1 post tagged “heaven”
It was a revelation for me (little "r") when I realized as a young believer that heaven isn't just the sky. Heaven is in fact the created realm in which God has condescended to dwell. Furthermore, this created realm is characterized less by vacuous and cottony clouds and more by mysterious metaphors like sapphire walls, golden streets, and nightless skies. (The image to the left is from a Chinese photoblog website.)
What is heaven really like anyway?
Belinda Carlisle's famous 1987 hit, "Heaven," was the song my Turnabout date, Lisa, and I danced to when I was a junior in high school.
I mention it is because the song was mentioned by my friend who led a group of university friends in a discussion about what heaven is like. My friend started out by asking, "What would you want heaven to be like?"
Good question.
One of my favorite movies, in the "disturbing" movie category, is The Black Robe. There's a great line from that movie where a First Nation Canadian Native was asked by a Catholic priest if he wanted to go to heaven. His answer went something like this: "Why would I want to go to a place where there is no sex, no earth, no trees, and sit on a white cloud and play a harp?"
My answer to the question, "What do I wish heaven to be like?" would fall out along these lines: feasting without fat, work without toil, love without regret, intimacy without danger, female companionship without fear of sin--true sisterly companionship, that is--and something like sex.
I add something like sex because I'm not prepared to say there is sex in heaven, though like the golden streets, if there is, its beyond whatever we can imagine here.
I was surprised in my friend's discussion that no one mentioned the seventy virgins of the Muslim hope. Martyrs, according to the Qu'ran, get the blessed hope of seventy black-eyed virgins in the great heaven. (Joking, I heard one woman say recently that seventy virgins would hardly be heaven--but that's a bit off topic.)
Back to Belinda. She says heaven is a place we make. There are two ways to make heaven, as I see it: either to get the good stuff now (as she implies) or to push the good stuff off into the future.
As an example of the latter, have you ever noticed how every hope, every aspiration, every dream, every wish gets stuffed into heaven like a messy closet? Heaven is after all where we'll see our dead goldfish and beloved Fido again, where we'll be reunited again with friends and loved ones, where we'll get the equivalent to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory's rivers of chocolate milk and whipped cream daisies (that was my friend's childhood fantasy).
Other, less noble, thoughts of heaven have been promoted through the years. Mark Twain once wrote that you go to Heaven for the climate, and Hell for the company. Neitzsche said something similarly interesting: "Hell is where all the interesting people are."
Christians have deserved this with their often strict, and even gnostic, expressions of the Faith. Immanence falling prey to Transcendence. Basically, we push everything good into heaven; one wonders, are we afraid?
Sting took a potshot at the Beatitudes somewhere in the early nineties with his song that suggested that the inheritance of the earth was not that great a reward for the meek. But, seeing Heaven with a wider, more comprehensive view, being meek sounds like a good investment to me.
Be that as it may, it was observed in our discussion that we too easily forget that the chief delight of heaven is the companionship and intimacy with God. Heaven is supremely about the unhindered, unimpeded presence of Almighty God, our Triune Creator: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Of course, the key, or, in line with Charlie's Chocolate Factory--the "golden ticket"--is Jesus. Jesus is the key to heaven; His perfect life exchanged for my wretched and twisted one. His perfect reward becomes mine by believing the unseen and impossible truth: God is and can only be my Companion through the death of His Perfect Son.
Belinda Carlisle is correct that we "make" heaven a place on earth, but it isn't by losing ourselves in a "wave of love" but it is as we receive, by faith, the life and joys of the Coming Age here and now with a transcendent, immanent faith in Jesus. Then it is really true: "ooh, heaven is a place on earth." But this place is a foretaste, the foyer, of the Real Heaven, when what we know now in part, whether wine, women, or song, is then Fully Experienced.
