Introduction: Heaven Begins Within You
Discovering the God who is waiting in your real life, not in a remote heaven
In his Introduction to Heaven Begins Within You: Wisdom from the Desert Fathers, Anselm Gruen writes:
Years ago the thing was to quote Zen Buddhist koans; now people are beginning to discover the wisdom of the fathers of the desert. Psychologists are taking an interest in the experiences of the early monks, in their methods of observing and dealing with thoughts and feelings. They sense that this isn’t mere talk about humans and God, that the monks’ words come from sincere self-knowledge and real experience of God.
The church today would do well to get in touch with the early sources of its spirituality. This would provide a better response to the spiritual longing of people than some moralizing theology trapped in the confines of the last two centuries. The spirituality of the early monks is mystagogical, that is, it leads one into the mystery of God and the mystery of being human. (p. 7)
What if God is not far away in a pristine heaven, wishing we would get our act together, but is waiting for us tenderly and lovingly in our failures, our wounds, and in our ugly imperfections? If God is present to all of it – without anger or fear, but with tenderness and love – what would happen if we could do the same?
The mystery of being human is both glorious and messy. We have sublime thoughts and feelings, along with arrogant and self-destructive ones. Sometimes we surprise ourselves with our courage, our generosity, or our kindness; and the next thing you know, we are beating ourselves up for being so cowardly, selfish, or rude. We can be forgiving at times, but we are just as prone to condemn or seek retribution.
At times, we reflect on our thoughts and behavior with self-loathing. “What’s wrong with me? Why do I act that way?” We vow to do better, and we sometimes ask God to help us. Still, few of us would say, “Now I’m finally in complete control.” The Apostle Paul once said, “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20), then in another letter, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do the thing I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Rom. 7:15)
What a relief it is to hear Paul say what we know and feel about ourselves.
And when someone seems to ignore us in a conversation, or someone doesn’t call or text us for what seems like a long time, all sorts of thoughts can arise. “I thought something was wrong in that relationship. I knew she didn’t really care for me.” And before long, we’ve given such thoughts the keys to the car, they’ve jumped in behind the wheel, and we are off living in another reality. “I knew she thought I was boring. Most people do. I don’t have any friends. Some people pretend, but it’s obvious that they’d rather be with someone else.”
It doesn’t take long for us to begin believing a narrative that is utterly untrue, and people who sincerely love and care about us begin to find us inexplicably unreachable.
These are just a few of the dynamics that the Desert Fathers of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th centuries sought to understand and address. And what they found was that thinking that God is far away in a pristine heaven, waiting for us to get our act together is one of the ways we distance ourselves from the true God who is closer to us than we are to ourselves.
In pondering of the insights of the desert monastics, we discover that these early Christian ascetics were insistent about not being judgmental of others, and a hallmark of their spirituality was their gentleness. They had experienced the humbling reality that God was lovingly waiting for them in their wounds and failures.
As we will see in the first chapter of Gruen’s book, Heaven Begins Within You, the spirituality of the desert fathers is not a remote spirituality from on high but “a spirituality from below.” Knowing ourselves is the first step in knowing God. And when we know God’s tender and loving presence, even in (perhaps especially in) those parts of ourselves that tend to evoke shame or embarrassment, that is when we might begin to soften, to sense that we are becoming a bit gentler, as God is gentle, and perhaps we begin to love and forgive a bit more, as the One who loves and forgives us.
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