The Many Rooms

The picture I keep seeing

I keep seeing a picture of heaven, and I don't trust it yet. Here it is, only lightly cleaned.

Heaven, the afterlife, has these hierarchies in it. The top of the hierarchy is God's throne, the Father, with the Son. Surrounding them are all these angels and saints. I can't imagine everyone is allowed to be as close to God as Moses, for example. Even Moses was blinded, wasn't he? I feel it relates to forgiveness, and to your heart's pureness, and to love. Some Christians seem less forgiving than others, but all may be accepted into heaven. I just wonder if there are different rooms for them. I don't think everyone is allowed to hang out with the angels and saints. I feel some people would force them all to exercise grace, where some people may be able to sit with them.

Several questions are folded in there. Was Moses blinded? Is nearness a permission, a room with someone at the door, or a light a heart can or cannot bear? If forgiveness differs among people who are all received, what does the difference come to? And the moment I say "some people," have I already started handing out the rooms?

What Moses could bear

Moses was not blinded. I had collapsed two stories.

"Then Moses said, 'Now show me your glory.' And the Lord said, 'I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. But,' he said, 'you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.' Then the Lord said, 'There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.'" (Exodus 33:18–23)

There is a place near God. The nearness is covered. His hand is what makes the standing possible. Moses sees the back, not the face. I don't read the covering as God being shy of him. Glory is more than a creature can take in one standing, and God knows the difference. Then Moses comes down not knowing his face is radiant. The people are afraid to come near. He calls them back, and the veil goes on, coming off only when he goes in before the Lord (Exodus 34:29–35). The one who has been near carries a brightness other people step back from. The distance, in that hour, is theirs.

Paul was the one who was blinded. On the Damascus road the light puts Saul on the ground, and when he opens his eyes he sees nothing. Three days, no food, no drink (Acts 9:3–9). That blindness is not a permanent seat. It is the start of being led by the hand. Isaiah belongs with it: "Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips… and my eyes have seen the King" (Isaiah 6:5), then the coal, then the sending. I wrote about that undoing in The God Who Kneels. Glory ruins a person on the way to giving him an errand.

Paul is also the one who reads Moses' veil. Israel could not look steadily at that face (2 Corinthians 3:7). Paul adds what Exodus does not say in the same words: the veil hid "the end of what was passing away" (2 Corinthians 3:13). Exodus says they were afraid. His reading serves an argument that the Spirit's ministry is more glorious and lasts. I want it marked as a reading. The sentence I cannot get around is the one about us:

"And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit." (2 Corinthians 3:18)

"Contemplate" may be "reflect." Past the cleft, the hope is a seeing Moses was not given that day. "We shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is" (1 John 3:2). "They will see his face" (Revelation 22:4). "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God" (Matthew 5:8). If the promise is that face, then "not as close as Moses" is already too small. Exodus 33 is a man still on the earth. The later hope is that a person can be made able. I hold that as a reading, and as a proposal. Glory is a weight, and it is not dropped all at once.

Hints that will not sit still

Once I go looking for degrees, Scripture will not leave me alone, and it will not line up into a chart.

On the night of the foot-washing Jesus says, "My Father's house has many rooms," and that he goes to prepare a place so the disciples may be where he is (John 14:2–3). Older English says "mansions," through the Latin mansiones, which in 1611 meant dwelling places, not palaces. The Greek is monai, places of remaining. Later in the chapter the same word is God making his home with the one who loves him (John 14:23). In the conversation, the saying is a promise that he is not abandoning them. I still feel "many." Wanting a ranked hotel is a want of mine, and I should call it that.

Paul tells Corinth that a builder's work on the foundation, which is Christ, will be tried by fire. "If it is burned up, the builder will suffer loss but yet will be saved—even though only as one escaping through the flames" (1 Corinthians 3:15). Gold or straw: he is talking about how a church is built. A class list of souls is a step past the paragraph. What he does hold together is the pairing I cannot ignore. Saved, and suffering loss.

"Star differs from star in splendor. So will it be with the resurrection of the dead" (1 Corinthians 15:41–42). The next line is a body sown perishable and raised imperishable. The sky is an image of continuity and of astonishment, before it is a ranking. People also hear degrees among the raised. Daniel had said the wise "will shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever" (Daniel 12:3). If that is glory, it shines by being given outward.

The minas make difference look like a charge. People expect the kingdom at once, and Jesus tells of servants set over ten cities or five (Luke 19:11–19). Another has hidden his mina in a cloth, afraid of a master he calls hard, and it is taken away. "To everyone who has, more will be given, but as for the one who has nothing, even what they have will be taken away" (Luke 19:26). I don't know how to set that beside a builder saved through the flames. The greater share, in the story, is more people to care for.

Asked who is greatest, Jesus sets a child among them. The lowly place is the greatness, and the way in (Matthew 18:1–4). The mother of James and John asks for the seats at his right and left. "You don't know what you are asking." To sit at his right or left "is not for me to grant" (Matthew 20:22–23). The other ten are indignant, so the hunger was shared. "Whoever wants to be first must be your slave—just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Matthew 20:27–28). Places have been prepared. He will not hand them out. Greatness is service.

Revelation is the scene I was copying, until it spills. Crowns laid down. A Lamb "looking as if it had been slain, standing at the center of the throne" (Revelation 4:10; 5:6). A share in that throne is promised on the pattern of his victory (Revelation 3:21). Then a multitude no one can number, "standing before the throne and before the Lamb" (Revelation 7:9). A rope between the angels and everyone else does not survive the verse. Hebrews says "you have come" already to the angels, the church, God the Judge, the spirits made perfect, and Jesus the mediator (Hebrews 12:22–24). I will not build an afterlife on a tense. That company is not a club admired from a corridor.

Forgiveness is the part I least want to drop, and it is harsher than rooms. "Without holiness no one will see the Lord" (Hebrews 12:14). "If you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins" (Matthew 6:15). The man forgiven an unpayable debt, who then chokes a fellow servant, is handed to the jailers, and Jesus says the Father will do the same to anyone who will not forgive from the heart (Matthew 18:21–35). A quieter room may be how I soften that. Of the woman at his feet he says her many sins are forgiven "as her great love has shown," and that "whoever has been forgiven little loves little" (Luke 7:47). Before this is a chart of other Christians, it runs through me.

The same denarius

Matthew puts the equal pay and the request for the best seats in one chapter. I think the order is the teaching. The men hired at dawn watch the five o'clock men receive the same denarius, and grumble that the last have been made equal to them. "I am not being unfair to you, friend. Didn't you agree to work for a denarius?… Don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money? Or are you envious because I am generous?" "So the last will be first, and the first will be last" (Matthew 20:13–16). Then a mother kneels and asks for thrones.

The complaint is about equality. The answer is about a wage already promised, and about an eye gone bad because someone else was given the same. If the denarius is the gift itself — God, the same welcome — a theory of better rooms has to survive the story, and I am not sure mine does. The wish to put the less forgiving further off can dress itself as discernment when it is the first workers' grumble.

"It is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast" (Ephesians 2:8–9). In Whose Love Is It? I had called love a "greater chance" of being allowed in, and I had to return the sentence. Odds are the language of earning. The question moved from his permission to whether I am becoming someone who wants what he gives. I don't want that chance smuggled back as a nicer room.

"There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). What this ends is Paul's actual argument: the old badges do not decide the inheritance. It is not, by itself, a report on whether every heart drinks the same depth of joy. I need it as a wall against boasting. I can also swing it like a gate and stop thinking. Both misuses are available.

If I announce better rooms, I will guess who is in them, starting with Christians who seem less forgiving than I feel today. The guess is about my morning. Justification, as I was taught it, is not a sliding scale. The Thirty-Nine Articles call "the Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory," with pardons and the invocation of saints, "a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture." The Westminster Confession receives the righteous, at death, perfected in holiness, into the highest heavens, to behold the face of God. I feel the force of both. A debt the living could shorten with money does not survive the cross. "Saved as through fire" is not a price list. In God's Grace, effort can answer a gift. It cannot make the gift owed.

So the test is plain. Difference must not become worth. A reward must not become the ground of acceptance. Nearness must not become a way for the living to rank one another and call it heaven. If the picture cannot survive those refusals, it should go.

Pictures people have made

I went looking, because I don't trust a picture only I am having, and I don't trust a tradition that has already closed it.

Dante finds Piccarda in the moon and asks if she wants a higher place. In Robert and Jean Hollander's English, love has subdued their will: they long only for what they have. "And in His will is our peace" — E 'n la sua volontade è nostra pace (Paradiso 3.85). Beatrice will not leave the spheres as addresses. Mary, Moses, and those souls share one heaven, feeling, as A. S. Kline has it, the eternal spirit "more, or less," and appearing in the moon only as a sign a mind could hold (Paradiso 4). Later they are one white rose (Paradiso 30–32). He is shown a floor plan, and then the floor plan is taken away. What remains is capacity, inside a single joy, with no envy in it.

Pseudo-Dionysius, writing in the late fifth or early sixth century and not the Dionysius of Acts, gathers Scripture's angelic names in The Celestial Hierarchy. Hierarchy, as John Parker translated him, is "a sacred order and science and operation," assimilated to God "as far as attainable," led into the light "according to capacity." Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim stand immediately around God, one equal order. What a rank receives, it passes on. He says God alone distinctly knows these orders. The poster of nine rungs is stiffer than the book. I don't take it as a map of souls. I take the phrase about capacity.

Aquinas asks whether, of those who see God's essence, one sees more perfectly. Yes. Not by possessing a better picture — the seeing is not by a picture — but by a greater power, given in the light of glory. "He will have a fuller participation of the light of glory who has more charity; because where there is the greater charity, there is the more desire; and desire in a certain degree makes the one desiring apt and prepared to receive the object desired" (Summa theologiae I, q. 12, a. 6). The following article still says seeing is not comprehending. No finite mind takes in the infinite. The same God. No private god for the advanced.

Jonathan Edwards, in "Degrees of Glory" on 2 Corinthians 9:6, says, "Every vessel may be full, and yet some may hold more than others." Then a line I did not expect, in a sermon that goes on to urge the seeking: "Those that are higher in glory will be lower in humility." Christ excels in humility as the sun excels the stars. Christ's purchase, he says, filled every vessel and did not decide its size. He also thinks God proportions the degrees to holiness, and that we ought to seek a high glory. I can take the vessels, and the humility, which turns the ladder over. The seeking I distrust. That mother was already on the same errand. To want a larger glory as a thing I could have is the taking I know.

The Great Divorce, Lewis said, is a supposal, not a report. The visitors are too thin for the grass. The guide names a great one: "Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green." Fame in that country and fame on earth "are two quite different things." People who met her, down to the boy at the back door, went home more themselves. The grumbling ghost may still have a woman inside her, or she may be "only a grumble," the mood running on like a machine. I take that as a direction I recognize, not a list of names. In "The Weight of Glory" there are no ordinary people. The one I would file in a side room is not a minor figure in a drawing of mine.

The East names the end theosis, a share in God's life. "You may participate in the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). Athanasius writes, "For He was made man that we might be made God," while spending his life refusing to call the Son a creature. I don't hear him saying we become the Creator. Palamas later distinguishes God's essence, beyond us, from his energies, the light a person can share. A Protestant caution belongs here: union, adoption, glorification, and a flinch at any wording that blurs what God is by nature. "We shall be like him" is as far as I can look. Like is not identical. It is still a sharing.

Isaac the Syrian writes, in Homily 28, "I also maintain that those who are punished in Gehenna are scourged by the scourge of love." The same love torments the one who has sinned against it, "as happens here when a friend suffers from a friend," and is joy to the one who has kept its ways. The "I also maintain" is his. I am not deciding what Gehenna is, or whether love finally empties it. The narrower observation is the one the picture was already circling. One love, different hearts, not the same experience. The kindness is what burns, when the heart is still holding the opposite.

Purgatory is the West giving that burning a time. The Catechism (1030) teaches a purification for people who die in grace, salvation not in doubt, but who are not yet able for the joy. The Reformers refused the machinery of penalties and indulgences, a debt the living could pay down, and I think they were right about the machinery. Under it is the shared intuition: received, and not yet able to bear the gift. I will not invent the duration. The communion of saints, in the creed and in Hebrews 12, is a company you come among, not a rope at a door.

What the heart can bear

What the picture was reaching for, I think, is this. Nearness may be less a seat someone hands you than a question of how much love, and how much light, a heart can bear. Charity widens sight, in Aquinas, because desire makes a person ready. The vessels are full at different sizes, and fullness is the happiness. Dante's souls feel one spirit more or less, and the lesser share is peace, because the will wants what God gives. Paul locates the increase in the Lord, by beholding. Moses is covered until what can be shown is shown. I hold that as a proposal about capacity.

Then the unforgiving person is not first shut out by the saints. If the name means anything, the saints are people in whom love has had room. To stand near a love that has dropped its debts, while I am still warming one, would hurt. I know a smaller version of it. Someone forgives freely, and the part of me that wants the offense kept alive cannot rest in the room. Their peace makes no speech. It accuses the grievance by refusing to need it. At the weight of the God who is love, that company would feel like pressure. A person would need grace extended every minute, because a life where no one is keeping score would be, to them, unlivable. The forgiven might simply sit. The difference would be in the heart meeting the light.

"Force" was the picture's word. Some people would force the saints to keep exercising grace. I know the fatigue in that, and a vanity. A heart still taking experiences other people's freedom as labor it has ordered. Their grace is not a tank I can drain, and I cannot see, from here, who the draining people are. Sometimes what I call unforgiveness is a boundary, and sometimes what I call forgiveness is a wish that the truth would stop. Fine Lines was my attempt to keep those apart. Releasing a debt is not permission for the harm to continue, and it is not trust restored on demand. The capacity I mean includes the love that will not call evil good.

In Giving or Taking, love gives itself, and lust takes, or lets itself be taken. A grievance keeps a person, and often God, on the books. A closed hand hurts when someone tries to fill it. The hand is what leaves the joy, and it may still be held. That is a direction, not a verdict. Matthew 18 may mean the jailers, not a quieter room. Lewis's grumble may thin out until almost no one is left inside it. The rooms I imagined were softer than the parable and colder than the multitude before the throne: everyone in, and some of them further off. A compromise may be a truth I lack the nerve for, or a ranking I am protecting. Both stay on the table.

Where would a capacity like that take shape? I have called the Moment God's tool to enact his will — the phrasing of The Moment itself, a theological framing, not something I measured. A debt is released in the lived minute, or released in the words and kept in the tone. Those minutes are not wages toward a larger cup. If Paul is right, a glory that comes from the Lord has already begun in them. In God's Grace I had separated worth from capacity. More room can mean more patience. It does not mean more value. If the extra room is good for anything, it is more room to serve. The place I had called higher is the place that kneels.

The one at the center

The one at the center of the throne looks as if he has been slain.

He knew the Father had given everything into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, so he washed their feet, Judas included. I still trip on so. The height is the reason for the basin. Peter refuses, which feels like reverence and is also a way of keeping charge of the mercy. "Unless I wash you, you have no part with me" (John 13:8). He keeps the titles. Teacher and Lord, rightly. The towel is what they mean. I hold that here as the same confession I tried to stay with in The God Who Kneels. It can be false, and if it is false it is false as an account of God.

Edwards saw the inversion from the side of glory, whatever I distrust in his call to seek it. Higher glory, lower humility, and Christ excelling in humility as he excels in joy. "The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve" (Matthew 20:28). If I keep the word hierarchy, the top of it washes feet. The closer you are, the lower you kneel.

If nearness is likeness to the center, the nearest people are the readiest to kneel. Someone who hoarded the view would be further from a Lord who did not spend his equality on himself. The fatigue in my picture — grace pulled, hour after hour, out of people who would rather rest — may be what nearness feels like from inside a closed hand. They can bear the meeting. Bearing it is the likeness. The question that comes back to me is whether I receive that freedom as a gift or as a service I am owed. The seats at his right and left are still not prizes he will hand out (Matthew 20:23). A share in his throne is promised "just as I was victorious" (Revelation 3:21), and his victory has the shape of a cross and a basin.

What I still don't know

I don't know if there are rooms.

The spheres, in Dante's own poem, were a way of speaking, and then he is shown a rose. Jesus says many rooms, refuses to award the seats, and tells of one denarius. Paul has differing splendor, grace without works, and a builder saved through the loss of his work. Isaac maintains that one love is joy or bitter regret. Edwards fills every vessel and then urges a congregation to seek a larger glory. These have not become one sentence I am allowed to recite. A clean map has decided more than I know.

I can see where the picture failed. It put Saul's blindness onto Moses, and missed the covering hand and the face other people could not bear. It made the saints a club. It used forgiveness to sort other Christians, when those sayings are said to the person who is praying, and to Peter, and so to me. It left the kneeling out of the top. Once the center is the one who serves, "who sits nearest" is a strange question. Nearness looks like a basin.

What still seems to be reaching for something true is the capacity. Not a slip of permission under a door. A heart enlarged by a love it did not earn, able to bear a light that would scorch the clutch of an old debt. I don't know how far that difference goes. I don't know whether death finishes the enlarging in a moment, or whether the unmerciful servant means some differences are not rooms in the house at all. The question has turned around. It is about the debts I am still holding, and about whether I could enjoy a love that will not keep them on the books.

• Where am I still keeping a debt warm that I have asked to have forgiven?
• Do I want nearness as a seat with a view, or as a love I would have to give away?
• When I imagine another Christian in a lesser room, what am I protecting?
• Could I sit among people who are not keeping score, or would I need them to keep extending grace while I hold the grievance?

If the same love is light to one heart and pain to another, what would have to be released in me before I could sit down in it?