the gap or chasm between Heaven and Earth

A big part of Randy Alcorn's Heaven (the similarities between Earth and the New Earth), a prominent theme in Dallas Willard's The Divine Conspiracy (the Kingdom is now and near), and something explored by C.S. Lewis as well...

From Richard Mouw in First Things...

In his Letters to Malcolm, C.S. Lewis reminds his fictitious friend about an argument the two of them once had in Edinburgh—an encounter, Lewis remembers, where “we nearly came to blows.” Their heated argument was about the relation between our ordinary experiences of pleasure and the kind of glory we will experience in heaven. And although the two of them have cooled off quite a bit since then, says Lewis, their basic disagreement has not been resolved: Lewis wants to insist that the mundane delight that we take in things like dancing and playing games anticipates the kind of joy that awaits us in the afterlife, while Malcolm thinks that it is preposterous to compare such frivolous things to the glory that we will experience in the heavenly realms.

What Malcolm fails to understand, Lewis claims, is that even the most frivolous sorts of pleasures can function as “shafts of the glory” that awaits us in the end time....

Lewis' thoughts are similar to those that Fr. Andrew Greeley...[who says that we should] “find our world haunted by a sense that the objects, events, and persons of daily life are revelations of grace.”...

Lewis and Greeley make their cases in different ways. Lewis talks about how ordinary experiences, particularly pleasures, are anticipations of the future glory, while Greeley points to the ways in which ordinary things contain hints of the nature of God. But they share the same larger view of reality—one that sees the visible world, including the full range of our ordinary human experiences in that world, as pointing beyond itself to what is for us presently the realm of the invisible.

As it happens, I like this way of viewing things. Indeed, I find it quite compelling. This may not seem like a dramatic confession, so I have to add that I make this confession as a convinced Calvinist. And the fact is that both Lewis and Greeley go out of their way to single out Calvinism as especially hostile to their case....

I know that we Calvinists have gone out of our way to emphasize the desperate nature of our sinful condition....

From there, Mouw continues by making his case-- interesting but long and beyond where I want to go with this...