Heaven

I like the story about the old Irishwoman who was being attended on her deathbed by a priest; and after he had given her the Last Sacraments, he said to her, ‘Molly, don’t you have any fear at all about meeting God?’

‘Afraid?’ said the old woman. ‘Why should I be afraid? Sure, and He’ll be glad to see me!’

Her certainty of a good welcome; the naturalness of her idea of Heaven, as if going to meet the Lord of the universe were no more than going across a street to visit a neighbour – these attitudes may seem a little presumptuous to the timid-minded. Yet they may be precisely the attitudes that God intends us to have, as a consequence of a whole-hearted belief in the incarnation and the efficacy of Our Lord’s Sacrifice on the Cross.

Before His Ascension, Our Lord spoke to His disciples and told them he was going to prepare a place for them; His words were words of consolation, partly (I think) intended to prepare them for His absence, and partly to make it wholly plain to them that Heaven would be the perfect homecoming, not something strange, something absolutely other-wordly, but the entry into a place prepared by the Son of Man for His fellow-men, a chamber, as it were, constructed by the Bridegroom for the Bride.

If all we know of God were His transcendence, then we might have reason for timidity – but that is not all we know – we know He is also a Man like ourselves, acquainted with the needs and secret hopes of men, and the place He has prepared for us will contain the perfect answer to our most intimate desires. Four factors are linked together in the Christian view of Heaven – perfect rest, perfect joy, the meeting with those we love who have gone before us, and dwarfing the rest as a mountain dwarfs the plain, the sight of the Bridegroom, God Himself, who is the man Jesus. Granted that the essential meaning of Heaven lies in the attainment of the Beatific Vision, and that without this all other joys would be dust and ashes, yet at different times in our lives our hope will tend to emphasise different factors. I would like page 440 to stress that Heaven is a human place, a human condition. When the poet Housman write, with the grief of the honest atheist

The lad who hopes for Heaven
Will fill his mouth with mould

He was not talking nonsense; he was saying in effect – ‘What is your insubstantial Heaven to me, when my friend who has died lies rotting in the ground?’

Yet I do not think he would have bothered to mention the matter if his heart had not been tempted to belief, as our hearts are periodically tempted to unbelief. The faith that he had lost still haunted and tormented him. No doubt he has now attained, or is in process of attaining to that Vision which he believed impossible; for he was not a lukewarm man; and we Catholics have been told that the Fiery Lake lies under the Cross, that it is for ourselves, who have been given the fullness of the Faith, that the final loss of God is a real danger, not for the pagans and the honest atheists and the half-believers. So I trust, by God’s mercy, I will meet Housman in Heaven. But the question he raises must still be met fairly and squarely – in the face of obvious physical death, what reason have we to believe in Heaven?

Setting aside what cannot be set aside – Our Lord’s explicit teaching and His own Resurrection from the dead – our answer would have to be – ‘Very little reason.’ As we have seen in recent times in our own community, among the Protestants, a Christianity from which the Resurrection has been subtracted is a sad ghost of itself, lacking the true virtue of hope. And the banal chatter of those spiritualist séances which we are so rightly forbidden to attend would, if it were true, indicate only a shadow life beyond the grave, a disembodied continuation of this life which would be a reason or sorrow, not for joy. Our hope lies in quite a different quarter – in the full-blooded and God-founded Catholic belief that our souls, if there is any charity in them, will attain to the Beatific Vision, and that after a time of waiting our bodies, transformed and resurrected, will be joined to our souls, so that the life of Heaven will be a fully human life, a million times more full than this has ever been. The promise is incredible, in the sense that it is so much more than we would naturally hope for; but it is wholly credible to us, because Our Lord has made it and has immeasurably strengthened our weak faith and hope by the evidence of His own Resurrection, like a father who goes ahead on the road where his children are to follow.

Heaven will be rest. This promise in itself is enough to bring gladness to the hearts of people weighed down with infirmities and tasks that seem beyond their strength. Rest from physical pain; rest from temptation; rest from the daily sight of the world’s apparently incurable disorders; rest in the absolute certainty that the battle is won at last, that we need never fear again page 441 the traitor inside us who would deliver us to the enemy. When a man lies down at midnight, after a hard day’s work and worry, it seems like a return to an abandoned innocence, to the sleep of childhood – and in that feeling there may be a faint foretaste of the peace of Heaven. At least I hope there is; for I doubt if we have been left wholly without rumours and intuitions of the Fatherland to which we are going.

And growing out of this rest, as a flower grows out of the soil it was created to grow in, there will be the perfect joy of Heaven – joy in God, joy in the fellowship of the Blessed, joy in one’s own nature finally purified and set in harmony with its Creator, joy in a creation – here I speak of the life of Heaven after the final Resurrection of the just – for the first time truly ours, as Adam knew the world and rejoiced in it before he fell.

Artists perhaps are more given than other people to the pursuit of intuitions regarding this kind of joy – and I can remember seeing an orchard in Central Otago, putting out its flowers after the winter, and feeling in my heart what I believe was a faint premonition of the joy of Heaven – a burning longing for that life, when we will really see the creation as it is, a holy cluster of perfections resting in the hand of God. These premonitions are always accompanied by a heightened sense of the habitual deafness, blindness, vagueness, weakness, of human life as we know it on earth, clouded by sin and ignorance and bodily infirmity. If the darkness is so great, how great the light will be! The Church tells us that the joy of Heaven would be far too great for our souls and bodies to bear, if they were not providentially strengthened by God Himself. This joy is our bourne; it is what we were all made for; and in a sense it is our birthright, not by natural birth, but by the new birth God gave us in our Baptisms.

If this was the light that the martyrs saw, one can understand that some of them sang with joy as they lay in the cesspits of the Roman prisons or were taken to be devoured by wild beasts. The meaning of Christian life is that we hope to see God Himself – the meaning of our life on earth is that it is a preparation for that life – and the fulfilment of that hope will not be like coming into a strange house, but into our own house transformed. Now – like the gladiators who came before Caesar, not without nobility – we can say to One who is greater than Caesar – ‘Lord, we who are about to die salute You!’ And He may seem to make no reply to us.

His reply is withheld until we have truly died. Then for the first time we will truly begin to live. And his reply will be – ‘Come to me. Did you think at times that I was an uncaring Father? Those pains were all to prepare you for this. I too suffered them on the Cross. This joy is the meaning of life. I have loved you always with an everlasting love.’ The old Irishwoman was not mistaken in her estimate of the welcome she would receive.

What will we do in Heaven? We have been told that we will see God; and perhaps that should be sufficient for us. But the child who goes to Church and thinks he is being told there that he is destined to spend eternity playing page 442 a harp – he has of course mistaken an allegorical for a literal statement – may well decide that Heaven is a place of great boredom. He would prefer to spend his time gaffing eels. And it is arguable that he may be able to do precisely this in Heaven after the final Resurrection.

I find it very difficult to agree with those theologians who argue that the Blessed will do nothing else but contemplate God. It would seem a waste of perfect intellects and perfect bodies not to employ them to the full. We are free, I think, without heresy to dream from time to time what Heaven would be like – since it will certainly be the fulfilment of our secret longing, our deepest desire – and I trust my fellow Catholics will forgive me if I indulge here in a little imaginative speculation.

Perhaps in Heaven, if God’s mercy brings me there, I will write (or at least compose and speak) the true and great poems I was never able to make on earth. Not that it will seem strange if I do; for there I will be in the permanent company of heroes, goddesses, prophets and sages. I look forward to comparing notes with Dylan Thomas in that place. And I may eat and drink in Heaven; not for bodily sustenance, but for communal pleasure, as Our Lord ate and drank on the lakeshore after His Resurrection. There will be animals in Heaven; I am sure of it – above all, cats, the animals I have loved most on earth. Those bays and beaches, with white sand, rushing breakers and waving toetoe, which filled me with joy on earth, as a foretaste of Paradise, will be mine again to walk on.

Nobody in Heaven will be crippled in body or mind. There also will be the true fulfilment of sexual love – not, in all probability, by the means so often misused on earth, but through the constant joy which will go with the company of the entirely wise and the entirely beautiful. There husbands and wives who stayed together with patience on earth, often without much communication or mutual understanding, will see that relationship become a perfect strand in the life of Heaven, where all things are understood and appreciated, and no blindness is possible.

‘Ah,’ some critic may say, ‘but you think too materially! Heaven is the place of spiritual joy. . . .’

Indeed, the joy of Heaven is primarily spiritual; as most joy is spiritual even here if we look at it closely enough. But after the final Resurrection the joy of the Blessed will be able to overflow to their transformed and perfected bodies. I would join issue in due charity with any person who does not consider Heaven to be the fully human state. We will never be wholly ourselves till we arrive there.

After the vision of God, the company of the Blessed will be our greatest joy – not just the canonised saints and martyrs, but our relatives, our friends, our ancestors, who were sinners one earth like ourselves; but there they will be no longer sinners but saints – and the vast multitude of strangers whom we have never met, who will there be strangers no longer, but our lovers and page 443 friends – I pray that it might be, by the mercy of God, the whole human race whom we meet there. For the joy of Heaven is essentially communal. And for each of us there is a special love, a special desire that will be satisfied. For me it will be to see the face of my Mother Mary who is also the Mother of God. But concerning that vision I had better be silent; for whatever hope and love and faith I have is intertwined with it.

I have often thought that the greatest single limitation which has come to the human race as a result of the Fall of Man is that none of us truly understand the meaning of our own lives. At times we catch glimpses of meaning in the pattern; but most of the time we simply have to trust that there is a meaning and that this meaning is known to God. But when the process of the Fall has finally been reversed – when earthly life, death, purgation, have come to an end, and we are received into the Fatherland of Heaven – then God will give us divine knowledge, and we will see our lives and the lives of others as wholly meaningful.

How great a thing it will be to know and understand the whole history of the human race, in all its eddies and turnings – to know the meaning of the life of an ancient Egyptian, a Viking, a Vietnamese villager, a New York gang leader, a member of a Soviet Komsomol! – to have this knowledge which is God’s knowledge of the human race, intimately ours, so that the lives of others become part of our own life. Yet this, I think, will only be a small part of the knowledge of Heaven. And still in each person’s heart there will be that central sanctuary . . . where God will dwell for ever.

Yet these speculations must fall infinitely short of the reality of Heaven; for there the life of God will be our life, as flame is joined to a candle, but without the candle being consumed. And the Scriptures tell us that no eye has seen or heart conceived what has been prepared for those who love God. This much at least we know: that Christ has prepared a place for us, of such a kind that our joy will be complete there and all expectations fulfilled; that the cloud of darkness and tribulation that hangs over our earthly life will be wholly dispersed; that if we die with the love of God present in our souls, then after death and whatever purgation may be necessary, we will see God and be joined to Him for ever. And in the light of this knowledge our earthly pains appear no longer a curse but a blessing, since they are the means by which we are joined to His Passion so that we may finally share in His joy. Because Heaven exists, no life need ever be a failure.

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