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We all hope to go to heaven, but not just yet. In fact, we do everything possible to delay our arrival! And in spite of all the holy pictures and blissful images of heaven, most of us are rather confused about what to expect.
Will babies who died still be babies in heaven, and will those who died in old age always be old? Will our wounds be healed, our missing hair restored? Will we get bored after some time? What will we do all day? In other words, what is heaven really like?
There have always been people, visionaries, mediums and over-confident Christians, who not only believed they could describe heaven, but also tell us who can get there…only Christians of course, or perhaps only Catholics! But Jesus dispels such certainties. The Sadducees tried to trap him with the example of a woman who had married seven husbands each of whom had died. They asked him whose wife she would be in heaven. He answered that she would not be anyone’s wife. Their question was irrelevant because heaven is totally different from what we know. It is beyond our questions, beyond our imagining.
People living long ago could not have envisaged our world of television and the internet. A crawling caterpillar cannot imagine that it will soon fly as a beautifully coloured butterfly. Jesus is telling us that heaven far exceeds scriptural images or the creations of artists, musicians and poets. It is more than winged angels and harps; more than a place of mansions, of feasting or of cool waters. It is far beyond anything we know or need to know…”No eye has seen nor ear heard, nor has it even entered into the heart of man, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1Cor.2:9). What we need is not answers but rather the deep faith and trust to live with mystery.
There are however important truths to remember about heaven. Firstly it is not something far removed from this world in which we live, “mourning and weeping in this valley of tears”; not a place for which we can earn or buy a spiritual admission ticket. It is a continuation of the here and now; a completion and bringing to fulfilment of the powerful evolution of God’s creation and of all that is best in the longings, hopes and strivings of the human heart. All of this yearning, this forward movement would be meaningless if it did not lead to ultimate crowning glory in God himself. As St. Augustine found, “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you”.
Moreover, God does not “send” us to heaven (or to hell). He merely honours, as he always does, the free choices we make every day, the bricks with which we build our heaven. At the Ascension two angels appeared and asked the apostles, “Why are you looking up at the sky?” Jesus had told them that from now on they would find him, not in the sky, but in the broken, the outcast and the marginalized. If they recognised and served him there, heaven would be theirs… “Come and possess the Kingdom prepared for you”. Simple, but not so easy!
The following verse sums up the message:
“Oh to be with the saints above,
That would be perfect glory.
But Lord, to live with the saints below;
Now that is a different story.”
Bro
Columba Gleeson
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