My parents enjoyed farming. They both grew up on farms. Both did hard work in the cotton fields of the South. I never heard them complain about that. We had a small home in a 50’s subdivision. My Dad had a garage built in the backyard. Behind the garage, he put in a garden. It could not have been more than 25’x25′. They planted tomatoes, green beans, okra, butter beans, peppers, and an occasional experiment. We had a pecan tree, a small apple tree, a plum tree, and a single row of grape vines. All of this on a lot that was probably just a third of an acre. I did small jobs in the garden, whatever I was taught and told to do. The first money I ever earned was selling small bags of vegetables door-to-door in the neighborhood. The vegetables, together with the fruit, always graced our table.
My father was an auto mechanic, but he always talked of farming. In his late 60’s, he sold his garage and retired. My parents sold the house with its tiny garden, bought a single-wide trailer and put it on some land belonging to one of my mother’s sisters. It was farmland that had been in some corner of the family for 200 years. The garden greatly expanded. I’m not sure what they did with garden’s surplus, though I suspect it went with them to Church, to extended family and anyone who dropped by, sharing the bounty with others. My Dad even bought a tractor. Conversations centered on growing things. Eventually, age caught up with my parents. A broken hip, a heart attack. They moved to a retirement home and fought the last battle of life. In 2009, my mother was laid to rest, followed by my father in 2011. I miss them to this day, though I’m always aware of their presence.
Whenever I ponder heaven, I think of my parents. Together with them, is a much larger host of family and friends, the hundreds I have known, served, and buried. Sometimes I remember them in the past. However, most often I think of them in heaven. They are not my past, but my present and my future. It raises a question for me from which the title of this article is taken. What will heaven be like? Will my mother and father still have things to grow? Or do they stand in eternity as participants in the longest Church service you ever imagined?
We have a few images of heaven: seas of glass, thrones, and lambs, elders, and seals, and a city of unimaginable proportions. Such images serve a purpose in their Scriptural context. I think they do not dictate how we are to think of paradise itself. The first paradise was one that would have been well-understood by my parents. A garden to keep with a rule or two to bear in mind. My mother was convinced that for every illness God allowed into the world, He had also placed a remedy (probably herbal) to be discovered as well. In some manner, we were still in paradise, but forgot what we once knew. She was a woman of Appalachia, her place and her time. But I think she saw a certain aspect of the world as a continuing paradise, if you dealt appropriately with the occasional snake. And despite such incursive things, the world was still a good place, all in all.
I also think that our imaginations are held captive by Church services. St. Ephrem the Syrian described paradise as a place on a mountain, a temple of sorts. But like the paradise of Genesis, it had an earthly location.
There is nothing sinful about growing a garden. There is nothing “this worldly” about plants and animals, air, rain, and soil. All of these things God has seen and declared to be “very good.” I have been in long Church services. At moments, they can be sweet beyond measure. Sometimes, they’re just long. But are we to think of heaven, our life beyond this life, to be an eternal Church service? I think the answer is yes – and no. And the no is key.
What we fail to understand, nearly always, is that the whole world and all of our life within it is a “church service.” The gathering of the Church for worship is not an escape from an otherwise non-worshipping world, but a revelation to us of the nature of all life. There is no such thing as “secular.”
All life, rightly lived, is worship. It is offering and communion with the Father through Christ by the Holy Spirit. Our modern view of the world tends to break everything into discrete moments. This is part of our modern method that specializes all things for the purpose of understanding and efficiency. It is, of course, a distortion. For nothing happens in a discrete manner – everything is always, everywhere, and all at once. The Divine Liturgy, for example, prominently includes the offering of bread and wine. But the bread and wine do not magically appear. The ages long process that is the growth of wheat and grapes, and everything that has ever gone into that process, are present in the Liturgy. We may say the same of the baking of the bread and the making of the wine. The West often includes the phrase, “the work of human hands,” to describe the bread and wine. They are, however, equally the work of the fields, the sun, the wind, the rain, indeed, of everything, everywhere, all at once.
The farmer on his tractor is a eucharistic moment, as is the baker in her kitchen. The whole of our lives participates in the Eucharist just as the Eucharist participates in the whole of our lives. “Sin” is that which does not participate in the Eucharist, and, even so, as we confess our sins and bring them into the grace-filled mercy of God, they have a “participation” that is represented in their healing and forgiveness.
When I bring this understanding to the question of heaven then, it seems clear that the “church service” that is eternal and in which we participate will be fully and truly eucharistic, but with no limits on the reach and form of that offering.
There is a sort of “over-spiritualization” that permeates our culture, perhaps because it imagines some part (the biggest part) of our lives to be “secular.” I have often pondered the report that Christ ate a piece of broiled fish after the resurrection (Lk. 24:43). We hear an expansion of this witness in Acts 10:
“Him God raised up on the third day, and showed Him openly, not to all the people, but to witnesses chosen before by God, even to us who ate and drank with Him after He arose from the dead.” (40-41)
The resurrection transcends our understanding, but it does not exclude eating and drinking. As such, it does not exclude a life of making and preparing, even as the Eucharist does not exclude them at present. I cannot describe these things in a heavenly manner, but I understand that what I imagine of heaven should be broader than it is.
The joys that my parents knew in a garden and on a farm were already eucharistic, though they did not as yet understand that. But as I eat, not just the bread and wine of the Eucharist, but every meal, always and everywhere, I am reminded to eat it eucharistically.
“…in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” (1 Thess. 5:18)
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