June 13th.

• This article was written for This Week at St Mary’s – Sunday 18 June 2023.

ON EARTH as it is in heaven. Me, a scruffy infant school pupil, speaking those words for the first time. It was Mrs Barnden, or maybe Mrs Moses (I can’t remember), who taught us the Lord’s Prayer. The words of the entire prayer are burned indelibly into my brain now, some forty-four years and several thousand recitals later.

I’d always thought the line in the prayer made it our job to make earth be like heaven now. While we were still alive. Others think this line is not a now thing, more a future thing, foreseeing a time when every tear is wiped from our eyes, when there is no more death or mourning or crying or pain, when the old order of things has passed away.

I have a Christian faith. But the concept of there being a time when all earth is restored, a time where humanity will see paradise again, is one too enormous for my tiny brain to assimilate right now. The resurrection is mind blowing enough.

A promise of any such spectacular future doesn’t make living in the now easier. It doesn’t make the task of processing devastation and tragedy on our doorstep any simpler, or trying to be any kind of hope and gospel-bearer to people impacted by that devastation feel any less impossible, when the raw evidence of their eyes, ears, and senses may well lead them to say: ‘Where is God? And how can he be a loving God when there is this?’

This is Nottingham. June 13th 2023. I have no answers and words feel puny. Something happened at the heart of our city today, and it hurts so much. How glorious, how magnificent, this beautiful city is. How much stronger it is than what happened to it today, though it won’t remember it for a time.

The future doesn’t seem to matter today. Not to me. But I know in my gut that we should never stop fighting to make earth like heaven now, while real heaven waits in the wings.

Father?

On earth as it is in heaven, please.

You can start with Nottingham.

Link

• Website for St Mary’s in the Lace Market, Nottingham

Photo credit

• Flames c/o Engin_Akyurt (pixabay.com)