UNITING EARTH AND HEAVEN
(January 2)
“Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…” (Mt 6: 9-10)
Today, as we on the Older Calendar begin the Forefeast of Christmas, I’m thinking about this part of the Lord’s Prayer, where we pray for God’s will to be done here on earth “as it is in heaven.” Is that even possible? If so, how exactly is God’s will done, “as it is in heaven”? I don’t know. Sometimes it is most unusual and unexpected, like a Virgin giving birth to the Son of God in a cave. But the One who prayed this prayer first, the God-Man Jesus Christ, knows. He teaches us to pray as He prayed, according to what He knows about both earth and heaven.
Through His divine-human presence among us, Jesus Christ unites the visible and invisible realities of Man and God, of earth and heaven. And He calls us to participate in unifying both those realities, if we let Him do that, by us stepping into communion with Him and all the saints, in the daily prayer and sacraments of the Church. St. Maximus the Confessor even states that it is the vocation of the human being to “make one earth” (μίαν ποιήσειε γῆν) “by a way of life proper and fitting the saints…” (Ambiguum 41). As merely-human beings with limited knowledge and vision, we can’t manage this unifying work on our own, but as Church we are empowered by the Holy Spirit to participate in it, bringing earth and heaven together within ourselves and then in our surroundings.
Today let me embrace the gentle honesty that is humility, surrendering to the human-divine reality that is truth, or God’s vision of everything, on earth as it is in heaven. Lord, as we direct our steps to Bethlehem throughout this Forefeast of Nativity, help us see what You are revealing to us, sometimes in unexpected ways and places, like a manger in a cave. “Thy will be done” with us today, Our Father, whether we understand it or not.
