many sparrows
“The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field; but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat and went his way…” Mt 13:24-5
Read this today. What struck me is that the kingdom of heaven he’s talking about is in this field, where the tares were sown. The kingdom of heaven isn’t just a distant celestial realm, but includes this world where the good seeds and the bad seeds have to grow together.
Reversing the viewpoint, this world isn’t just a distant terrestrial problem: we are a broken world in heaven, which is a very important sort of problem. I’m reminded of the damaged frog in Perelandra:
It was a damaged animal. It was, or had been, one of the brightly coloured frogs. But some accident had happened to it. The whole back had been ripped open in a sort of V-shaped gash, the point of the V being a little behind the head. […] On earth it would have been merely a nasty sight, but up to this moment Ransom had as yet seen nothing dead or spoiled in Perelandra, and it was like a blow in the face. […] It was irrevocable. The milk-warm wind blowing over the golden sea, the blues and silvers and greens of the floating garden, the sky itself-all these had become, in one instant, merely the illuminated margin of a book whose text was the struggling little horror at his feet, and he himself, in that same instant, had passed into a state of emotion which he could neither control nor understand. […] It was not merely pity for pain that had suddenly changed the rhythm of his heart-beats. The thing was an intolerable obscenity which afflicted him with shame. It would have been better, or so he thought at that moment, for the whole universe never to have existed than for this one thing to have happened.