Heaven is Just a New Pair of Glasses

There is an anecdote told in a book by a sober booze hound called Chuck C, about an hour he spent over coffee with an old Jesuit priest that profoundly changed his view about where to find God. As they sat talking, the old mystic took to silent pondering and began cleaning his well-aged spectacles while gazing out into a dark and rain-swept night. Eventually he spoke:

I sometimes think that Heaven is just a new pair of glasses. Ed Dowling, SJ¹

It just doesn’t get any better than that! I’ve previously penned that if we can’t find God in the now, the immense beauty of Heaven on Earth, we may never find it. As the Galilean God with skin on man says, “Nor will they say, look, here it is! Or there it is! For, in fact, the kingdom of God is in our midst” (Luke 17:21). Of course to find this perspective, we have to get those glasses clean, comrades, and for a fella like me this has been no quick or easy, overnight matter. But that’s the nature of the spiritual journey, new vision takes time and lots of —mystic pondering—spectacle polishing.

Few indeed are those rare individuals who get so clear-eyed and devoid of egocentric distractions that they quickly achieve perfect and continuous Heaven on Earth vision. Most of us must humbly settle for just giving it a red-hot go each day, and getting an ever-growing glimpse along the way.  

That said, make no mistake it is entirely possible for anyone with a desire to search for a better way of seeing the world to find a spiritual practice that makes the new vision thing possible. My practice is Ignatian meditation, which comes from the self-same tradition practiced by the old bespectacled mystic quoted above. Let me paraphrase yet another Jesuit practitioner of this mode of getting clear-eyed, who said:

In the future, we shall all be mystics or nothing at all.” Karl Rahner, SJ

Let’s here and now abandon some of the overblown mystique about mystics. Mostly, they are just simple everyday folks who meditate. If you give meditation in whatever form a serious and ongoing whirl, you’re in the mystic gang.

A key indicator and the primary goal for Ignatian mystics is, “Finding God in everything.” It is easy to make the connection between this, and “Heaven is just a new pair of glasses.” But let me be clear, I’m not advocating that everyone should rush out and get hook-line-and-sinker into Ignatian meditation. It is just one of a veritable smorgasbord of meditation practices waiting out there for new vision seekers. 

What I am saying is that the bondage of self, which is the self-seeking ego on the rampage, blinds us to the beauty of God’s creative and life-giving presence all around us. Meditation is one of the spiritual tools that helps remove the egocentric scales from our eyes so that we can get into the Heaven on Earth space, the beautiful beyond measure peace with purpose place. Now, what’s not to like about that?

For we mystics shall surely see with vision splendid the living Spirit in the dark rain-swept night, or on the summer breeze so bright. And hear God’s ancient whisper in the rustle of the leaves so very gentle, and so light. Then we shall surely know because our own eyes have seen that God is indeed in everything. “Heaven is just a new pair of glasses.”

1. Chuck C, A New Pair of Glasses (New York: New-Look Publishing Company, 1984), 36. [↩]