Q: What is heaven? I need the best answer you can give me, because my friend who asked me this is kind of hard to convince!
A: The modern mind understandably — almost commendably, one might say — has a lot of difficulty with a heaven imagined in popular terms. The benign, bearded Grandfather on a throne in the clouds, surrounded by plump babies with wings and larger ones in their nighties blowing trumpets, is both difficult to place in the cosmos and singularly unattractive to most of the denizens of the twenty-first century.
Just when I was wondering where I would come up with a “best answer” that would persuade your friend, the Pope bailed me out. Last year he explained that heaven is not, as many people imagine, “a place in the clouds.” The press — well the cheap press, anyway — immediately got excited and produced headlines leading one to believe that the Catholic doctrine of heaven had been abolished. Fortunately for all of us, it’s still there.
Except “there’s no there there,” at least not in the sense that you and I are used to using the term. We know that in heaven are present the physical, glorified bodies of at least Christ the Lord and the Blessed Virgin Mary (and also, perhaps, Enoch, Elijah, and Moses), and we know that after the General Resurrection on the Last Day, the bodies of all people who have ever died will be reunited with their souls for eternity. So in some sense we can speak of heaven as a “place,” but what we don’t know is what kind of a “place” heaven is when it comes to concepts such as space and time. Recall how jarring it was for the Apostles to see Christ, in His glorified, resurrected body, walk through the “place” where a wall was, as he entered the room unannounced in Acts 20:19-20). Clearly, the physical characteristics of the life of heavenly glory in the Resurrection are radically beyond anything we have experience with in this mortal life.
In short, we simply don’t know and can’t understand what it will be like until we get there ourselves.
One thing is for sure, though: Heaven is not a “place” in the way we understand the term. It’s much more that that. It’s a state of total happiness that transcends anything we are familiar with. The Holy Father described heaven as “the fullness of communion with God which awaits all those who have welcomed Him into their lives and who have sincerely opened themselves to Him. Divine Revelation teaches us that heaven is neither an abstraction nor a physical place in the clouds, but a living and personal relationship of union with the Holy Trinity. Heaven is our definitive meeting with the Father which takes place in the Risen Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit” (General Audience, 21 July 1999).
To put it in words your friend might understand better: Heaven is the most dizzying love affair with the most marvelous Person we will ever know, in its most exhilarating expression and with the certainty that it will go on for ever. “Definitive, supreme happiness,” says the Catechism. Beyond that, I’m delighted to say, I can’t really go, because “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor 2:9; cf. CCC 1024 -1027).
