Encounter With an Onion

A friend of mine sent me a book entitled The Supper of the Lamb, by Robert Farrar Capon.  It belongs to a genre all its own, something along the lines of "theological treatise meets the cookbook."  In Chapter 2, ("The First Session"), he has his reader "confront" an onion, examining, peeling, and carefully studying it in order to make various discoveries about onions and their Maker.  He also uses this encounter to say the following about "place."

You have, you see, already discovered something:  The uniqueness, the placiness, of places drives not from abstractions like location, but from confrontations like man-onion.  Erring theologians have strayed to their graves without learning what you have come upon.  They have insisted, for example, that heaven is no place because it could not be defined in terms of spatial co-ordinates.  They could have written off man's eternal habitation as a "state of mind."  But look what your onion has done for you:  It has given you back the possibility of heaven as a place without encumbering you with the irrelevancy of locations.  This meeting between the two of you could be moved to a thousand different latitudes and longitudes and still remain the session it started out to be....

...What really matters is not where we are, but  who -- what real beings -- are with us."

Now compare this to an excerpt from Sinclair Ferguson's book, Grow in Grace.

The order of spiritual experience has not changed since the psalmist's day.  We too need to go to the place where God has promised to meet with us.  That is no longer in Jerusalem.  It is in Christ.  No longer in a place, but now in a person.

Back to Capon:

"In that sense, Heaven, where we see God face to face through the risen flesh of Jesus, may well be the placiest of all places, as it is the most gloriously material of all meetings."

Amen!