Curiosity: Parallel Universes and... Heaven?

Life has been very full lately. I got engaged, I'm in the process of getting a call to a church (which is, I can say, quite the process), and tomorrow I'm heading out to do the Superior Hiking Trail's version of the 7 Summits. When I get back I plan on doing a serious, blogging recap of the journey, but for now I have had a few different thoughts that seem important to get down if for no other reason than to keep myself in the practice.

A week or so ago I saw the new Discovery Channel series Curiosity for the first time. Basically, it's big questions put before experts in the field who then do their best to simplify and explain the issue and raise new questions in turn. I can't speak to all the episodess so far (I know they did one on Is there a God with Stephen Hawking that I haven't seen and, frankly, it's hard to want to, knowing how Discovery has treated this issue in the past). Nonetheless, the two episodes I have seen were both intriguing, the kind of programming I expect from Discovery (and not this American Chopper or ghost-busting bologna).

The episode that really caught my attention was one on parallel universes. It was stuff that I had heard before but presented in a fascinating way. One of the theories offered was that there are, in fact, two realities that run parallel to each other. These two universes balance out the cosmos. In this theory, the Big Bang wasn't the creation of matter but the splitting of the two universes--one up against the other.

This is intriguing enough from a scientific perspective, but if we take the audacious step of thinking about this theologically then we have a whole new can of worms. I've heard heaven described as just a blink away, always just there an instant ahead of us. I don't know if this is scriptural--I looked briefly and couldn't find it--so if you know where this came from please do clue me in. But regardless, there is something about this that really jives with an understanding of the world down here and a spiritual world beyond.

Maybe heaven isn't so much an instant ahead of us as it is directly alongside, parallel to us. After all, in the creation story of Genesis 1, God separates the waters above from the waters below to make the earth and sky. In fact, much of cosmic creation amounts to separating similar entities. Whether it's the water from the water (Gen 1:6) or the day from the night (1:14) creation is tantamount to separation. Similarly, the first distinction in the Bible is between two different entities: earth and heaven.

"In the beginning God created the earth and the heavens."

In the beginning there was balance in this created order. Mainline Christianity has long ago given up the physical locality of heaven insofar as it can be reached in this reality, but in its place the language for heaven has become spiritual rather than scientific. Curiosity got me thinking: what if this is it? What if our language about the kingdom of God boils down to another reality opposing and yet parallel to our own? What if heaven isn't just a breath away but imminently present, parallel to us?

Suddenly, the incarnation isn't so much a break in the boundaries of heaven and earth as much as it is a rupture in the fabric of the universe. Isn't that what the gospel writers are telling us with the skies (Mark 4:10) and curtain (Mark 15:38) being torn apart?

Maybe all of this is a stretch. Things are rarely so simple that they can be summed up in a 60-minute television program, and yet I wonder... And that is what curiosity should be about.