Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

Author of the World's joy,
Bearer of the World's pain,
At the heart of all our distress
Let unconquerable gladness dwell.

Dag Hammarskjold

Life as a pilgrimage, heaven its goal ... Unlike those medieval journeys through space, however, the moment we put our foot on the road to heaven, we're already there!

For nearly two thousand years one hymn has opened the act at the heart of Christian worship. The Lord's Supper, Eucharist, Holy Communion, Mass; by whatever name the sacrament is known, it begins with the Sanctus. Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus chanted in Latin, Holy, Holy, Holy said or sung in a thousand modern tongues, not just here on earth but as the old prayer book puts it, "with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven."

Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts,
Heaven and earth are full of thy glory!

For decades now I've repeated these words with other Christians at least twice a week, often every day. Thousands and thousands of times as I prepare to take the Lord's Body and Blood, "Holy, Holy, Holy ... "

For a long time, though, one word of the Sanctus was impossible for me to say.

Full.

"Heaven" to me was still a theoretical realm. A place "full of thy glory" sounded suitably vague and lofty. But earth? Earth was real - containing much that was glorious, but also much ugliness and tragedy. How could earth be "full" of Gods glory?

Yet the church insists on it. "Our bounden duty," in the old prayer book's wording, is to proclaim the Sanctus "at all times, and in all places."

For years I wrestled, as Christians have through the centuries, to reconcile my dawning belief in God with the all too obvious existence of evil. I'd weigh my fledgling faith against the calamities in the daily paper - murders, floods, earthquakes, war. My faith always lost these intellectual battles.

Meanwhile, though, through the individual men and women who shared their stories with me, I was encountering a different reality. Good experienced in the very clutches of evil itself.