The Game

continued

"Oh, I'm not," he said. Icons, he explained, are not "art" in the Western sense. Self-expression has no more place in an icon than in Egyptian tomb crafts. The iconographer replicates as nearly as possible a hallowed image handed down from master to apprentice over the centuries. "Icons are considered 'windows into heaven.' They're unsigned, dateless."

I looked more closely at the portrait of St. Paul. Bald, dark-skinned, curly black beard falling to his chest, he held in his hand a jewel-studded book. Around his head, glowing in the dim light of the sanctuary, was a metallic gold halo.

"Icons are different in another way," Andrew went on. Western perspective, developed during the Renaissance, shows space receding away from the viewer, lines converging at a "vanishing point" in the distance. In an icon, lines converge forward, meeting outside the painting, at the place where the spectator stands.

"It's not you looking at the painting," said Andrew. "The painting looks at you."

The painting as the active agent, reaching out to include me in its celestial space. What if I've had it wrong, imagining with our heaven game that I am thinking about heaven. What if, instead, heaven is thinking about me?

The "Hound of Heaven" pursuing us, as it pursued fleeing Jacob, planting a ladder at his feet as he slept. What if ours is always the passive role? Not us projecting our desires onto eternity, but eternity striving to imprint each of us with our true identity Trying to mold each life into the unique pattern for which God created it. Preparing us for a world where all things fit together and each separate piece of the great design is essential to the whole.

Perhaps in the realm where past, present, and future are one, the design is already complete. Perhaps the Native American with his Happy Hunting Ground, the desert dweller with his garden, were not being naively literal, but catching whispers from eternity. Plato taught that everything on earth is merely a copy of its prototype in heaven. Perhaps a divine work assignment, an eternal choir, a heavenly art collection, an endless classroom, is tugging at different individuals here from a realm where these things have their full expression.

"Your soul has a curious shape," wrote C. S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain, "because it is ... a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you -- you the individual reader.... Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it."

Made for heaven. Made, through all the struggle, joy, suffering, and seeming chance of this brief earthly life, for an eternity of bliss no fantasizing can equal.