Dear Theophilus, 

We have talked about many things but there is one important topic which we have not touched on. We haven't looked at the teachings about heaven and I think that it may be time to deal with this.

When one mentions heaven, one expects eyes to roll as if this is a topic below the intelligence of adults; it's something that is fine for children but for intelligent adults, who have outgrown fairy stories and other childish things, this is a subject that does not deserve serious attention. I think that this attitude betrays a fear that anything that is good, that is happy, that is lasting is something unreal. This says much about our cynical view of life.

Another difficulty that arises is that when we talk about heaven we are talking about a reality so different, in some respects, from what we experience in this life, that the language bogs down in contradictions and paradoxes and all this adds to the air of unreality which envelopes the topic. And there is always the fear that to long for heaven is to somehow be intellectually below us.

What heaven testifies to is the fact that we have a deep yearning for fulfilment. When we hear about the glory of heaven what this speaks about is completion, about joy, about being loved. The whole history of man revolves around a few simple questions. The fundamental one is: am I loved? This gets twisted by us into: am I worthy of love? And this finally ends with the question: what can I do to make myself worthy of love? The resounding answer from God and the whole universe is that we are loved without any qualifications or limitations. This is mainly, what heaven attests to.

The question of time and eternity is very important in talking about heaven. We sometimes, mistakenly consider eternity as if it were a never ending stream of time. This is not what is meant by eternity. Probably the best definition of eternity was given by Boethius, who lived in the fifth century. He pointed out that even if time were unending, it would still not be eternal. Eternity is a special quality which enables all moments to be present. Thus God experiences all times as if they were here present in this very moment. But that is not the whole story. We must remember that when we talk about God and heaven and eternity, we are bound to come against paradoxes. God is outside time, and yet He is somehow inside time. The clearest illustration of this is the Incarnation. Christ was born a man, experienced what it means to be human and this included the experience of passing time. Heaven is ultimate reality and, if we find it difficult to describe our partial grasp of present reality through words and through definitions, how much harder it is to describe heaven through these terms. We cannot escape - we are forced into paradoxes.

What happens to us after death? Do we sort of sleep or do we find ourselves in some location other than heaven and earth? These are questions that naturally arise and there have been different answers given. Maybe what I can do is to focus on some of the more important questions and points which have some degree of agreement.

First, allow me to dissuade you of an idea that is very common and has come to be accepted as if it were part of Christian teachings. Nowhere in the Old Testament or for that matter, in the New Testament, is there talk of the immortality of the soul. Human beings are seen as indissolubly consisting of the body and soul and neither is immortal. The reason why this concept is so widely accepted within Christendom is that it is easy to picture. The truth that Christianity teaches and defends is the truth of the Resurrection. What this means is the following. After our physical death, we still retain our personhood; we do not disappear forever and continue to exist as personal, conscious beings. There is some talk about sleep after death but this does not mean an unconscious state, as we experience on earth when we go for our nightly rest. What it rather refers to is that we are in an incomplete state between death and the end of the world. Our place of residence has changed. We used to live in our physical world and now we reside in God - He is our 'world'. By dying, do you enter eternity and now see all moments at once? There is some indication of this in the liturgy. In the part of the service where the bread and wine are transformed, one of the prayers offers thanks for the Second Coming of Christ as if it had already occurred. However, there are others who feel that there is an interim period of waiting before we experience the full joy. And you can understand this to a certain extent through the following example. If you were to die today, many of those who are related to you and others whom you loved would not be with you. That is, your joy would not be complete. There is therefore, some would say, a period of waiting. There is also some support for a cleansing occurring once we die so that the last vestiges of sin can be washed away from us. This will probably be a painful operation but undertaken willingly by us so that we can be more prepared to receive the gifts offered to us.
It may be surprising to you, Theophilus, but one of the most common objections that I hear about heaven is that of boredom. It is hard to imagine how we could go on and on and not eventually become bored. This is beyond our wildest imaginations. The reason why this question arises is that the only reality that we experience in any continued and strong fashion is the reality of the fallen world that we inhabit. Here, boredom is a problem. However, we cannot project what we experience here onto heaven because it will be a different level of existence. That may be some form of experience of time but, we will also have experience of eternity and this eternity will involve our exploration of God without end. This is all very hard to explain with our limited experiences and our limited language but boredom sounds more like the problem in hell as opposed to heaven. Maybe the vastness of the physical universe is a metaphor for the complexity and breadth of the post death existence that awaits us. Those vast expanses of space hint at an adventure that awaits us. Love is dynamic and the very matter that constitutes us is dynamic. If we were to look into the depths of an atom, we would see a tiny world of continual motion as subatomic particles swirl and move around. What underlies boredom is the unchangeability of things - lack of newness. But what love testifies to and what creation hints at is that God is dynamic and so is life, and because of this dynamism boredom is not something that awaits us.

I think that what heaven points to is the fact that we expect too little. The joys that await us are beyond our wildest imaginings and our wildest hopes. We find it hard to believe that heaven exists because of the situation in which we find ourselves in this fallen world. But we need to hear about heaven because that is our true homeland. We are homeless vagabonds in the truest meaning of the word and that pain that lives there in the deepest recesses of our hearts is there to remind us that we are bound for another land. That pain is there to give us, paradoxically, hope and to underline the fact that what we now have is not all that there is. Some laugh at this as wishful daydreaming. But, as there is something to answer our physical and emotional yearnings doesn't this point to something that is beyond our limited present vision and which will satisfy our deepest yearnings? To say otherwise is to be cynical to the utmost degree and to see this whole universe as one big, bad joke on us. Somehow, in my very depths, I don't feel that this is so.

You will never know but you must accept the existence of heaven on faith. Why this is so is still a mystery to us but that is the reality in which we find ourselves. Someday we shall see; for now perceive as if through a haze. But this does not make heaven less real. Heaven is ultimate reality and maybe one of the reasons why we know it as through a fog is due to the fact that much of our lives is spent in living in delusion. We tend to form comfortable, manageable idols that we can control and manipulate, giving up in the process a rich and enlivening reality. Someday, Theophilus, we shall know. For now, goodbye.

Yours,

Bar-Abbas

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