By Steven Norris
“Where does God live?” It was one of those questions that I got from my younger son when he would transform into our “bedtime philosopher.” Of course the “right” answer was “in heaven,” but I knew that I had not been true to the biblical story.
When Jesus was teaching us to pray in the Lord’s Prayer, he said that we should address, “Our Father, in the heavens.” I know that this is not the way that most of our English translations render this phrase. The Greek, however, has “heaven” in the plural.
The Hebrews viewed “the heavens” as a three-tiered reality. The first heaven consists of the atmosphere around you — the air you breathe and the sky in which the birds fly, clouds float, and storms form. The second heaven was everything that you see in the night sky — the stars, moons, planets, solar systems, galaxies, etc. The third heaven is beyond the night sky and even beyond the visible and the material world. It consists of the very throne room of God. In Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, he talks about being “taken up to the third heaven” (2 Corinthians 12:2). He meant that he was given a vision of the throne of God.
When we pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven . . .” we are acknowledging the closeness of our God — that God is as close to us as the very breath we breathe. The ancient Rabbis suggested that the unpronounceable name of God (YHWH) consisted of four letters that mimicked the sound of a person breathing. The implication was that the act of breathing was literally the act of speaking God’s name.
To pray to our God “who art in heaven” is a reminder that we share a common humanity. We may stand at different points on the globe and see a different “pieces” of the sky; we may use different words and languages to refer to sun, moon, or cloud; we may be connected to different geo-political identities; but we are still one humanity. As the book of Ephesians states, there is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all” (4:5-6). To pray to the God “in heaven” is to pray to the same God who is over the rich and the poor, the conservative and the liberal, the powerful and the powerless.
Finally, to pray to God “in the heavens” is to acknowledge that God is transcendent, beyond our comprehension, completely other (separate, holy, different). It is to acknowledge that God is beyond our ability to comprehend. As Albert Hasse puts it: “God refuses to become an object that can be contained by the human mind — whether that’s a golden calf or a literary image. God lives in heaven! God dwells in inapproachable light. God is indescribable, ineffable, unfathomable, incomprehensible.”
To learn to pray to this God “in the heavens” is to be invited into the tension between intimate communion and unknowable mystery.