This is my unusual idea of Heaven...does it fit in with any theologians view?

[oldcelt]

The things you want(ed) to do aren’t necessarily the things that make you happy.

Pretty broad statement, don’t you think? There are many things in my current existence that may or may not get done while I’m alive. I can assure you that doing them or seeing, etc., would make me quite happy.

 

[hansard]

I read somewhere that heaven is “the eternal contemplation of the beatific vision” (or words to that effect).

I hope it’s more than that. Surely there must be something more than proximity to God. Wouldn’t there be a plan for us? With a whole universe as our canvas, couldn’t we be given something to actually do?

 

[Dorothy]

I read somewhere that heaven is “the eternal contemplation of the beatific vision” (or words to that effect).

I hope it’s more than that. Surely there must be something more than proximity to God. Wouldn’t there be a plan for us? With a whole universe as our canvas, couldn’t we be given something to actually do?

Trust the Lord. He knows what He is about. Remember this scripture “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard what God has planned for those who love Him.”

 

[yppop]

I am 80 years old and more and more, each day, heaven becomes a very important object of contemplation. I’ve decided that since I have never seen a description of Heaven that is both imaginable and plausible and also accounts for that other possibility we call Hell, I stopped guessing what Heaven and Hell are like and began to imagine what I would liked them to be. It is easier to describe my Heaven than my Hell because fortunately this lifetime was closer to a Heaven than to a Hell. So here’s what I would like Heaven to be like:

My mother, father will be in the same age-relationship with me as they were this time around. They won’t be teenagers and they won’t be ageless, they will be my mother and father. So too will my brothers and sisters, my children, their children and all the people I have known in this life time will be there just as they are or were in this lifetime. Yes, there will be the same animals, flowers, oceans, stars, and all the things I’ve experienced in this lifetime.

I will fall in love again with the same beautiful woman and live an entire married life immersed in romance, good humor, and friendship. My Heavenly life will be filled with the same or more of the laughter, wonder, love, joy, fun, peace, nostalgia, and piety that has filled this life. I will hit a baseball again; I will hear La Boheme for the first time again; I will sing babies to sleep in the middle of a quiet night again. I will eat peanuts, smell roses, hear a whippoorwill, see the ocean for the first time; see Broadway musicals, watch my children graduate, marry the same persons, and have the same children again. You get the idea.

On the Hell side, there will be diseases, earthquakes, plaques, floods, and all sorts of physical evil. But that stuff will be diminished just as social evil such as wars, bigotry, injustice, tyranny, and poverty also will diminish. Since I have had a minimum of disappointments in this life, I can’t describe a vision of a personal Hell but it would consist of far too many regrets and sins, none of which I care to share. But if I have done this life correctly, and have confessed those sins and regrets, then they won’t happen in the Heaven that is my next lifetime because I will enter into it with a more effective conscience.

So my Heaven and Hell would look a lot like my present life except there would be fewer regrets and sins committed. In other words it would be palpably better. Kind of like the movie “Ground Hog Day” in which Bill Murray repeatedly wakes up on the same day, but each new repeat, he alters his behavior for the better, and experiences more and more joy. Each new life would be closer to Heaven and farther from Hell until I and all the rest of humanity achieved that goal and we reach the fullness of the Mystical Body of Christ.

And how would this sort of Heaven/Hell come about. Well there does happen to be a scientific solution for my hope. It is called the Many World Interpretation of the Schroedinger wave equation. Before any of you puritanical Catholics accuse me the heresy of reincarnation, google the Many World Interpretation and ask yourself whether living a parallel life as yourself is reincarnation. I don’t think it is. And if the MWI is real, consider what that would mean if not successive lifetimes.

Anyway I am not saying with certainty that this is a theological view of Heaven in accordance with scripture and the “defined dogma” of the Catholic Church, it is merely what I what Heaven to be like. On the other hand, it describes how those that have been derived of a full lifetime of wonder, peace, and joy, like a young teen age girl with a fine mind and a body wracked with Spina Bifida can have a clear vision of hope. It also allows those now suffering in a life that Hell to eventually escape, so that all souls are saved.

In the meantime, we are making our way through our personnel purgatories in which we too often make the wrong choices by failing to respond to God’s grace. Eventually we will all escape our personal Hell’s and arrive at that perfect world we call Heaven.

Yppop

 

[tafan]

I have come to think the work we have to do in heaven will be one of the wonderful aspects of it. People don’t think about work in heaven, but it will be there for us. God will use us as His helpers just as he uses angels. Before the fall, work was not a burden or toil, there was no conflict between man and the work he needed to do. We will gain back that complete integrity of work. And I suspect God will have plenty of interesting tasks at hand.

 

[tonyrey]

I am 80 years old and more and more, each day, heaven becomes a very important object of contemplation. I’ve decided that since I have never seen a description of Heaven that is both imaginable and plausible and also accounts for that other possibility we call Hell, I stopped guessing what Heaven and Hell are like and began to imagine what I would liked them to be. It is easier to describe my Heaven than my Hell because fortunately this lifetime was closer to a Heaven than to a Hell. So here’s what I would like Heaven to be like:

My mother, father will be in the same age-relationship with me as they were this time around. They won’t be teenagers and they won’t be ageless, they will be my mother and father. So too will my brothers and sisters, my children, their children and all the people I have known in this life time will be there just as they are or were in this lifetime. Yes, there will be the same animals, flowers, oceans, stars, and all the things I’ve experienced in this lifetime.

I will fall in love again with the same beautiful woman and live an entire married life immersed in romance, good humor, and friendship. My Heavenly life will be filled with the same or more of the laughter, wonder, love, joy, fun, peace, nostalgia, and piety that has filled this life. I will hit a baseball again; I will hear La Boheme for the first time again; I will sing babies to sleep in the middle of a quiet night again. I will eat peanuts, smell roses, hear a whippoorwill, see the ocean for the first time; see Broadway musicals, watch my children graduate, marry the same persons, and have the same children again. You get the idea.

On the Hell side, there will be diseases, earthquakes, plaques, floods, and all sorts of physical evil. But that stuff will be diminished just as social evil such as wars, bigotry, injustice, tyranny, and poverty also will diminish. Since I have had a minimum of disappointments in this life, I can’t describe a vision of a personal Hell but it would consist of far too many regrets and sins, none of which I care to share. But if I have done this life correctly, and have confessed those sins and regrets, then they won’t happen in the Heaven that is my next lifetime because I will enter into it with a more effective conscience.

So my Heaven and Hell would look a lot like my present life except there would be fewer regrets and sins committed. In other words it would be palpably better. Kind of like the movie “Ground Hog Day” in which Bill Murray repeatedly wakes up on the same day, but each new repeat, he alters his behavior for the better, and experiences more and more joy. Each new life would be closer to Heaven and farther from Hell until I and all the rest of humanity achieved that goal and we reach the fullness of the Mystical Body of Christ.

And how would this sort of Heaven/Hell come about. Well there does happen to be a scientific solution for my hope. It is called the Many World Interpretation of the Schroedinger wave equation. Before any of you puritanical Catholics accuse me the heresy of reincarnation, google the Many World Interpretation and ask yourself whether living a parallel life as yourself is reincarnation. I don’t think it is. And if the MWI is real, consider what that would mean if not successive lifetimes.

Anyway I am not saying with certainty that this is a theological view of Heaven in accordance with scripture and the “defined dogma” of the Catholic Church, it is merely what I what Heaven to be like. On the other hand, it describes how those that have been derived of a full lifetime of wonder, peace, and joy, like a young teen age girl with a fine mind and a body wracked with Spina Bifida can have a clear vision of hope. It also allows those now suffering in a life that Hell to eventually escape, so that all souls are saved.

In the meantime, we are making our way through our personnel purgatories in which we too often make the wrong choices by failing to respond to God’s grace. Eventually we will all escape our personal Hell’s and arrive at that perfect world we call Heaven.

Yppop

A superb post!

 

[tonyrey]

The things you want(ed) to do aren’t necessarily the things that make you happy.

You have overlooked the word “necessarily”…

 

[Simca]

I have come to think the work we have to do in heaven will be one of the wonderful aspects of it. People don’t think about work in heaven, but it will be there for us. God will use us as His helpers just as he uses angels. Before the fall, work was not a burden or toil, there was no conflict between man and the work he needed to do. We will gain back that complete integrity of work. And I suspect God will have plenty of interesting tasks at hand.

I do hope I’ll have a responsible position in heaven. I would like to be a helper in God’s kingdom. A lot of people talk about Jesus’ words that there are many mansions in heaven, and that each person will have their own mansion. If this is true, I just don’t want to have to vacuum mine. I hope all mansions will be self-cleaning!

 

[DanAl]

My ideal Heaven would have an unimaginably different kind of time. No time is inhuman and linear time a frustratingly never ending story with no ‘goal’. It would have to be a time we haven’t even thought of. Things we particularly love here ( in my case the fictional tv series Dr Who and fictional monsters- don’t laugh! They’re great!) will be fulfilled in Heaven. In other words, those things here serve as echoes/ shadows of Heaven/something in Heaven. That heaven’s joy and satisfaction far, far surpasses Earth’s. Is there any respected theologian that would go with these ideas?

Dund Scotus held an unusual view on time when it comes to heaven: potential time.
time, for aristotelians, means change. But suppose there is no change (say, creations goes into suspended animation) would there be time? yes, according to Scotus. We would have an imaginary or potential time. we could say, “it’s been a thousand years since we went into suspended animation.”

This is an oversimplification, and Scotus notion of time is hard to describe, but, he pointedly says that st. peter can move in heaven but there’s no real change in his moving around. The apparent change would be in our imagination according to our standards of time.

theories of time are really difficult and Duns Scotus views are not exactly reader-friednly

 

[Linusthe2nd]

Sometimes I ask the theologians and philosophers why God would do away with what He creates. Not that He doesn’t have the right, because He does…He is the Author of Life. However, I not sure I believe that God would do away with the beauty He created…that includes plants and animals, and even the inanimate rocks. And…isn’t there supposed to be a restoration of creation as the Catechism puts it. I recommend anyone who ponders this question to read the section on the New Heavens and New Earth, which speaks of the restoration of both our planet and the universe.

vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P2Q.HTM
"1046 For the cosmos, Revelation affirms the profound common destiny of the material world and man:

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God . . . in hope because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay… We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

1047 The visible universe, then, is itself destined to be transformed, “so that the world itself, restored to its original state, facing no further obstacles, should be at the service of the just,” sharing their glorification in the risen Jesus Christ."

I also suggest people obtain this book: “The End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life” by Fr. Charles Arminjon. It’s even recommended by St. Therese of Lisieux. ‘Reading this book was one of the greatest graces of my life.’

In the chapter titled, “The Place of Immortal Life and the State of Glorified Bodies After the Resurrection”, Fr. Arminjon tells us, “…creation will not perish: the temple of immortality will not be an ethereal, incorporeal place, as some imagine and teach, but a material abode and a city. St. Anselm describes this new earth when he says, ‘This earth, which sustained and nourished the holy body of the Lord, will be a paradise. Because it has been washed with the blood of martyrs, it will be eternally ornamented with sweet-smelling flowers, violets, and roses that will not wither.’”

All right!!! I like that. And every dumb creature who ever lived will have its rightful place and its creaturely joys.

Linus2nd