Seeing Heaven 1-23-10

Anderson, South Carolina

We get used to ourselves, we get used to our world, taking for granted what makes up the normal human experience, processing our physical environments and relational experiences through a set of sensory and cognitive resources built up over a lifetime. Six week old infants are not able to tell what their immediate environment looks like, lacking the neurological and linguistic resources needed to do so. Eventually the occipital cortex and associated neurological structures for visual processing come on line and infants learn to see accurately, eventually gaining the ability to interpret their physical world. Some of us were lucky to get telescopes in childhood and got to see further than most, but usually the business of life relegated those wondrous telescopes to dusty corners, eventually to be ‘junked’ in garage sales. We lost our vision.

In childhood it is the rare individual who is able to step back and see the world in a deeper more profound way, something that goes beyond the normative information processing most of us do to survive. That some adults have the ability to see beyond the obvious is even rarer. A select number of deeply gifted individuals seem able to see beyond, individuals of tender age who can show us their own unique flavors of Heaven; ones who don’t even need telescopes to do so. Occasionally, even an adult remembers the larger world as it was during early childhood.

Garth Stein stepped back and used the device of an anthropomorphized dog to make some brilliant observations about human nature. By writing an entire novel in the first person perspective of a mixed breed dog, Garth’s The Art of Racing in the Rain, was able to bring into focus many of the behavioral and relational dynamics in modern American culture. His findings clearly reveal humans to be an admixture of base greed and occasionally awe-inspiring endurance and commitment. He is ‘spot-on’, as the British would say, in his ability to be concise and on-target. Stein shows the reader how to see far beyond the immediacy of a circumstance, into possibilities for a better way, a way to finish the race of life in first place, by simply first finishing. He suggests through his fiction that there might just be more than meets the eye, perhaps a lot more.

Oliver Sacks, the celebrated British Neurologist has enjoyed a spectacularly successful career by observing human nature though the lens of catastrophic neurologic disease. Able to articulate himself with profundity, his best seller, Anthropologist from Mars describes the life journeys of ten people struck by congenital and acquired neurologic disorders.

A pair of institutionalized twins in Mississippi have the ability to do mathematical computations faster and more accurately that the fastest super computers on earth, yet these two siblings would be hard pressed to tell time on an analog clock or navigate outside of their institutional universe for more than a few minutes. Scientists have no idea as to how these two ‘children’ process information in such incredible fashion. For several hundred pages, Sacks takes the reader through an entrancing world in which individuals with severely compromised neurological capacities have in some unknown fashion been able to compensate, sometimes in extraordinary fashion. They have developed a stunning ability to see deeply into our universe, performing specific tasks far beyond the ‘normal’ among us.

Idiot savants are special individuals who seem to be way short on the general skills required to navigate daily life, often lacking the social skills and cognitive capacity to interpret their daily environments, yet able to perform specific tasks at astounding levels of excellence. Individuals appear in our midst with the astonishing ability to articulate the human experience through a very specific expression of music, art, math, or word. These expressions are at times sublime and inspiring beyond conception, almost functioning as windows to Heaven.

I have been led to wonder at times if we have each been given a fixed amount of creative/intellectual resources and have in some cases ‘decided’ to allocate all of them to a single task rather than spreading the resources out to the doing of many normal activities at usual levels of performance. How it is possible to perform a profoundly difficult task with spectacular ease while being unable to perform even the most mundane activities of daily living is a great enigma to those of us entranced with observing human experience and performance potential.

Some of the greatest observers of the universe and articulators of Hope are not only short on neurological resources; they are completely deficient in life experience, being mere children, perhaps only two or three years old. How is it possible for a three year old to articulate the deepest feelings and experiences of adult life, yet have no obvious personal knowledge of it?

Mattie Stepanek was born in 1990 with a rare disorder known as Dysautonomic Mitochondrial Myopathy. It ultimately took his life at age 13. For most of his short life he was in and out of hospitals enduring torments most of us cannot fathom, even in our darkest moments. Yet, he began writing short stories and poems at age three, bringing a profound message of love and reconciliation to the world. When he died he left a legacy of six published books of poems and a best selling collection of peace essays. His poems have been set to music and a number of CD’s created. In the words of Mattie's mother, Jeni Stepanek, who posthumously published Reflections of a Peacemaker at her son's request, "In reading these poems we enter Mattie's world and gain insight through a child who somehow balanced pain and fear with optimism and faith." Through Mattie’s work we really do get a clear glimpse of Heaven.

Sahara Sunday Spain, born in 1991, has her neurologic resources intact but at age four she did not know how to write. She figured out how to dictate her poems into a telephone answering machine so they would not be lost. At age nine she was described as a seasoned traveller and author, having been around the world, meeting many spiritual luminaries. Bill Cosby described her as having “an imagination that brings love, peace, and harmony to all souls, both young and old”. Much like Mattie, she was empowered to see beyond her present realities, into a world filled with love and reconciliation. Mattie and Sahara both illustrated their books of poems with expansive visual images of a world filled with laughter, joy and community, perhaps even Heaven itself.

Helen Keller is perhaps the best known writer in the past hundred years to overcome massive deficits and describe clearly a world she never saw or heard with her physical senses, having been robbed of sight and hearing in infancy. Helen was gifted with the ability to see through her silent darkness and show people the way to a world filled with profound beauty and possibility, perhaps a foretaste of Heaven. In her case, the blind led the sighted into visions of numinous clarity.

Akiane was born to a stay-at-home atheistic mother in Illinois in 1994. At age four she began drawing, at age six painting. At age seven she was writing aphorisms and poems. She speaks Russian, Lithuanian, English, and American Sign. At age four she had a profound spiritual experience that resulted in her atheistic family embracing God. With no art training whatever she is described as one of the twenty most accomplished visual artists in the world and is considered by some to be the only true binary genius in the world. Her website says that her life goal is “to share her love for God and people around the world.” One has only to read her words or view her paintings to be absolutely certain that this prodigy can see far beyond - perhaps even to Heaven. The technical excellence and compositional aspects of her written and visual work are simply staggering. To the best of my knowledge she does not own a telescope.

One certainly might wonder what was going on in the early 1990s that a number of such profoundly gifted individuals came into our world. Unlike prodigies who have sheer intellectual horsepower gifted to them to perform at high levels, these individuals have an additional spiritual capacitance that turbocharges their creative expressions to a world that is in desperate need of seeing Heaven, a place of serenity and beyond the turbulence and chaos of daily life. These messages of hope and vision can be transformative, if we but stop, look, and listen.

The ability to imagine life from a dog’s perspective, to calculate impossible equations without benefit of pen, paper or supercomputer, to craft words into shimmering prose at age three, to paint vivid images of a sublime world at age six, to capture the essence of the human experience, good and bad at age three, to describe the world without benefit of eyes or ears; all of these suggest One who wants a message of love, hope and reconciliation to be heard by all of us who share this world.

Recently NASA brought the orbiting Kepler telescope on line. This specialized telescope has a single job - finding planets, hopefully ones of the right size, composition, and temperature to support carbon-based life as we know it. Almost immediately Kepler started finding planets, lots of them. Alas, all of them are considered ill-suited to life. For up to six years this telescope will stare at the same region of the sky and monitor the light from 100,000 stars, hoping to find suitable candidates. Analysis of fluctuations of the light from each of these stars can be highly suggested of planets orbiting them. It is straight-forward mathematics to deduce the size, orbit, and temperature of these planets. It is heady stuff to think that we might actually have the ability with our present technology to sleuth life-giving planets in remote solar systems. Yet, analysis only allows us indirect inferences about the worlds that orbit these remote unnamed stars. We cannot really see these planets directly.

As stunning as it may be to find hundreds of planets in remote solar systems scattered across the galaxy, perhaps far more compelling is the ability of gifted individuals, untrained children yet, to see far beyond the capabilities and range of Kepler. Inexplicably, we find they are able to create stunning visual and linguistic visions of unseen regions of the universe, images the equal or greater than any of those produced by multi-billion dollar orbiting telescopes. Perhaps we are really seeing Heaven through the eyes of children.

Barbara Hagerty has recently written a compelling book that demands we consider the possibility these children are seeing more, much more, perhaps even Heaven. In Fingerprints of God she posits the question that has tormented her and many others “Is this all there is.?” A lifetime of questioning boiled down to this. “I wondered about my own brief brushes with something numinous, and the gnawing suspicion that there might be a reality this hides itself except in rare moments, or to rare people.” Over several hundred well-written pages Hagerty reviews scientific evidence highly suggestive of the veracity of claims made by such rare people of visions of another realm, of Heaven, of God.

The Revelation of John describes something akin to what these children are seeing and reporting with their incredible gifts. John was one of those rare adults gifted with a profound vision of Heaven. It has been a bestseller for twenty centuries.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. The first heaven and the first earth disappeared, and the sea vanished ... There will be no more death, no more grief or crying or pain. The old things have disappeared … Then the one who sits on the throne said, "And now I make all things new!" He also said to me, "Write this, because these words are true and can be trusted." And the city itself was made of pure gold, as clear as glass. The foundation stones of the city wall were adorned with all kinds of precious stones. Rev 21

The apostle Paul, who was granted authorship of a big chunk of the New Testament, admits that we are not seeing directly or very clearly.

What we see now is like a dim image in a mirror; then we shall see face-to-face. What I know now is only partial; then it will be complete---as complete as God's knowledge of me. I Cor 13

Perhaps one way for us to see with greater clarity and vision is to make sure all children have access to kindness, safety, pencil and paper, brushes and paint, and pianos, especially when they are young and still able to see the world clearly

Craig C. Johnson