt Christ’s vibrant movement and energy of love in the heart of the universe and saw Christ’s radiant presence in all matter.
Teilhard worked on the French frontline of the first world war as a stretcher-bearer. Even in the horror of the trenches, he saw Christ’s face and figure shining with the brightness of life. Christ’s eyes looked with tenderness, compassion and pity on the atrocities of war and the soldiers caught up in it all. Teilhard even observed Christ’s gentle, absorbing eyes in the eyes of the dying soldiers.
He believed that Christ’s form is forever present in the universe and forever melting away into infinity. His passionate energy is eternally seeking to entice us towards greater unification and love as he draws us into the future and into continual rebirth and becoming.
If Christ is present in the universe in this way, where is heaven? If Christ is in us, what does ‘going to heaven’ actually mean?
