Heaven

[wittgenstein]

I have a problem with conventional images of heaven. I see heaven as being one with God,not having wings and living in a garden. Its more like a drop of rain that falls and becomes one with the ocean. I believe that my belief is the same as the great Catholic mystics and saints.
1 Corinthians 13:12

 

[soma]

I agree with you God is always present, we just have to remove the obstacles that keep us from God’s ocean of pure consciousness, which is heaven. The mystics are pointing to this grand experience. The people preaching about hell are experiencing that so that is what they are talking about.

 

[devoutchristian]

The people preaching about hell are experiencing that so that is what they are talking about.

Huh?

 

[bzkoss236]

I have a problem with conventional images of heaven. I see heaven as being one with God,not having wings and living in a garden. Its more like a drop of rain that falls and becomes one with the ocean. I believe that my belief is the same as the great Catholic mystics and saints.
1 Corinthians 13:12

I wouldn’t say that we become one with God, because that’s more in line with some Buddhist thinking. But I agree, it’s not typical depictions of heaven that people seem to have. It is more than likely that we won’t have wings. And I doubt we’d be naked in a garden too. My opinion of heaven is that it is something which we cannot actually imagine with our limited brains. Where the is a kind of oneness, but there is still individuality. Think more of people working together as a team, or as one unit, like a husband and wife are supposed to do. Being separate beings, but together in the Body of Christ. There will also be unimaginable joy, prayer, and worship.

 

[soma]

“One God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all…” Ephesians 4:6 NRSV

“You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe_____and tremble!” James 2:19 NKJV"

 

[Deo_Gratias42]

The Church teaches that until the Second Coming, when the world it made anew and we receive our resurrected bodies, we will be spiritual beings either in heaven, hell, or purgatory. Further, until that time, Heaven is a state of being.

 

[AlanFromWichita]

To me, heaven is to be where I am at any given moment, doing what I’m doing at that moment, but at all times with the peace of Christ, and the confidence that the Holy Spirit will guide us through every experience, comforting and challenging both.

Alan

 

[soma]

Alan, I agree with you when you are being in Christ doing what is intended, you are with God and in Heaven. God bless.

 

[JimR-OCDS]

I wouldn’t say that we become one with God, because that’s more in line with some Buddhist thinking…

Actually, it’s Catholic teaching. Union with God is the focus of St. John of the Cross, but also the prayer Jesus offered;

That they all may be one;
as you, Father, are in me, and I in you,
that they also may be one in us
so that the world may believe that you have sent me. John 17:23.

Jim

 

[Vouthon]

I have a problem with conventional images of heaven. I see heaven as being one with God,not having wings and living in a garden. Its more like a drop of rain that falls and becomes one with the ocean. I believe that my belief is the same as the great Catholic mystics and saints.
1 Corinthians 13:12

Brother Wittgenstein

I believe that your understanding of heaven is correct. It is not a place but a state of being and we experience a partial foretaste of it right now when we live in the will of God fom moment to moment:

“…Heaven is not a place and cannot be found on a map; rather it is where God’s will is done…”

*** - Pope Benedict XVI***

Therefore brother Alan is completely correct also.

Many Catholic mystics did use the image of a drop of water dissolving in an ocean to describe the state of union with God that we experience in this life and more fully in the next.

It is important to stress though that this does not mean that our soul ceases to exist.

We become by grace what God is by nature, partakers of the Divine Nature, seeing God without veil or intermediary in the Beatific Vision, the direct vision of the Essence of God. We do not become absorbed into the Essence and lose our creaturely identity. We see it without veil but it is so vast that Blessed Jacopone describes it as a “sea without a shore…without colour or hue”. He says that we “never touch bottom”, that is we can never posses fully or understand fully the Divine Essence to the extent that we become God as he is in Himself, unknowable. Saint Faustina describes it as being akin to a tiny vessel or vase trying to contain the atlantic ocean. It is impossible.

Blessed Ruusbroec described it as being like “breathing”, we simultaenously and eternally experience ourself as both creature and distinct from God, as Lover gazing eternally into Beloved; and also we experience a “union of indistinction with God” in which we have completely lost all awareness of self and feel no difference between our “I” and God’s divinity to the extent that Saint Catherine of Genoa says, “My I is God”. We become divine by participation yet also retaining our human nature and rational soul. We always remain distinct from God in essence or substance, whilst we also feel no difference between God and ourselves on another level.

That might sound paradoxical but the mystics explain that it is beyond human intellect to comprehend. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa back in the 1400s explained that “God is the coincidence of opposites”. Thus Saint John of the Cross said:

**St John of the Cross, Verses on the Ecstasy of Deep Contemplation
**
I was left there so absorbed,
so entranced, and so removed,
that my senses were abroad,
robbed of all sensation proved,
and my spirit then was moved
with an unknown knowing,
all knowledge there transcending.

This is also a state beyond time and place. We must relinquish any attempt to understand it through our cognition, our human intellectual knowledge. As the Sufis say, “the mind is the slayer of the Real”.

Blessed Suso says that it can only be experienced intuitively through the grace of God.

 

[Vouthon]

I wouldn’t say that we become one with God, because that’s more in line with some Buddhist thinking.

Brother Bz

Peace be with you.

Buddhists do not believe in God nor do they worship a Supreme Creator. They believe that “empty phenomena” is the mark of all reality which is conditioned and impermanent.

I think that what you are confusing it with is Vedanata - Hinduism, one of the schools of which is Non-Dualism which teaches a pantheistic doctrine whereby the creature is Atman (God) in essence and the individual soul is absorbed into the Supreme Deity, losing all sense of distinction.

Catholicism does not teach this doctrine although we do believe that, “God became man so that man can become god” (Saint Athanasius), that is we do believe that union with God is the ultimate end of the spiritual life.

For example there is an early agrapha (non-canon saying) of Jesus quoted by the apostolic father who wrote 2 Clement in the early-to-mid second century which tells us:

Second Clement 12:2-6 says (Lightfoot’s translation): “For the Lord Himself, being asked by a certain person when his kingdom would come, said, When the two shall become one.”

And Saint Teresa echoes Our Lord when she says:

“…It is plain enough what union is—two distinct things becoming one…It is as if a raindrop fell from heaven into a stream or fountain and became one with the water in it so that never again can the raindrop be separated from the water of the stream; or as if a little brook ran into the sea and there was thenceforward no means of distinguishing its water from the ocean; or as if a brilliant light came into a room through two windows and though it comes in divided between them, it forms a single light inside…”

***- Saint Teresa of Avila (1515 – 1582), Catholic mystic & Doctor of the Church ***

 

[soma]

"For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things."Romans 11:36 BBE

“That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou has sent me. And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.” John 17: 21 -23

“The Lord is God, in heaven on high and here on earth;there is no other God.” DEUTERONOMY 4:39 BBE

I enjoy reading the wisdom that people are expressing about heaven, unity and Christian Mysticism. Thank you and may we all have a Mystical Christmas.

 

[Vouthon]

"For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things."Romans 11:36 BBE

“That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou has sent me. And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.” John 17: 21 -23

“The Lord is God, in heaven on high and here on earth;there is no other God.” DEUTERONOMY 4:39 BBE

I enjoy reading the wisdom that people are expressing about heaven, unity and Christian Mysticism. Thank you and may we all have a Mystical Christmas.

Peace be with you Soma and may you have a Merry [and mystical!] Christmas

 

[ltravis]

We don’t have the capacity to understand Heaven in its fullness until we get there, but we do know that it is analogous to marriage. All that is good and authentic in the love of a husband and wife is but a hint of the union we will have with God in heaven, although that love is infinitely greater than what we experience in our marriages. Also, and I may not say it the best, but I have heard that all of our human desires and longings, although they may be disordered because of how our passions work through our fallen natures, are really in essence a search for God. Heaven, then, satisfies all our longings through our union with our beloved for whom we were made.

-LT

 

[Vouthon]

We don’t have the capacity to understand Heaven in its fullness until we get there, but we do know that it is analogous to marriage. All that is good and authentic in the love of a husband and wife is but a hint of the union we will have with God in heaven, although that love is infinitely greater than what we experience in our marriages. Also, and I may not say it the best, but I have heard that all of our human desires and longings, although they may be disordered because of how our passions work through our fallen natures, are really in essence a search for God. Heaven, then, satisfies all our longings through our union with our beloved for whom we were made.

-LT

Beautifully described Itravis and very true Merry Christmas!

 

[ltravis]

Beautifully described Itravis and very true Merry Christmas!

Thank you, and you too!