I agree, but how does this allow us to infer that suffering doesn’t occur in heaven? One of the goods that came from Christ’s crucifixion is the call to pick up our cross and follow him. Christ’s greatest act of love was to die for us. Why shouldn’t we think of the “city on the hill” he spoke of as Golgotha writ large?
I’m no theologian, and I don’t think we can really know the answer anyway, but I think of it this way:
We are told that, at the end of the world, we will have glorified bodies; perfect in every respect. We are at least encouraged to believe the universe will be our oyster. We will be able to go about without the limitations of time or distance. If so (space being rather uncomfortably cold) it also stands to reason we would be able to journey into the interior of a star. If our bodies are perfect, we would then be able to feel those millions of degrees just as they are. But, since we would be invulnerable to harm from those millions of degrees and pain being the body’s warning of tissue damage that would not actually be occurring, we would feel the millions of degrees just as they are, but not feel them as pain.
Perhaps there is suffering in heaven in a way. After all, Jesus’ suffering on the cross is from all eternity into all eternity. Will we be ignorant of, say, the tragedies in the world or would we somehow just not care? Or, would we still have human emotions, feel them fully, and yet not experience them as pain? After all, if a body can be glorified, why cannot a mind be glorified also?
The emotional pain a human suffers is also a “warning”, just as physical pain is a warning. We feel remorse as a prompting not to do a particular act again. We feel sorrow as a signal that our acceptance of Providence is faulty; we would change God’s will if we could. But in heaven, do we need those reactions any more when our souls can no longer be harmed, than we need pain reactions when our bodies can no longer be harmed? Will we feel the “million degrees of emotional heat” and yet not be adversely affected by them?
We understand that, in heaven, we will be unified with God. We don’t know quite what that means, but we would not be assuming too much to take it to include partaking in the “symmetry” that is in God, who can be sorrowful (as Jesus was) about the sin of the world, yet also see the “big picture”; how God brings good from evil, and see it simultaneously and fully so that our soul’s repose is not truly disturbed.
Parenthetically, I have sometimes wondered whether the situation of Adam and Eve in Paradise was no more complicated than their having been fully accepting of Providence; accepting cold, heat, hunger and pain without in any manner objecting to it or feeling put upon by it, until they demanded the power to distinguish.
Thinking about saints like Ste Therese, then, it would be wrong to think of her as a masochist, and correct to think of her as a person who (at least to whatever degree it was true of her) accepted Divine Providence fully out of her love for God. That’s a very different thing.
But as with many things about heaven, we really won’t know until we’re there.
