Review
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Title: All The Way to Heaven: Discovering God’s Love in the Here and Now
Author: David Grandy
Publisher: Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center, in cooperation with Deseret Book
Genre: Nonfiction
Year Published: 2021
Number of Pages: 104
Binding: Hardback
ISBN13: 978-1-9503-0409-7
Price: $19.99
Reviewed by Michelle Magnusson for the Association for Mormon Letters
All The Way to Heaven is heaven, if you’ll forgive my blatant plagiarism of Saint Catherine of Siena. David Grandy uses one hundred pages well, laying out a philosophical feast inviting the reader to awake, arise, and draw on the power of God’s love all around. This short volume brought me hope, a glimpse of the expansive theology and collectivist gospel that first drew me to the faith. His challenge to us is a familiar one – lose yourself in God’s love, and in doing so, you will find eternal life. Without trivializing the trials and traumas of mortality, Grandy urges the reader to follow the long arc of God’s love.
Grandy seamlessly (and refreshingly) incorporates the voice of many – women and men, scientists and philosophers, poets, prophets, and even Cecil Rhodes. While many call for love and unity in these divisive times, Grandy’s call elevates the beautiful diversity of the world and her people as a strength of Zion, rather than asking some to suppress their uniqueness or silencing already marginalized members to better “fit” with a dominant group. Unlike many authors, he seems at peace with the mysteries of godliness, buoyed up by a belief in the truth that underlies it all — God is Love.
All The Way to Heaven draws us back to how the organic world is shot through and animated with God’s love and reminds us how the very ubiquity of small miracles in nature can blind us to the awesome nature of God by sheer familiarity. His judicious use of metaphors from the natural world – seeds, sun, grapes, amphibians – strengthens his case and are easily incorporated into everyday teaching and personal worship.
Grandy challenges readers to reflect on and challenge the earthly models that we may have imprinted on our conception of heaven. Without chiding, we are confronted by the limiting aspects of viewing the world through a lens of scarcity, colonialism, property ownership, and inequity. In his words, “Our sense of awe atrophies as we grow into the zero-sum practices of human culture.” Grandy offers gratitude and an abundance mindset as a way to unlock the blessings God has prepared now, on this the best of all possible worlds, and after we die.
Each of five sections weaves complete thoughts together, but with enough dangling threads left for a reader to continue to enjoy this short volume over and over again, each time refreshing and renewing the sense of wonder and awe of the expansive vision, both of God’s love and the ongoing restoration.
As Grandy said about the work of another, “Every detail brims with divine love, so much so that even small, seemingly insignificant things turn out to be inexhaustibly deep reservoirs of creative possibility.” Grandy calls the reader to gently reflect on how the universality of God’s love might reshape our lives and discipleship in big and small ways. If the thought of “enduring to the end” has ever left you exhausted, All the Way to Heaven offers an effervescent new way of viewing and walking our path home.