Who art in heaven. This phrase reminds us that we are addressing no earthly father, no ordinary person, but God. Where is, or what is, ‘heaven’? St. Catherine of Siena wrote that “All the way to heaven is heaven.” For many of us, we tend to conceive of heaven as being somewhere up above, or somewhere ‘out there’, beyond the horizons of our universe. So often, when we speak of matters of the spiritual life, we speak in terms of direction: up, down, vertical, horizontal, near, far, and so on. But we really have no idea what, or where, heaven is. Another common conception is that heaven is very similar to earth—only it’s the perfect earth where all pain and suffering, sorrow and fear, are no more. Heaven is imagined as the perfect earth where all will be happy forever and no one will want for anything. We rarely think of heaven as the place where, first and foremost, God dwells.
The often quoted “God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere” can help us understand that God and God’s presence are not restricted to or bounded by any one location. This is why we speak of God as omnipresent. God, at the center of everything, dwells in the depths of every person and all that exists. Thus, heaven is very near to us--indeed, the kingdom of heaven is within us and God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves.
