What's Heaven Like, Exactly?

What’s next?

I find that seems to be on people’s minds at this time of year. What’s next, not on the daily schedule, but on the Big One, the life schedule.

November is the month of remembering, not just because of Remembrance Day but also All Saints Day and All Souls Day, the days following All Hallows’ Eve. It’s the time of year that Celtic tradition describes as being liminal, when the veil between this life and the next is thinnest. The seasons have changed and, in this part of the world at least, nature’s getting ready for winter. We see empty trees and brown fields and most of nature seems to have died.

Our remembering comes with a sense of loss, of lives ended, and wondering about what might come after this life. So. What’s next?

I don’t know exactly, but I do know some things for sure. 

I want to say that I don’t know because I haven’t been there. But that’s not accurate. I just don’t remember. I believe we come from God and we return to God. The divine spirit is in all living things - God’s the energy of life that powers us and connects us - but we’ve become disconnected from God, living into our earthiness, rather than in a balance with our spirit. That’s what Jesus is all about, showing us how to embrace and engage that spirit, reconnecting with God and with each other and creation.

I think that’s what Jesus means when he says that God is “God not of the dead, but of the living. To God all are alive” (Luke 20:38). In this life and the next. That’s the point of resurrection, the new life with God.

After this life, we return to God. Everyone. Every. One. So, yes, that means no one goes to a “hell,” we all go to God. God is grace and love. We find that when our spirit connects with God. That’s what Jesus means by “the kingdom of heaven is near.” Or here. It’s already in us. Created in the image of God, we are good. We are love, grace, compassion, all the things that Jesus lives to show us. That’s the heaven we can bring here.

But what’s that heaven like, exactly? That’s the part I don’t know, exactly. I’m pretty sure it’s not this, and I mean that in a good way. Going back again to the stories of our beginning, I believe that we already live in the “Eden” of the Bible, we just aren’t aware and connected enough to see it. We learned to have free will and make choices, we haven’t always made good ones and we’ve strayed from our job as good stewards of the garden. Maybe that’s why we tend to image heaven as the most beautiful place on earth.

So maybe that’s what heaven is like, being so intimately connected to God that it feels like the beginning of the creation story, in the garden. Maybe it’s whatever we can imagine that brings us into the fullness of knowing God, what the 16th century poet Edmund Spenser called the “endless perfectness.” From our vantage point here, that means we imagine it with what we know and understand in this life. A beautiful, sunny pastoral scene, perhaps, or a great family gathering, music or toys or animals or whatever brings us the most joy.

Because that’s one other thing I know. Whatever it will be, we will be what Jesus draws us to in this life: we will be one with God.