The Bible actually provides very little concrete idea of what heaven is like. We know there are many mansions and that once you drink the water you will not ever be thirsty again, but painfully little more than that. The biggest selling point we have is that if you get to go there, at least you are not forever roasting in hell!
In the church I attended as a child, there was a huge painting up behind the altar of God the Father seated on a heavenly throne, surrounded by all these chubby little cherubs, each sitting, hands neatly folded, on his own little cloud, gazing longingly up at God. I studied this painting thoroughly, and remember thinking, as an eight-year-old, This is why I’m trying so hard to be good, so I can sit around and stare at God all day? Needless to say, I didn’t draw much inspiration from that painting.
As it might help allay some of our fear of death, I think it is a good use of our time to consider what, exactly, heaven may be like.
First, keep in mind that nobody really knows what heaven is like. I take this as license for us to make it be anything we want. After all, we will not learn the truth until we are dead, and by that time we’ll probably have a lot of other things on our minds. In the meantime, we can gratify ourselves with a lifetime of beliefs that may help us lead more loving lives while still on earth.
While some may think of this as mere self-deception, barring any factual evidence to the contrary, isn’t any concept we may have of heaven a form of self-deception? If we think of heaven as a place where we will be reunited with our family and loved ones, isn’t such a thought going to serve to make us happier and more serene in our lives today? And are not happiness and serenity likely to lead us to be more loving and caring individuals than we might be were we to live with the uncertainty and anxiety of having little or no concept of where we’re headed?
We do know that God loves us, and this knowledge can serve as a strong foundation. For example, knowing he loves us, we can pretty much assume he is not going to make heaven be like, say, North Dakota. When we love someone and want to take them out for their birthday, we are not going to take them to a grubby diner and insist they can only have the chili. No, we are going to take them to a nice restaurant and let them order whatever they want.
I also want to point out that heaven need not occupy physical space – and that, if it does, it can occupy an infinity of physical spaces in an infinity of dimensions or be spread out over the infinity of the cosmos. My point here is that there need not be any one place we call heaven. Heaven can be our own unique creation; each one of us can have heaven be just as we like it, without taking anything away from anybody else. If I, for example, want you to figure prominently in my heaven, but you have plans of your own, there is no reason you couldn’t be in both places at once. Ordinary physical limitations need not apply; after all, this is heaven!
There is more here than mere frivolity. To my way of thinking, keeping in mind (and taking to heart) how much God loves us is one of the major tasks in our lives. And we need to do a better job of it. The more we realize and experience his love for us, the more likely we are to be loving to our brothers and sisters in Christ. While our knowledge of hell is not extensive, it is very dramatic: burning forever. We could benefit from having a better idea of where God’s love will lead us: it would balance our fear with love and replace anxiety and uncertainty in this life with gratitude, generosity, and compassion.
Just as a for instance, I would like to tell you a little about what heaven will be like for me. First, it will almost always be seventy-eight degrees and sunny. The fishing will be varied and excellent. All my friends and family will be around, all of them happy and in good health. There will be no cell phones. There will be no designated hitter rule. There will be this huge telephone directory, providing the phone numbers of everyone who has ever lived and even fictional characters from books and movies. Whenever you want, you can call one of these people up and invite them out for dinner and drinks on some deck somewhere with a view of the sunset. I already have a partial list drawn up; it includes John F. Kennedy, Jesus, Julius Caesar, my grandparents, Charles Dickens, Mary Magdalene, Horatio Hornblower, Abraham Lincoln, and Cleopatra.
Let us return to hell for a moment – so to speak! I think God is just too loving for there to really be a hell: the notion of someone burning forever is just not in a loving God’s playbook. I think if there is a hell, this is it, where we are right now. And just as we were saying about heaven just now, we could probably benefit from a closer look at our definition of hell.
Burning for eternity is just too permanent; if you think about the suffering we all endure here – non punitive, informative, and temporary – it makes much more sense. First of all, it is not a punishment: the pain and suffering we undergo here is self-inflicted, occurring when we turn away from God. We cannot really help turning away from God – our fears and anxieties drive us too hard. And most of the time we are acting more out of blind panic than doing it willingly or consciously. We are just making mistakes as we grope our way back toward the Garden. And, thankfully, for the majority of us the pain and suffering are within manageable limits.
Also – and this is key – it does not last forever. We suffer, we recover, we suffer, we recover and hopefully, we are learning from our suffering, so that each time it happens we are suffering a little less and recovering a little more. One could make the case that we are on earth to suffer and learn; the more we learn, the less we need suffer.
God wants us to grow through taking his love in and through loving him and our brothers and sisters in Christ. He does not want to stick us somewhere to burn forever. I mean, what is the point in that? The more loving we become, the closer we grow to him – and that is, after all, all that God wants.