Who Art in Heaven, Part 1

We turn to the next words in the Our Father as we continue our deep dive into THE HEART OF CATHOLIC PRAYER.

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Our Father is not, according to Jesus, merely our Father. He is our Father “who art in heaven.” What does that mean?

Getting at the answer to that, in our present culture, is harder than you’d think, not least because heaven, says C.S. Lewis, is an acquired taste. Indeed, there are moments, Lewis notes, when he wonders whether we really desire Heaven.

I know how he feels. I grew up as a pagan. That’s not to say I grew up worshipping Apollo or painting myself with woad and running around naked in the woods (a vision to conjure with). Rather it is to say that I grew up unbaptized, almost completely unconnected with the Christian tradition except what I could glean from A Charlie Brown Christmas and the occasional glimpses of The Robe at Easter. I came away with dim impressions of something about Romans, peace on earth, violent death, and that schmaltzy 50s era portrayal of sanctity with choirs of angels and people suddenly gazing off into the distance with a look of profound awe. I knew that Christmas was Jesus’ birthday. I did not know what Easter was about until somewhere in my teens. My grasp of scripture came from one abortive attempt to read Genesis at age 13 where I started at chapter 1, plowed on through to Genesis 3, gave it up, ruffled the pages of the Bible till I found the book of Revelation (turns out it’s in the back), gave that a stab, and then closed the thing with my head spinning.

Modern day Christianity, which was only tenuously connected in my mind with “Bible stories,” was a vague amalgam of holier-than-thou hypocrites from preachy 70s sitcoms (St. Frank Burns, pray for us!), chilly Lutheran devotional art on the walls of the local rest home, sundry “born again” fellow students in high school whose awkward attempts to “witness” to me just made me feel awkward, and various encounters with scary Christians like Jack Chick, assorted TV screamers, and the drawings of Gustav Dore (Noah’s Flood and Dante in Hell: brrrrrr!). When I was four, I somehow picked up from a Paine Field AFB Vacation Bible School the notion that you shouldn’t say Jesus’ name. Once, in high school, I darkened the door of a Catholic Church when a friend asked me to come to Good Friday services. I had not one clue what was going on.

Bottom line: When I thought of “religion” I didn’t even think about it long enough to dismiss it. It just seemed unconnected to me. While I suppose I hoped vaguely for something pleasant to happen in an afterlife rather than, say, discovering that H.P. Lovecraft was right, I didn’t give it much thought one way or the other. “Christian Heaven” seemed mostly boring, consisting of white clouds, harps, and singing dull “Church songs” you heard being led by school marms in old Westerns. Mostly I felt (and when left to my natural inclinations unenlightened by revelation still feel) a foreboding that at death you simply go out like a light and that nothing happens after your final agonies. My normal natural mood is to veer toward the general suspicion that death, rather than life, is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Not that I have ever been an atheist. Atheists have always struck me as a sort of photo negative of “Scary Christians” like Chick. They have a certitude and a diagrammatic worldview I lack. They are way angry as a rule, arguing in ways which typically say “There is no God” but which feel like “Hell yes, there’s a God and I’m hissing mad at him!”

No, it’s always been death, not life, that seemed idiotic to me. I can easily believe in a meaningful life and being a pagan only whetted that inescapable sense of a world bursting at the seams with hidden meaning. As a pagan, I had a reverence for the Unseen and Unknown. That included God. I had the weird impression growing up that everything I could see around me would, if I could just get around behind it, reveal an entire unseen world. It was as though all creation was a sort of stage set and on the other side of it was Reality. I remember listening to a Jethro Tull album in the late 70s and feeling the dim sense that the blasphemies and insults Ian Anderson directed against God were not so much wrong as dangerous. Don’t irritate The Power Behind Things.

Of course, being Unknown, this Unseen Power was also scary and not a God of Love as Christians understood him. The Power behind things might be something more like a Fate than a God: a capricious (and should it turn its gaze on me, malignant) Will or Presence that was setting the universe up as a vast practical joke to be sprung on me when I finally let my guard down. Oddly, I didn’t consider that a blasphemous thought. I thought it was a cautious (and dreadful) thought, the thought of a helpless victim and not of a rebellious sinner. I hoped that the Power wasn’t like that. But something in my Irish makeup tended toward such pessimism and flirtation with despair.

I give you all this boring autobiography because it is the interior life of millions of people around the world who likewise live in a pagan universe haunted by the Unknown God. It is precisely to such minds that the stunning revelation that Our Father is in Heaven is addressed, with the incredible prospect that, so far from living in a horror movie where the hero wakes from the nightmare and finds that his waking reality is worse, Faith teaches us that every fairy tale hope that has ever stirred our hearts might actually, really be realized and that, quite literally, all our wishes might come true.

Of which more tomorrow.