For as long as there have been Christian visions, art, images and metaphors, Heaven has been up in the sky among the clouds, and Hell has been below our feet somewhere down below the Earth’s crust in the mantle where there’s magma and lava… the lakes of fire and such. Really, if you look at the description of Hell in Mark’s gospel, it reads a lot like catastrophic volcanic activity.
But otherwise, in our culture, we always point up when we mean Heaven, and down when we mean Hell. Like there’s an afterlife elevator and you get on it as a spirit and the bellman either says “going up” in a pleasant tone which means you’ve been admitted to the upper floor, or laughs a classic villainous laugh and hits the down button, at which point you plummet 5000 floors into Hell.
The whole spatial up and down positioning of Heaven and Hell is a problematic thing.
I’d like to propose that we flip it over. Make Hell what is above our heads and Heaven what is beneath our feet.
Here’s why: Our culture has been created around capitalist ideas and ideologies. In order to be successful and have good things in life and help your family and give your children a good life and be a contributing member of society and all that, one has to compete and to rise up. One has to “climb the ladder of success”.
If one is climbing a ladder of success, one is moving up. Up, up, up.
Get the best grades, move up; Get into the best school, move up; marry the right partner, move up; get the best job, move up; buy the best house, move up; etc.
And with all this climbing up, what’s happening to our relationships with fellow humans? And with God? If we’re climbing up, we’re trying to get ahead of other people, to have more, do better, to gain access to the very top of our society – where the nice things are. There’s not room at the top for everyone, so it’s a competitive situation where we climb to get somewhere before others get there and we climb to have things that others won’t get because we worked harder and got them first. And our relationship with God? Well, climbing up means struggling, it means fear of falling, it means trusting only in ourselves, not in God, and if we have both hands on a ladder, we can’t really spread our arms wide to accept anything. We just hold on to the ladder to keep from losing our place in line.
But what if we saw it differently. What IF, we saw Heaven as the place beneath our feet. If all we had to do to get there was just …. Let go.
We could stop clinging to the ladder of success, stop climbing, and just spread our arms out, laugh, and fall – knowing that the only place we’d wind up is in God’s kindom. What if we believed so unwaveringly in God’s grace and love that we saw it just like gravity – and knew we couldn’t escape Heaven even if we tried to climb out. Eventually we’d get tired of trying to leave, and fall back in. What if we realized that even if we climbed all the way to the top, we’d be there alone, tired, angry, suspicious, and scared. Probably having harmed a lot of other people on the way. That doesn’t sound much like Heaven to me.
But if we let go and stop trying to hard to win, maybe that’s when we really understand what Jesus hoped for us.
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