...heaven

No, I'm not going through the Lord's Prayer word by word, or phrase by phrase. In fact when I really get right down to it there are only a few things in it I want to change. (I'm sure Jesus is relieved that I don't really want to edit him that drastically, right?)

One bit is "heaven." Depending on how you learned the prayer, it begins "our father in heaven" or "our father, who art in heaven," or "our father, which art in heaven." That last one tickles me--after personalizing God with the term "father," the prayer then immediately depersonalizes God with the "which." Hedging your bets, maybe. I can respect that. But what about "heaven," anyway?

Nick asked me the other day if I thought there was a hell. I'm not sure where the question came from, though he did of course have that little episode with Marina and "help me hell" earlier this summer, so obviously he's thinking about it. Anyway I told him no, I don't really believe in hell. I think God loves everyone and so there's no need for a hell. This troubled Nick. "But for really really bad people, there's hell, right?" "Maybe," I said, "hell is not being sorry for being bad. Maybe it's not wanting to be loved. That might be hell."

"But if God loves everyone maybe the bad people are sorry, and then they don't have to go to hell," he responded. I love when he actually seems to be listening to me. "But if they're really really bad, then I still think they go to hell." And sometimes I wonder why he even asks me stuff, when he so clearly has his mind made up. Hmm.

But it did get me thinking. If I don't really believe in hell--certainly not as a place, though perhaps as a psychological state--then what do I think about heaven? Again, I have trouble with the "place"ness of it. I don't believe in a personal God who sits in a place up there, from which he (always he, in this version) decides who gets to come hang out with him and who doesn't. Most versions of Christianity I'm familiar with suggest, in fact, that God is omnipresent. So where, or what, is heaven?

Sometimes when I'm trying to work my way through this I end up saying something like, "Our mother and father in perfection, your name is holy." I'm not crazy about it, but it works better for me than "heaven."