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Just back from the Indiana University Ballet's production of The Nutcracker, and I must say that it brought the sort of incandescent happiness that is both sheer delight and almost pain. Very simply, the choreography and music were a reminder that there is peace, order, stability, unity beyond the brokenness I see and experience. Perhaps it's overly pessimistic, but at one point I felt a surge of amazement that the dancers weren't knifing each other on stage--or tripping and falling every other beat. That the audience could sit and watch the production as a unified group without any terrible mishaps or outbursts. That the orchestra could produce those incredible, heart-wrenching crescendos without flaw. I know that there's such a thing as "common grace," but it seems to me tonight that that's the wrong word for it. We take it for granted and assume that God will hold under control all of our evilness, when really it's so amazing that there should be any rhythm to the world after the Fall.

And it gets better! One of the dancers didn't quite pull off a landing; a brass player over-blew a note; and I was sitting up in the balcony, watching, not participating actively--but Heaven is coming to earth. Heaven is coming to earth, and when it does, the peace that is only foreshadowed here on earth will flow effortlessly, effervescently from us as we participate actively, flawlessly, in it. It's truly incredible that God would permit us to participate in His glory, but He will there. I love C.S. Lewis's essay "The Weight of Glory," particularly where he talks about how we will perhaps be enabled to enter into nature in some deeper, fuller way, to join its beauty and power as we long to do but cannot do on earth.

Earlier this week I read the end of Ezekiel, where the description of the new Jerusalem is given. On either side of the river flowing from the temple "will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither, nor their fruit fail, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing." As the fruit in Eden was our poison, so the fruit in Heaven will be our feast; as the leaves in Eden were our pitiful attempts to hide our rebellion, so the leaves in Eden will heal us of our brokenness once for all.