I was reading a book the other day about survival. Who dies who survives and why. It followed the story of many who fell into disaster and took steps to survive. The way these individuals these ‘survivors’ (whether they lived or died) looked at reality was a huge contributor to whether they would survive.
After being on a lifeboat for seventy-six days a guy named Callahan summed up the experience as ‘a view of heaven from a seat in hell.’ Never having been on a lifeboat for that long and having only a few moments in my life where I thought maybe this is what some sort of hell could be and having only to survive while having everything I need on my back I wondered why his thoughts struck so close.
A view of heaven from a seat in hell.
Perhaps for many of us a certain heaven, a place of wholeness or a reality that we find as a longing set deep in the fabric of who we are always seems just a bit out of reach. They say when a survivor looses the capacity to imagine rescue their end is not far off. One scholar said it this way, “The task of the prophetic imagination is to cut through the numbness, to penetrate the self-deception, so that the God of endings is confessed as Lord.”
That is to say that when we venture out and risk imagining a future a hope better and more free than the now we are in that very action converted again to view a heaven in the shadow of what may be a kind of hell.
