AUDIO
by Doug Scott, LCSW
Last Tuesday night our Building 4th gathering belonged to one of our members, Tim. He called his presentation “Co-Creating Heaven Together: Practical Steps to a Better Tomorrow,” and joked that all of his talks have to sound like a business seminar. It was anything but. Tim led us through four marks of heaven, each starting with H, with music, a poem and a good deal of laughter along the way. You can watch the whole evening below. What follows is my summary of what Tim offered, along with some explanation of the comments I made as we went, since a few of them deserve more than the minute I gave them on the call.
Where Tim Began
Tim told us he’d known all week that he was presenting and still didn’t know what to say. So on the drive to work he prayed for a thread to follow, and the thread turned out to be his own recent internet searches. He read them to us, deadpan: whether perfection includes the capacity for self-transcendence (and if so, whether perfection is never final); how Plato’s truth, beauty and goodness interpenetrate; whether the highest good has to be universal or whether goodness comes in the plural. Mixed in among these were whether Diet Mountain Dew counts as a clear liquid before a colonoscopy, and how hot Taco Bell’s habanero sauce really is. (His report on both: everything went fine, and the sauce is pretty hot.) It was a vulnerable and funny way of saying that the sacred and the ordinary sit side by side in all of us.
Then he got to his real question. For Tim, heaven is the archetypal good — everything he longs for and wishes to return to, a city of peace, light, love and joy. So what is it? A place, a state of being, or both? Where is it, when is it, why is it, and who is it? Tim noticed that stories of enlightenment often sound solitary, and he asked whether anything could really be heaven if we aren’t with those we love. His answer was that heaven is a state of being in relation. In that sense we already have a proto-heaven here, made out of the bonds we forge with one another, and there are moments when eternity seems to leap into the soul and time stops.
My First Comment: Heaven as a Condition of the Soul
I jumped in here with a few thoughts, and I want to fill them out.
First, even the Catholic Church — which carries a lot of responsibility for the dualistic thinking we inherited in the West — doesn’t officially teach heaven as a place up in the sky. The Catechism calls heaven “the state of supreme, definitive happiness” (CCC 1024). In 1999 Pope John Paul II put it even more plainly in a general audience: heaven is “neither an abstraction nor a physical place in the clouds” but a living, personal relationship with the Trinity. That is very close to what Tim was saying. Heaven is relational before it is geographical.
Second, I quoted Richard Rohr: heaven all the way to heaven, hell all the way to hell. I want to give credit where it’s due. The first half is older than Rohr. It goes back to St. Catherine of Siena, whose words Dorothy Day loved to repeat: “All the way to heaven is heaven.” Rohr picked up the line in his Daily Meditations and added the other half himself — it’s hell all the way to hell — with the point that we’re choosing our destiny right now. In other words, death doesn’t flip a switch. We carry on with the psycho-spiritual development we were living at the time of our passing.
Third, that fits what so many near-death accounts and between-lives accounts describe. There’s a change of clothes, if you will, a shift of energy bodies, but the soul arrives somewhere on a spectrum between wholeness and separation, and the spectrum is continuous with how we’ve been living. Ra’s description of fourth density, the density of love and understanding, has the same relational flavor. Ra says it is “a plane of compassion and understanding of the sorrows of third density,” a plane where one is aware of the thoughts and vibrations of other-selves, and where “individual differences are pronounced, although automatically harmonized by group consensus” (16.50). That last phrase is close to Tim’s heaven-as-relation: diversity kept, not erased, and held together by love.
Fourth, there’s Luke 17:21. Most modern Bibles translate Jesus as saying “the kingdom of God is among you” (or “in your midst”), while the King James has “within you.” The Greek phrase, entos hymōn, can carry both meanings, and translators have to choose. I don’t think we have to. The kingdom is within us and among us at once — interior and relational, the same two sides of heaven Tim was naming.
The Four H’s of Heaven
Tim then introduced his “Four H’s of Heaven,” a play on the 4-H Club, under his first homemade meme: “Don’t make me get Archangel Michael.” Each H came with a short clip of music or film. Those clips aren’t in the video or podcast, for copyright reasons, but Tim’s reflections around them are.
1. Humor
Tim believes heaven must have a fabulous sense of humor — a lightness of being where we don’t take ourselves too seriously. Humor disarms rivalry; add it to two people at odds and something good-natured happens. He gave us Bob Hope’s line about banks (to borrow money you have to prove you don’t need any), Milton’s “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n” (Paradise Lost I.254–255), and a Mormon joke about irrigation that I won’t spoil here.
Then he did something I didn’t expect from the humor section: he turned to activism. Tim admitted that as a seeker he’s been drawn inward and away from the fray, reading less news than ever. A Richard Rohr meditation had pulled him back. Rohr describes three levels of social ministry using the image of a river flooding its banks. At the first level we pull drowning people out of the water — the soup kitchen, the food pantry, the hungry person at the door. At the second we help keep people from falling in — schools, hospitals and social services that give people new possibilities. At the third we build a dam so the river doesn’t flood in the first place — advocacy, the critique of systems, organized resistance to injustice. Rohr’s point is that no level is better than another; all three are the Spirit moving in us for others. Tim’s hope was for a heart-centered, metamodern activism, one that brings everyone to the table instead of becoming shrill. And his link back to humor: whatever level we work at, we have to keep our sense of humor and our wits about us.
I chimed in that this is one of my favorite Rohr passages. In the same reflection, Rohr warns against comparing levels as better or lesser or more committed — he calls that an ego game — and asks us to respect and support the other two levels even when we can’t do them ourselves. As I read him, we get imbalanced when we assume our calling is the only one, or the best one. The invitation is to know our own calling and then nod, with dignity and respect, to those called to a different part of the river.
2. Humility
Tim pictures the citizens of the heavenly city as childlike — a wise innocence, tender and meek: “Blessed are the poor in spirit… blessed are the meek.” His image for humility was a first kiss, uncertain yet full of excitement, openness and vulnerability. He shared a clip from West Side Story and told us that at seven years old he wept so hard when Tony died that he hid under the coffee table so his older sisters wouldn’t see. He paraphrased Adyashanti: good spiritual teaching doesn’t answer your questions so much as question your answers. There’s a humility in knowing that we don’t know, and figuring things out together like children.
Here I offered something I saw in that scene: the archetype of the divine feminine and masculine choosing each other. Each of us has a part to play, and each part requires our yes, even when we don’t know the future. The lovers in that story didn’t know what would happen after the wedding. Neither do we. One of our members added that deciding he couldn’t know what happens after death actually gave him great freedom. Tim said something I keep returning to: we don’t know the shape of the future, but a feeling echoes backward from it — the emotional landscape we’re trying to create — as if the future is reaching for us and drawing us toward it.
The same member then asked whether universal good and universal evil are forever balanced. Tim wisely parked that as a theodicy question for another night. I offered a simple frame I lean on: truth is the fact that unity is all there is; goodness is wholeness made manifest and appreciated; and love is the manner in which unity becomes goodness. It’s overly simple, I admitted on the call. But it helps me hold Plato’s three pillars, which Tim opened with, as one movement rather than three separate ideals. Truth is what is. Goodness is what is, seen and enjoyed. Love is the motion between them.
Tim’s one poem of the night was William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1923), sixteen words beginning “so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow.” So much depends upon you, Tim said — upon a rusted old wheelbarrow glazed with rain. We are all walking arks through the storm, carrying the seeds of God forward. And as we humbly move ahead, beside the white chickens, it’s going to be okay.
3. Holiness
Religion usually calls something holy when it’s set apart from the common. Tim has come to see holiness the other way around: taking what is common and setting it within, integrating it. The descent of God is a downpouring of holiness — down, down, down, rather than up, up, up. Another member wrote in the chat that holiness seems to be something infused with divine energy and love, and Tim loved that.
He then brought in the psychologist Don Clifton’s four domains of leadership strength — executing, influencing, relationship building and strategic thinking — and Clifton’s finding that good leaders build on what people are already strong at instead of drilling their weaknesses. Tim mapped these onto Rohr’s three levels: the executors pulling people from the river, the influencers and relationship builders in the schools and hospitals, the strategic thinkers upstream at the dam. Then he widened it to Paul’s gifts of the Spirit (1 Corinthians 12–14) and the parable of the talents (Matthew 25): find your gift and magnify it. He closed the section with Teilhard de Chardin’s hope that one day we will harness for God the energies of love, and for the second time in history discover fire.
4. Historicity
Tim’s last H was his curveball. Heaven, he said, carries all that is past, like a mother hen gathering her chicks under her wing. There’s depth in knowing who we are from who we were, in honoring the forebears on whose shoulders we stand, and in learning from what went wrong — and the twentieth century, with its world wars and totalitarian regimes, was lethal. He played a recording of an American folk hymn, then said he believes there is something good in this country to build on, even in a rough patch. His closing question is the one I’m still carrying: what kind of heaven will we create?
What I’m Taking With Me
When Tim finished, I told him the truth: I find his spirit heavenly, even angelic, and I meant to carry some of his love and passion for life into the next day on purpose. Others named his pacing, his creativity and the way he embodied the energy he was talking about. One member said the last slide moved her most, because there is so much good and beauty around us that she hardly notices anything else.
If I put Tim’s evening next to the Law of One, it lands right on what Building 4th is about. Ra calls the coming density “the vibration of love, sometimes called by your people the vibration of understanding” (13.23). Tim’s four H’s read to me like a practical curriculum for that vibration: humor to loosen the grip of the ego, humility to keep us teachable, holiness to pour the sacred into the ordinary, and historicity to gather everything that has been, so nothing is lost. Heaven, in that sense, isn’t somewhere we wait to go. It’s something we practice together, all the way there.
I’m offering these thoughts for what they are worth. Thank you, Tim.
Sources
- Ra Contact: 13.23, 16.50
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1024; Pope John Paul II, General Audience, July 21, 1999
- Richard Rohr, “Heaven and Hell,” Daily Meditations, April 28, 2019 (on Catherine of Siena and Dorothy Day)
- Richard Rohr, “Participating in Movements for Justice,” Daily Meditations, December 4, 2020 (three levels of social ministry); see also Rohr, A Lever and a Place to Stand (2011)
- Video: Co-Creating Heaven Together: Four H’s of Heaven
- Luke 17:21; 1 Corinthians 12–14; Matthew 5:3–5; Matthew 25:14–30
- John Milton, Paradise Lost I.254–255; William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1923)
- Don Clifton’s leadership domains, as presented in Tom Rath and Barry Conchie, Strengths Based Leadership (Gallup Press, 2008)
