AT OUR TABLE?

John 14:23: Jesus answered and said to him, “Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him."

     This is staggering. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit will come and live with you or me?  Is this even thinkable in any other religion? Is it ever thought about in Christianity? I've never heard it discussed. Extraordinary intimacy! The most ordinary believer can become Abraham, and more than Abraham: not only a 'friend of God', but (the) one God lives with. Not of any of the greatest patriarchs in the Old Testament was this said.
     What would it be like, to live with the Trinity? Quite literally, Heaven on earth. Thinking about it forces you to imagine Heaven, something we don't often do. In the old paintings of the Last Judgement, the painters clearly enjoyed portraying Hell a great deal more than Heaven: the latter is usually populated with rather po-faced saints standing in serried ranks with prayer-books or their official iconographic attributes in their hands, looking pious. But if you imagine it on earth, and you are old enough to resist the Big Rock Candy Mountain image, it can be easier.
     You begin with Clopas and his chum walking to Emmaus in the company of one-third of the Trinity and feeling their hearts burn within them -- burn with excitement, with brand-new understanding, and with joy. Now think of the rare moments you have felt the presence of the Holy Ghost (I make no apology for using the old term: not even my unconscious connects it with ghosts, and I dislike double disyllables.) He is the Comforter, the Helper, the Advocate, the one on, and by, your side. You may have felt his Presence during some particularly remarkable church service, or standing on a high hill surveying the "coloured counties" with the wind in your hair; at an important or emotional moment of private prayer; or bringing about a totally unexpected solution to a deeply painful situation. It's almost as if there is an extra lung breathing inside you. There is a sense of things falling into place and somehow becoming bigger. You instinctively give thanks.
     Praying "through" the Son and receiving gifts from the Spiritus Sanctus already happens on earth. What about the Father? He always seems more remote; and yet it is to him that the Son tells us to address the most famous and universal of prayers. He is the Creator of the Universe, yet we are encouraged to call him "abba" -- "baba", "papa", what small children call their father. I doubt if many of us do: the awe is too great. Yet perhaps we should: the Son said the disciples were no longer servants but sons.
     Little by little, we are perhaps getting a sense of this Heaven on earth that loving the Son and doing what he tells us to do will bring about for us. It will have something of a family. There is a Father, our Father; his Son, and therefore our brother. Irving Layton, the Canadian Jewish poet and roisterer, once said to me "Roger, Jesus is my brother. I like him; I love him; but how can you call him God? My brother farts: does God fart?" "Yup," I said. I suspect that in that family we are invited to, there is Mother Mary as well. The Holy Ghost is probably sexless, though a person. He "proceeds from the Father and the Son", says the Creed. But he is not just the love between them: he is a fully-fledged Person of the Trinity. In the family, he might be She: if Jesus is our brother, the Hagion Pneuma might be our sister, though in a shadowy sort of way.
     How to convey such stupendous intimacy without sounding cosy and ridiculous? If we love him and keep his commandments, (T)HE(Y) will come "and make our dwellling" with us. I don't think this is intended to signify a reward, but rather a consequence. Such a way of life, if and when it becomes habitual, will bring it about completely naturally. If you put your hand in the fire, you will burn; if you jump off a building you will break your neck; if you sin against God's love, you will be miserable; if you love Him and keep His commandments, you will live as part of the family, in the family house. Heaven on earth. Shit may still happen, but Heaven on earth nevertheless.