Archives for September 2024

These meditations on heaven will be anything but systematic.  I hope, in any case, that they will encourage readers’ own reflections.  For a fine and stimulating systematic treatment, I recommend the book The Life of the World to Come by the unjustly neglected Abbot Anscar Vonier, OSB, late abbot of Buckfast Abbey in England.  What follows will be indebted to one of his observations.

Whenever we recite or chant the Creed, we profess to “look forward to…the life of the world to come.”  Following Abbot Vonier, I want to point out two aspects of this line.  First, the word used in the Latin version of the Creed is exspecto, which means ‘to look out for, to await, to expect’.  This range of meanings differentiates our desire for heaven from worldly hope.  For example, I hope to finish the current series of reflections…but I might not actually see this hope through to fruition.  By contrast, God’s kingdom will come whether I desire it or not, and nothing I do can hasten or delay its realization.  When we pray “thy kingdom come”, we are asking God for the change of heart that will bring about in us a foretaste of the peace and joy of His kingdom even now.  As we consent to be changed, our waiting will be marked by a greater and greater desire for the final manifestation of His kingdom.  Vonier connects this desire to the Christian theological virtue of hope.

The second important aspect is what we await.  According to the Creed, it is not heaven but ‘life’—a new kind of life, but still congruent with what we already know by experience.  Too often, we understand abstract ideas like the ‘beatific vision’ as negations of life as we know it.  The very fact that we limit ourselves to talking about the world to come as ‘heaven’ is an indication of this impoverishment.  Instead, the Biblical witness offers us “new heavens and a new earth [Rev 21: 1]” in which God dwells together with His people.  God’s glory is the very light that permeates all creation [21: 23], such that the new earth is “full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea [Is 11: 9; Hab 2: 14].”  In the beatific vision, we see God’s light in all creation, and we see all creation in God’s light.

Do we truly desire heaven?  We often answer, perhaps only out of a professional obligation, ‘yes’.  But in my experience, this is frequently a perfunctory answer that masks a real ambivalence.  Sure, we would prefer ending up in heaven to ending up in hell—and I make this observation not to question anyone’s faith in the spiritual realities proposed for our belief by the Church.  But when you probe a bit and find out what heaven really means to people, I fear that we get a picture of a place rather inferior to the world that we presently occupy.  Few of us would gladly say with St. Paul, “Death is gain!”

What are we picturing when we picture heaven?  If we can go by popular presentations in advertising and the like, it is a pretty boring place.  Persons sitting alone in white robes, stroking harps that they obviously don’t know how to play, all the while perched on a cloud with nothing else to look at but bland, blue sky.  Not much fun there.

Sometimes, we hear pious allusions to the beatific vision, the vision of God.  What does this mean to most people?  I fear that it sounds like staring into the sun for all eternity.  Again, better than eternal hellfire, but hardly a reward that inspires us to heroic acts of sacrifice in God’s honor and service.

At funerals, we get a slightly different picture: it would seem that souls live on, indeed, perhaps already get to heaven right after death, if we think they were pretty good people.  But what kind of existence is it?  We speak too infrequently of the resurrection of the body.  It seems to me that our heaven is a Gnostic, docetic heaven, devoid of actual bodies, where a vague ‘life force’ lingers on, blissful, perhaps, in a nirvana-like absence of pain.  But again, if this is what we are after, why not take up Buddhist meditation and experience some of that deliverance now?  Why would anyone instead choose to take up  the Cross and follow the Crucified?  And where is He, come to think of it, in all of this?

This leads Christians to be at cross-purposes with their own beliefs.  How can we practice true detachment—the art of living in the world while not being of it, of seeking first the Kingdom of Heaven—when our immediate life seems so much better?

This ambivalence is surely part and parcel of the ignorance of the theological virtue of hope that, in my experience, so frequently marks the lives of many Christians today.  When I entered the monastery, I honestly had no idea what ‘hope’ meant.  At one point, I spent several weeks in lectio divina reading every reference to hope and trying to understand it.  What broke through for me was the astonishing opening paragraph of St. Peter’s first epistle.

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!  By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and to an inheritance which is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” [1 Peter 1: 3-5]

There is a lot to unpack there, and I may do so in future posts, as we reflect on some important aspects of the reality of heaven.

Another discovery that helped clarify the notion of heaven for me was the peculiar eschatology of the gospel of John.  Eschatology is the ‘study of the last things’, of obvious import to our present topic.  In the commentaries on John, one frequently reads that the evangelist presents a tension between a ‘realized eschatology’ and a ‘future eschatology’.  What this means is that it is hard to know, in reading his gospel, whether he is teaching us that heaven is entirely in the future, or if it is something present now in the church.  We need not resolve this tension to recognize here another fault in our present notions of heaven as exclusively belonging to an ‘afterlife’.  Afterlife!  The very word subtly suggests something that happens once life is over, rather than the fulfillment, the abundance of true and eternal life.

Now, if we once more do a perfunctory inventory of our Catholic vocabulary, we can affirm that the celebration of the Eucharist is a foretaste of the heavenly banquet.  But how many of us truly experience this?  Do we really feel transported to a ‘place’ or state of being in which all desires find overflowing fulfillment, in which all sadness is taken away, in which all grievances fade and true peace and love reign between individuals and nations?  Or do we simply repeat on faith that we intellectually assent to this pious fiction image?

Ultimately, the fleeting nature of the world is bound to bring us to a profound existential ennui, even outright anxiety and depression, if we cannot imagine a happiness transcending the things of the world—and if we cannot imagine God actually willing that we attain to a transcendent happiness.

So how do we set about recovering a lived experience of the hope of heaven?  How can we truly learn to desire, above all desires, to ‘acquire possession of our inheritance, to the praise of God’s glory’ [cf. Eph 1: 14]?  In forthcoming posts, I will begin exploring these questions.

“ ‘Salvation’ is not just a matter of avoiding hell and somehow getting into heaven. It is, as its etymology indicates, the wholeness of good health. Present-day Italian still says la salute, with the two meanings of health and salvation. No-one is healthy who has any sort of infirmity. Every fault, even the smallest and least noticeable, means the contamination of a little health, a little ‘salvation’.”

—Irenee Hausherr, SJ, Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East, p. 23

As long as heaven and hell are seen only as ‘afterlife’ choices, we will be inclined to a view of morality that is a kind of jumping through hoops or scorekeeping. Atheists who reject this view have reason to do so, I think. However, it is not at all representative of the great tradition of Christian moral reflection, which sees ‘salvation’ in the terms that Hausherr presents it in the quote: health, fullness of life, joy, contentment. All our choices lead either toward such flourishing or away from it.

Over the course of our lives, we will have tended either toward ‘salvation’ or away from it. And the realities of heaven and hell correspond to these patterns of choices.