Some News From a Far Country

A few Tuesdays ago, I made the mistake of leaving my hiking boots at a priest friend’s rectory after we returned from the trail. He notified me of my forgetfulness and announced that the boots would be held for ransom. The payment? His choice from a small collection of books that had recently arrived for me in the mail. And he wisely chose Sweet and Blessed Country by John Saward, a beautiful study of heaven, many excerpts from which my priest friend has shared with me over the past few weeks. So, even though I have not read it, I still know enough about it – and about the author as well – to recommend it to you. Here is an editorial review of the book:

In Sweet and Blessed Country John Saward takes an altarpiece from fifteenth-century Provence as his starting-point for a theological exposition of the Christian hope for Heaven. The altarpiece, Enguerrand Quarton's Coronation of the Virgin, was painted for a Carthusian monastery, and so it is monastic theologians, and principally Denys the Carthusian, who guide Saward in his exploration of that 'sweet and blessed country' in which the angels and saints contemplate the face of God. John Saward's book breaks new ground not only in content but also in style and method. He discusses a subject, eschatology (the doctrine of the last things), which is generally neglected today, and, though he observes the disciplines of scholarship, he also reaches out to a readership beyond the academy. This theology of Heaven, faithfully rooted in the Catholic tradition, offers enlightenment to every Christian who seeks understanding of his hope, and encouragement to every human being who yearns for ultimate fulfillment.

My first thought as I studied the cover of the book, with its depiction of Quarton’s masterpiece, was to wonder whether the dearth of beauty in our churches helps explain the diminution of modern Christians’ awareness of heaven. Many these days may not realize it, but traditionally churches were designed to evoke a sense of heaven and to stir up in the believer’s heart a desire for such a reward, such a bountiful destiny. I am afraid that we have traded in beauty for functionality. No wonder so many insist that they find God better in the beauty of nature than in a building that seems more dedicated to physical comfort than to the exposition of the urgent message of the Christian Gospel, a message more ably communicated through beauty than state-of-the-art sound systems.

I remember as a boy leafing through travel books and encyclopedias to look at prints and photographs of some of the world’s great cathedrals in Europe. When later as a young man I traveled in the Old World, I made a point to visit as many of these magnificent edifices as I could. Once, while hiking in the countryside of the north of England, I ended a two-day walking tour at Durham Cathedral, a hauntingly beautiful structure begun in the Romanesque style and finished in the Gothic; and as I stood inside at the entrance and gazed down the central nave, I felt the pull of something, a kind of allurement, the nature of which I could not really identify at the time. That “epiphany” came somewhat later, when I was standing in the Cathedral of St. Stephen in Vienna, staring at the high altar, crowned as it is with a statue of Our Lady. A fellow American tourist, standing nearby, remarked disparagingly to her companion, “And look who’s exalted above all” (referring to the statue of St. Mary); and I, not a Catholic at the time, answered without taking my eyes off the pinnacle of the altar, “Yes, right where she should be.”

For it dawned upon me that this marvelous work of art, the high altar and statuary and the moving depiction of St. Stephen’s martyrdom (the first Christian martyr) is the Church’s artistic means of whispering in our hearts’ ears a visual message from the “sweet and blessed country.” Where she has been assumed, we, who would gaze without puritan or worldly filters over our eyes, are lured by beauty. “Heaven must be,” I reasoned with myself, “otherwise, such beauty could not exist on earth”; for beauty in this world does not satisfy, but rather arouses in us a yearning always for something more….

A recent survey tells us that over 20% of professed Christians in America do not believe in an “afterlife.” Well, no wonder, if we’ve reduced the idea of heaven to something that is after life, as if an afterthought. The Church’s doctrine of the last things speaks of heaven and hell, rather than merely an “afterlife.” And if she can so gloriously picture heaven in the art of St. Stephen’s high altar or Quarton’s Coronation of the Virgin, the Church also has commissioned artists to give us a fearful glimpse of hell, as in Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. These works, like so many others, work quite well: they make me want to go to heaven and to avoid going to hell.

But Saward writes about heaven and the nearly unspeakable beauty of it all, the glory, the bliss, the final attainment of a happiness never achieved in this world, only tasted through contemplation of Christ and His promises to those who follow Him, through the reception of the Sacraments (especially the Eucharist, the foretaste of that never-ending Banquet) and tasted too in the art of the Church and in the wonder of God’s creation. Saward’s book is beautiful, both in its style and more so in the thoughts he would have us think with him – to think about heaven, to ponder such a destiny, to be guided by such a hope, to be given in this life of pilgrimage on earth the meaningfulness of so splendorous a goal!