The passage: We give thanks to the Father, who has made us fit to share in what the saints inherit in the light. (Colossians 1:12.)
With an earthly inheritance, each additional heir shrinks everyone else’s share. In the saints’ inheritance, what each person has adds to what all the others have. Here is what Dante’s guide tells him in Purgatory:
Dove per compagnia parte si scema,
Invidia muove il mantaco a' sospiri.
Ma se l'amor della spera suprema
Torcesse 'n suso 'l desiderio vostro,
Non vi sarebbe al petto quella tema;
Che per quanto si dice piu li nostro,
Tanto possiede piu di ben ciascuno,
E piu di caritade arde in quel chiostro.
On things where sharing lessens every share,
The human bellows heave with envious sighs.
But if the loftiest love that dwelleth there
Up to the heaven of heavens your longing turn,
Then from your heart will pass this fearing care:
The oftener there the word our they discern,
The more of good doth everyone possess,
The more of love doth in that cloister burn.
Dante asks how a good that is handed out can make each receiver richer, the more receivers there are. Virgil answers:
La mente pure alle cose terrene,
Di vera luce tenebre dispicchi.
Quello 'nfinito ed ineffabil bene,
Che lassu e, cosi corre ad amore,
Com' a lucido corpo raggio viene.
Tanto si da, quanto trova d' ardore:
Si che quantunque carita si stende,
Cresce sovr' essa l' eterno valore.
E quanta gente pin lassu s' intende,
Piu v' e da bene amare, e pin vi s' ama,
E come specchio, l' uno all' altro rende.
To earthly things, and on them only brood,
From the true light thou dost but darkness pick.
That same ineffable and infinite Good,
Which dwells up there, to Love doth run as fleet
As sunrays to bright things, for sisterhood.
It gives itself proportionate to the heat:
So that, wherever Love doth spread its reign,
The growing wealth of God makes that its seat.
And the more people that up thither strain,
The more there are to love, the more they love,
And like a mirror each doth give and gain.
So in this inheritance a person can seek his share without harming anyone; indeed, if we fail to take ours, we deprive others of part of theirs. Let us look closer at what it consists of.
I won’t insist that “the inheritance of the saints in light” can only mean possessing the light they inherit; that would strain the wording. But the phrase literally says “in the light,” which makes me more confident that Paul saw the light itself as the substance of the inheritance. Consider that God is light, that the Lord’s highest prayer for his friends was that they be one in him and his Father, and that Paul told the Ephesians “in him we live and move and have our being.” Even if Paul did not mean “light” to cover every side of the inheritance (I think he did), the idea fits his teaching. What makes existence good is that nothing stands between our life and the life it comes from. Knowing that God is our life is not enough; we need to be aware, in some vast consciousness beyond imagining, of our maker present while he keeps us alive. So the inheritance we can claim as his twice-born children, and he wants nothing more than for us to claim it, is simply the light: God himself. Among ten thousand good things, what makes any of them good except the God in them? I am not content to say that the world’s beauty merely originates in God’s will; it is his own beauty, his lovely thought, and shows what lives in him. If you could convince me that God no longer cared for the daisy but cared for something else, my interest in its beauty would vanish; the soul would be gone from it. Some flowers lead me back to God’s heart, and as his child I hope I feel, in my small way, what he felt when he brooded over them and said, “They are good,” meaning “They are what I intended.”
If we saw everything as coming from God, I am arguing, the saints’ inheritance, in whatever form, would be seen as light. All things are God’s not merely because he rules them but because they come from him. Even darkness turns to light around him once we remember he created it; there could be no darkness without light. Without God there would not even be nothing, or any idea of nothing, unless he existed and called something into being.
Even nothingness owes its name and nature to God’s reality: there is no word for what is not God, for a where without him, because such a place does not exist and could not. So I take the saints’ inheritance to be each person’s share in the Light.
But how can there be shares when everything is open to everyone?
In the heavenly kingdom a real share is not what you keep but what you give away. What is truly mine is what I have the power to give; whatever I cannot share with everyone cannot be essentially mine. In the fifth canto of the “Paradiso,” Dante sees a thousand splendours gliding toward him on the planet Mercury, crying:
Ecco chi crescera li nostri amori!
Lo, here comes one who will increase our loves!
All the light is ours. All of God is ours, even the part we cannot understand; if any of him were not ours, he would not be one God. We will never fully grasp him, even in eternity. But he is our Father, so he must think of us with all of himself, knowing us and whatever in himself we cannot know in a single thought. That is how we can claim everything and still each have a share. God’s infinity can be revealed only through endlessly different creatures, each able to wonder at, admire and love the others, so that all are joined in him and show him to each other. Each human being is a facet cut in the great diamond to which I might dare compare the Father of the man who compared his kingdom to a pearl. Every man, woman and child reveals God; even the unfinished show him still at work on his creation. I have my message from my great Lord, and you have yours. Your dog or horse tells you something of the one who cares for all his creatures. Perhaps coal, diamonds, iron, clay and gold came from his hands, but living things came from his heart, near where we came from. What my horse knows of God in its horse’s way I cannot tell, and we are at best only horsemen to horses. God’s ways go down into microscopic depths as well as up to telescopic heights, and more marvellously, since life begins in the small and the vast stars and worlds exist for the sake of lesser things. So with minds: God knows his horses and dogs as we cannot, because we are not yet fully his sons. When our sonship brings, as Paul teaches, the redemption of these lower brothers and sisters, we will understand each other better. For now the Lord of life must watch multitudes of his creatures being tortured on purpose. Offences must come, but woe to the one who causes them; the Lord may seem not to notice, but he sees and knows.
Each of us is something no one else is, and so knows something no one else does, perhaps without realizing it. As heirs in the kingdom of light, each of us should give his share to the rest. We are one family, with God as head and heart and Jesus Christ our elder brother teaching us about the Father, whom he alone knows.
Whatever is a source of joy or love, whatever is pure and strong, whatever awakens aspiration or lifts us out of selfishness, whatever is beautiful or admirable, in short whatever belongs to the light, is part of the saints’ inheritance in it, however small. James says every good and perfect gift comes from above, from the Father of lights, in whom there is no change and no shadow of turning.
Children fear heaven because of the dismal pictures given them by unimaginative adults, who accept without question what other unimaginative people say about it. I see no need to make it sound appealing. If I convinced a man heaven was everything he could wish for, what would he or the truth gain? If he knows the Lord he won’t worry about heaven; if he doesn’t, heaven won’t draw him to the Lord. I would not try to persuade a weak Christian that heaven is worth going to, but that no place in space and no hour in eternity is worth anything to someone who stays as he is. I wish nobody would presume to teach little ones what they know nothing about themselves, or push them to want what they cannot love. I remember being distressed that I was not pleased at the prospect of being made a pillar in the house of God and never going out again. Those words were not spoken to little ones, and taken literally they are a blessed promise compared with the idea of going to church forever. Perhaps nobody teaches this outright, but unintended teaching is stronger than words. What boy, however much he longs to follow Christ, would choose a sermon over his glorious kite, with God himself as playmate in the blue wind that tossed it about? He might give up kite, wind and sun and die for his brothers, but surely not so they could join an everlasting prayer meeting! I rejoice that there will be no church or chapel in the high countries, nothing called religion, and no law but the perfect law of liberty. There every heartbeat says God, every throat sings eagerly with thanks, and the universe’s tears of joy pour forever from beneath God’s throne like glad waters. Where is the room for religion, when God is the heart of every thought; for law, when everything it could forbid is too foul to think of; for honesty, when love more than fills the law and a man would sooner fall into the abyss than wrong his neighbour by a hair?
Heaven will be unbroken contact with God, and the sense of being alive will itself be bliss. Real life requires conscious contact with its source, so life itself, as good as God’s own life, will be a bliss so intense that I think it needs tempering to be bearable: by the loftiest joys of fellowship with our blessed companions, by art in every form, and by countless services to those still unfinished and hard work for people who do not yet know their neighbour or their Father.
To people who care only about things and not about their souls, their truth and reality, the prospect of inheriting light has no appeal. Their comfort, a false one, is that nobody will ask them to claim it yet. Perhaps they will go on sucking things dry and missing their loveliness until they loathe the husks their false imaginations have made ugly. Loving only the body of Truth, they end up, even now, calling it a lie and moaning over life’s illusions. They lost the soul of Truth because they never loved her. What purifying fires might they have to pass through before they can even see her?
What so-called Christians imagine about the state their dead friends have entered, which they call blessedness, is bad enough to justify their bitter grief and their heathen doubt whether they will know those friends again. No wonder, since after a year or two of such a fate their friends would be unrecognizable. Nirvana is grand beside their heaven. The early Christians sometimes pestered Paul with a foolish question whose answer still troubles us, but did any of them doubt he would find his friends again? This is unbelief in another shape: they say God is love, yet cannot quite believe he does not make the love in which we are most like him a mockery or a torture. A promise of heaven would mean little to me if I could not hope to say, “I am sorry; forgive me; let what I did in anger or coldness count for nothing, in the name of God and Jesus!” Can someone not ready to pour out a heart full of regrets be an heir of the light? Saying “I was wrong; I am sorry” is the joy of a true heart, a child of the God who loves an open soul, and of anyone who hates the wrong more for having done it. Oh, the sweet winds of repentance, reconciliation and atonement that will blow from garden to garden of God in the tender twilights of his kingdom! Whatever the place is like, there will be endless atonement and growing love, and whatever the divinely human heart desires, it will not desire in vain; the light that is God, our inheritance as his children, guarantees it, for the heart that desires was made to desire. God is, so let the earth be glad, and the heaven, and the heaven of heavens! Whatever a father can do to bless his children, God will do for his, so let us expect good things from him, their father and everlasting saviour. If what I have here comes from him and is so plainly only a beginning, shouldn’t I take it as a pledge of better to come? Amid this world’s good things I have never felt quite at home or seen anything lovely or grand enough to satisfy me. Perhaps my eyes are too dim to see what he has given; but whether the fault is in the world or in me, both being incomplete, matters little: God is, and all is well. All it takes to set the world right enough for me, and no highest heaven could be right without it, is that I care for God as he cares for me; that my will and desires keep time with his music; that no thought of mine springs from myself apart from him; that my individuality has the freedom that belongs to it as born of his, in no slavery to body, ancestry, prejudice or any unknown impulse; and that I am free by obeying the law of my being, the life-giving will by which life is life and my life is myself. What springs from myself and not from God is evil, a twisting of something of his. Whatever is not of faith is sin: a stream that cuts itself off from its source and thinks it can run on without it. But light is my inheritance, through the one whose life is the light of men, to awaken in them the life of their Father in heaven. Praise to the Lord, who in himself brought forth that life!