Articles under Meditations on Heaven

“Jesus said to them, ‘Is not this why you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God?  For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven.’” [Mark 12: 24-25]

When we rise, “we shall all be changed” [1 Cor 15: 51] from this life as we know it to a life akin to the angelic life.  What does this mean for us?  What are angels, exactly, and why should the angelic life be desirable?

God “makes the winds his messengers,” as Psalm 104 (103): 4 tells us.  Unfortunately, this is not the best translation for our present purposes.  It is another of those places where the old, rickety translation better conveys the tradition.  The Douay-Rheims renders the verse this way:  “Who makest thy angels spirits.”  For good measure, the King James Bible reads almost exactly the same: “Who maketh his angels spirits.”

So if, in the life of the world to come, at the resurrection, we will ‘be like the angels,” this must mean something like the privileging, enlarging and fulfillment of our spiritual natures.  It does not mean the loss of our bodies, but their transformation by the illumination of grace, into pure ‘spiritual bodies’.  (N.B.  All of 1 Corinthians 15 is worth reading in this context.  I will append what I consider to be the core of that chapter’s message at the end of this post.)

Here, alas, we come to a major stumbling block for discussing the life of the world to come.  For when we speak today of ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’, we mean something like the very opposite of what is meant in classical theology, which is to say that we have largely reduced these concepts to the very physical realm from which they ought to be distinguished.  When persons today claim to be ‘spiritual’ and not religious, they often sense something overly ‘fleshly’ in religious observance:  legalism, party spirit and the like.  But in setting out to find something ‘spiritual’ instead, they most frequently fall into the mistake of elevating feelings above reason, of seeking freedom in autonomy—the freedom, that is, to create their own rules.  And frequently these ad hoc rules privilege emotions in such a way as to imprison us in our ‘flesh’, that part of us to which emotions properly belong.

Similarly, ‘soul’ is used almost exclusively in contemporary parlance to mean ‘feeling’.  To the earnest, urgent question that taxed classical philosophers from Aristotle to Gregory of Nyssa—“What is the soul”—we moderns can jokingly respond, “What a jazz musician has.”  When we refer to ‘soul music’, we do not mean that it is music which displays an elevation of intellectual and aesthetic qualities.  This is not to say that soul music has no place in our world, only to point out the degradation suffered by the soul in such casual re-definitions.

Traditionally, the soul and spirit have been taken to be that part of us which is ‘spiritual’, the part that separates us from ‘brute’ animals.  Our spiritual nature consists of intelligence, imagination, creativity, appreciation of beauty, free will and the acknowledgment of moral choices, and so on.  It is these faculties that make us already ‘like the angels in heaven’.  To the extent that we live at the spiritual level of existence, we already live the angelic life.  This does not in any way denigrate the body, but elevates the body to its proper pitch, directing the emotions toward their proper fulfillment as well.  The Transfiguration of Christ is a foretaste of how the body appears when the spirit is revealed in its final state.  That this can happen already on earth is manifest in many lives of the saints.

***

1 Corinthians 15: 35-53

But some one will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?”  You foolish man! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.  And what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain.  But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body.  For not all flesh is alike, but there is one kind for men, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish.  There are celestial bodies and there are terrestrial bodies; but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another.  There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory.

So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.  It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power.  It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.  Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.  But it is not the spiritual which is first but the physical, and then the spiritual.  The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven.  As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven.  Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.  I tell you this, brethren: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.

Lo! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.  For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality.

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.