A Catholic Monthly Magazine

Heaven

When I was a little boy my idea of heaven was having bacon and egg every day.  This vision has become modified over the years, but we all wonder often what Heaven will be like.

The only human who had a vision of Heaven was St Paul, and it helped inspire him to endure being flogged within an inch of his life five times, beaten with rods three times and being shipwrecked and starved.

Paul was lost for words to describe the wonders to come: “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard; nor has it entered into the heart of man those things that God has prepared for those who love him...”  So if Paul was lost for words to describe heaven in human terms,  how far can our imagination take us?

Obviously we cannot comprehend heaven because it is an infinite dimension of love and joy, and our minds are limited to the dimensions of time and space - and the experiences of human emotions.. So how can we imagine the next world?
A baby about to be born must have some degree of awareness. We know the unborn can respond to external stimuli such as music.  So how would you describe to the unborn baby the wonders of the world it is to be born into?

“What is light? What is colour?  What is music? What is fellowship? The only dimensions I know are darkness, warmth and wetness,” the baby might reply.

To comprehend another world of infinity is just as difficult for us - yet we believe we will go through the door of death into another existence as amazingly new and different as the world is from the womb.
If God is the source of all beauty and majesty in the universe, the inspiration of all creative art such as music, dance, painting or sculpture.... then to know God must be to experience the delight of everything beautiful created from the beginning of time.
We know that God is love... infinite love. So for all of us who have known the experience of falling in love, or deeply loving those closest to us,  knowing the love of God must be like experiencing the depth and warmth of any human love in an infinite dimension.
Without the limitations of time and space, heaven must be something like an eternal sense of the present.  Do you remember in your youth a golden afternoon which you wished could continue forever? Heaven must be like that!


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