Dreams are interesting things—our modern age either makes too little of them or too much of them—but mostly, we believe our dreams are about us and about the inside of our heads. Those who make too little of their dreams write them off to anxiety or other stresses of the day—simple wish fulfillment—or a variety of other mundane causes. Those who make too much of them remind me of those who are Western believers in reincarnation—they always seem to have been somebody famous—while their dreaming counterparts always try to find the meaning of the universe or something equally significant in the slightest symbol. I don’t mean to sound so jaundiced on the subject, but I once spent a week at a Jungian Conference—it was long ago and far away and definitely in a different galaxy. In fact, such a week can make you afraid to go to sleep!

But dreams certainly have a significance—as shown in Scripture, dreams can indeed be sent by God, and sometimes we have to pay attention to them. My favorite biblical dream is the famous of Jacob, who sees a ladder stretching into the heavens and angels going up and coming down. His reaction upon waking was to attribute the dream to the place in which he was sleeping: “This is none other than the gate of heaven and the house of God!” And, of course, as the good patriarch that he was, he erected a stone and anointed it with oil.

Years ago, some years before I became Orthodox, I had a dream in which I was in a church. It was very what I call a “big dream”: you wake up from it, and you have a sense that there is some significance and meaning to this dream, even though you don’t know exactly what it is; but I have always called those dreams “big dreams.” Well, in this dream, I found myself in a church. Its construction was of log-timber, and it was obvious to me, for whatever reason in the dream—it was obvious to me that it was an Orthodox church. There were icons and lampadas, and there was a sizable crowd of people, though they weren’t people I knew.

What fascinated me about this dream-church were its many rooms. Everywhere I went there were steps up and steps down and rooms here and rooms there, and all of them full of people and icons and lampadas and the smell of incense, the low murmur of worship and prayers. I remember the dream lasting for quite a while, but with nothing more significant than the many rooms—and how it felt to be there.

That feeling is what remained with me when I awoke and remains with me to this day. The description I have given is probably the best I can do, for I have no words for how it felt, other than to say it felt like an Orthodox church. And it feels like every Orthodox church I’ve entered to this day. But an almost endless Orthodox church, with its room after room.

In the past few weeks I’ve been speaking in these podcasts about a one-storey universe versus a two-storey universe, and speaking about what it means to live the Christian life in a one-storey universe, a universe in which God is everywhere present and filling all things, rather than a God who is relegated to some other place, a second storey of our world, in which we have little contact with him, and our ties to him are tenuous at best.

But I am reminded of that church in my dream when I think of this one-storey universe, for it was certainly a one-storey church. God was present there and present in a very profound sense. What was interesting to me about it, though, was that it constantly opened up into place after place.

Earlier this fall, I spent a week studying the painting (or writing, if you prefer) of icons. They are often called “windows to heaven.” I spoke some about icons last week. But in the church of my dream, or certainly within the metaphor it has left in my heart, I also have to think of icons not as windows to heaven but also as doors to another room. Each saint, each icon of Christ or of the Theotokos, opens not just to heaven, but to ever deeper rooms within the world in which we inhabit. To spend time with an icon is not to visit some other place only to return to where you were before, but is to enter another room though you never left where you were. The world is changed and enlarged. What seemed small and insignificant is suddenly expanded and filled with meaning. The finite is filled with the infinite and becomes inexhaustible.

I remember waking from my dream years ago, and aching with a hunger for something I couldn’t name. I wept—but I know now that it was a hunger for heaven, and not for a heaven somewhere else, but for heaven on earth, which in Orthodox dogma is indeed the Church.

Someone put a question to me some days back about what I would say about evil in a one-storey universe. Of course, I’ve thought about the question. My simplest conclusion is to wonder how one would account for evil in a two-storey universe! For it seems that those who have imagined the universe as a two-storey affair have largely confined evil here and propose that the second floor has been swept clean: heaven above and earth below, and a basement yet to come, where the evil will at last be confined in everlasting flames. Of course, the multi-storey version of good and evil do nothing to solve the problem and do much to create a secular no-man’s-land, increasingly populated with those who cannot believe in either a second storey nor a basement, and frequently see the believers as among the evil in this world, if only to complicate matters.

Of course, the two biblical books that treat the imagery of spiritual warfare with the evil one in the most literal fashion have Satan standing before God and holding converse about the long-suffering Job, that is, in the book by the name of Job, and engaged in a war in heaven with St. Michael and the angels and the other, that is, the Revelation of St. John. In neither account is the location of great significance, for the center of action in both books is not heaven but rather earth, with St. Job’s sufferings in the one in the various plagues and misfortunes befalling the earth in the other. Indeed, if the drama of either book is examined, the heavenly scenes are more like anterooms than an upper storey.

But the question remains: What account do we give of evil if we speak of the universe in the language of a single storey? I’m a believer, and as such generally find the source of evil to be in the abuse of free will, whether of human beings or on the part of heavenly beings, that is, the demonic. Nor do I see that account as different than the theological account to be found in the Fathers. What I bear witness to as a believer, however, is less an account of the origin of evil than to my faith that our universe, though caught in the throes of death and decay, has nevertheless been entered by its Creator, who, having taken flesh of the Virgin, has entered into the very depths of death and decay, themselves the result of evil, and defeated them.

And thus I see this one-storey world in which I live as the active stage upon which that same victory is being manifest. I cannot say in the least that I see that victory increasingly manifest, for the Christian account of the world is not an account of progress towards the kingdom of God, despite how some people speak, but instead it is a witness to the fact that the kingdom of God has entered our world in the Person of Jesus Christ, and there is nothing we can do about it. We can of course repent, believe the Gospel, and by God’s grace come to know that kingdom within ourselves and within the world in which we live, all of which is the gift of God, but we will also know that kingdom in the midst of this same story which continues—even though the world continues—to lie in darkness and to endure the presence and work of evil.

Of course, there’s much conversation about the metaphysics of evil and the nature of hell and eternal punishment to be found in our culture, and though I have recommended articles on the same that I find of value, I think that a large amount of Christian energy is wasted on such matters. For it is not a mastery of the metaphysics of the universe that makes any difference in our lives, but rather the embrace of the Gospel of Christ and obedience to his commandments. Those who point to the plenitude of evil around us will get little argument from me other than to say what appears to be a plenitude is the kingdom that cannot stand, and that its end will come. I speak, of course, of the kingdom of evil.

I received an email from someone that got lost in all of my computer workings, that was complaining of the evil in the world and wondering how I could speak of “heaven on earth.” I cannot think of anywhere else to speak of it, since all I know of heaven is what has come forth from the tomb at Pascha. That same resurrected Christ is now head of his body, the Church, and I cannot know of how to speak of that body if it is not heaven on earth, despite all that we sinners may drag within her. But all the sickness that enters the doors of a hospital do not make it less a place of healing. I cannot do other with the body of Christ but bear witness to the fact that it exists for nothing other than healing. The only weakness within the Church is when we patients forget why we came into its doors in the first place, and begin to imagine that we are already healed, or worse, that someone has turned us into the medical staff.

But though the one-storey world as we know it is a cosmic war zone, I cannot lose hope when I know that the end of the battle has already been accomplished in the coming of Christ. I wait for its manifestation, and I remember my dream, that this kingdom, this world of heaven, this world that I now know as Church, has many rooms. And as we wander from room to room, God opens up his kingdom to us, ever deeper and ever deeper. This one-storey world we live in is not very finite, despite all of its physical definitions. Somehow, it is deeper; it is wider; it contains more than we ever imagine. I wait for its full manifestation in the world.

But having known the risen Lord, I wait with hope, and I run the race with patience. What else are we supposed to do? Glory to God.