Living in Two Kingdoms

I live in two kingdoms.  They occupy the same space and time, but they are very different places. 

One is the kingdom of God.  It is the realm of true justice, of transcendent peace, of beauty and creativity.  It is ruled by compassion and forgiveness.  Here, the suffering of one is the suffering of all.  The exaltation of one is the ennoblement of all.  Here, people share from their abundance and receive on the basis of their need.  Here, the only competition is to see who can be kindest.  Signs of this kingdom surround us.  Whenever we walk the extra mile, turn the other cheek, reach out to the lonely, stand up for justice, or share our artistic talents, here it appears in our midst.

The other is the kingdom of this world.  It is the kingdom of the best that can be accomplished at the moment, rather than the kingdom of the best, period.  Here, sometimes there is no humane choice but to use force to protect human life and liberty - abandoning some, if not a lot, of humanity in the process.  Here, one must make deals with people of ill will in order for those of good will to be able to exercise the most compassion possible.  It is the kingdom that allows for the freedom to be greedy as well as the freedom to be generous.    It is the kingdom of bad intentions that sometimes yield good results, and of good intentions that can lead to ruinous outcomes.  Here, a lot of the time, moral choices aren't obvious.

One might think that these two kingdoms would be so at odds with each other that one or another would have prevailed by now.  But they remain in an ongoing, dynamic tension in the same fabric of space-time.  One potent symbol of this tension is the cross, upon which we meditate in this time of Lent.  It reminds us of how crossed-up we are between our vision of heaven and our reality on earth.    We don't want things to be this way; we try to deny it in a thousand ways.  Some Christians peg their hopes on the "second coming", expecting that any time now, this struggle between kingdoms will be finished.  But this sort of thinking doesn't help advance the cause of the kingdom of heaven. It's a recipe for repeated disappointment, when what we need is communion bread for a very long journey.  Over and over, we wishfully declare the victory of God over the world - but in fact the struggle is never over, the job is never done.  The cross remains.  The kingdom of God is nailed to the kingdom of the world. 

Our felt tension between the heavenly and earthly realms reflects the essential nature of the universe.  The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who strove to integrate the insights of quantum mechanics with metaphysics and religion, put it this way:  "But just as the kingdom of heaven transcends the natural world, so does this world transcend the kingdom of heaven.  For the world is evil, and the kingdom is good.  The kingdom is in the world, and yet not of the world."  (from "Religion in the Making", 1926, p 88, Fordham edition)  The realm of the sacred ideal moves us to be Godlike, ever seeking to shape the world into its image.

Religion fails us when it preaches that we can exist in the kingdom of God without having to live and act in the kingdom of the real world.  It fails when we turn religion into an excuse for withdrawal from public life, and into the pretense that we can retreat into religious communities that are somehow holier and purer than any other human institutions.  Religion sells us short when it preaches that the world is just fine the way it is, and fails to activate us as citizens pressing for the common good.  Religion fails us when it leads us to expect either perfection or putrefaction in politics.  It fails when it forces us either to be blinded to religious hypocrisy, or to reject religion entirely because of such hypocrisy.

But the great promise of religion is to enable us to live with this contradiction.   It can awaken us to the guiding promise of the kingdom of heaven, urging us to do our best for the highest purposes by getting our hands dirty in the kingdom of the world.  It resurrects us from despair when the going gets tough. Religion is a gift when it opens our eyes to to what is wrong in the world, at the same time that it infuses us with faith, hope, and enthusiasm to work for the ideal.