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.