What Heaven Must Be Like

I‘m getting on in life, and I think it’s finally time to plan ahead and speculate on what heaven is like. All I was told about heaven as a child – that I’ll have wings, wear a gown, play a harp, and sing to God all day long – is kind of childish and isn’t going to satisfy me now. I want to know more.

First of all, nobody other than Jesus, His mother, and probably Enoch and Elijah, will have bodies in heaven. We will all experience the general resurrection when all humans will receive their own resurrected bodies. None of us will have wings, wear a gown, or be expected to sing songs. After we die we will retain our thoughts and the merit of whatever righteous deeds we were able to perform while we were in this life. I have a robust imagination, so maybe I can speculate on what heaven will be like for a body-less soul.

It will be like a very vivid dream, except I will never wake up to return to this physical life, not until the end of the world when my physical body will be resurrected and rejoined to my soul.

My life up to now

In this present life I have been taught that my primary goal in life is to know God, to learn to love Him, and especially to obey Him so that He will accept me into His heavenly kingdom and make me happy forever. It sounds easy, but I don’t know how to love someone I never saw. In all my ninety years, I have never even gotten started on this first requirement to achieve heaven. I try, but it has been a long, long struggle with no tangible results until now, when my entrance into the next life is probably only a few years away.

What am I going to do with all the time I spent in this life? I have collected many things in my mortal life, things pertaining to my hobbies, my interests such as photography, good books, stamp collections, and many others. At one time I wanted to learn everything and have in my house a museum of artifacts that I collected through the years. But I long ago grew tired of my hobbies, I realized I cannot learn everything, so I spent some time dusting off and arranging my artifacts that were rapidly becoming boring to me. I drastically thinned out my collections. I wound up deciding I am only going to keep my most precious artifacts, just enough of them to comfortably be displayed in my man cave.

I feel liberated now because I don’t have all that junk weighing me down, but in the process of whittling down, I discovered something. Any artifact that carried sentimental memories for me, like photos of my wife and children, became very precious to me, whereas objects that did not carry sentimental value but purely scientific or historical interest gradually became less and less important to me. Projecting my thoughts forward, I wonder how much they would interest me a thousand years from now or a million years? I have never had much free time before, but now I’m beginning to see what eternity is going to be like.

I have learned a few things about God in my life too, but only from a distance. Now when I realize how little time I have, I want to know Him better. I don’t want to merely know things about Him: I want to know Him, like I know my children, but even more personally. I want to be with Him all the time, to know Him more intimately than I have ever known anybody. After all, He is not like anybody else I know, He is the one who created me. He knows everything about me. He has a plan for me that would make my existence in heaven really heavenly. How do I connect with that?

My plan to live fully

I’m beginning to view things in a new light that I have never experienced before. I am going to live forever, not ten or twenty years, but hundreds or thousands of years although I doubt we can even use that way of measuring things in heaven. I’m glad that I learned the Catholic Faith in my youth. It taught me that if I want to learn how to love Jesus, I would have to learn what He is like, to observe Him, to gradually get familiar with Him. Then, if I like what I observe, I know I will eventually get to love Him, but it is so difficult to get started.

I seldom allow myself to get attached to others because I know my shortcomings very well. I don’t want others to know. I’m sure the shortcomings that bother me are temptations because I never act on them, never carry them out. But they are embarrassing to me. I think I’m a lot more wicked on the inside than I am on the outside. If I want to get closer to Jesus, my first challenge is to feel comfortable with Him knowing what goes on within my soul as well as I do.

Example of St. Therese

I’m starting on that journey in my life. I try to explain to Jesus what is going on in my soul and see how I feel afterward. The Little Flower, Therese of Lisieux, wrote in her diary about her most wicked act. She got angry with the family’s maid because the maid wouldn’t allow Therese to do something, and Therese called her a brat. A brat! I wish that was the worst thing I ever did!

St. Therese was also interested in the salvation of others. She heard her parents talking about a murderer in Paris. This man had murdered a prostitute and was captured and sentenced to death, and Therese was horrified at the thought that he was unrepentant for his deed and might go to hell. Without saying anything to her parents, Therese asked Jesus to bring that man to repentance and forgive him.

Several weeks later she overheard her parents discussing the execution. Just before the final act of execution, the man asked for a crucifix and kissed it. Apparently, as a blessing to Therese, Jesus brought that man to repentance. This made a big impression on me.

I know of a lot of people who have gotten themselves in trouble with God. Perhaps the only hope they have is to have someone like Therese praying for them, and God will respond. If I thought God would do the same through me that would be something to strive for. There are so many family members and friends I worry about and many celebrities I have heard about but never met in this life who I also think got a raw deal in life. It would be nice if God would recognize my concern for them and intervene.

A way to express deep love toward God

Most of our love songs are one human being expressing love to another human being, and many have beautiful lyrics. But when you reach ninety years old you realized that human beings are attractive and beautiful only for a short time. You and I are programmed in our hearts to love someone who never gets less attractive. That’s what the Church teaches. We are programmed to love and to be loved by God, and our hearts will never rest until that desire is fulfilled.

I have always been interested in music, especially romantic songs. There is a sense of longing and sometimes pathos in a song sung to a loved one who is absent. I suppose some of the saints sang love songs to God and meant it, but I don’t think such songs are sung by the laity in today’s culture. Yet, there are songs that with just a slight revision could be love songs to Jesus sung by someone who loves Him and misses His presence.

I spent ninety years with little or no feeling of love for Our Lord, and I had better try something before I stand before a very disappointed and rejected Lord who actually loves me. He is the God who created me. He says He loves me more than I know. It’s time I made a try of expressing the same level of affection toward Him.

So I took the song What Will I Do, and I changed a few words and got it to express the feelings of someone who misses the presence of someone he loves. I pretended I was singing it to our Lord; I am surprised that it caught on in my imagination right away. I thought I did not love Him, but I do love Him, but I am unable to sing that love through my emotions.

My wife has a devotion to Father Solanus Casey, the Capuchin friar from Detroit. She once took me to the monastery where he had lived, and his life was explained to us. It turns out that he could play the violin, but not very well. Nevertheless, he wanted to treat God to some of the best of what he could do. So, in the middle of the night, he snuck out of his room, went into the chapel and played his violin in front of the tabernacle containing Jesus.

That image made an impression on me, because I was very shy myself. So I‘m going to find songs that impress me, revise the words and sing my heart out, hoping I may finally be able to return the ardent heartfelt love that Jesus has for me.

What I hope to do in the next life

On that subject, there’s a very popular song out called “El Condor Pasa”. It came from the Peruvian culture and is about the concept of freedom. Condors are vultures and I never had much affection for vultures because they eat rotten cadavers and some of their heads are naked and ugly, but the song made me realize how big these birds are. Their wing span is more than ten feet.

Andean Condors are the largest birds in the world, but they are light weight because they are designed to fly. Their twenty-five to thirty-pound body from beak to tail is almost the same size as my torso. I can easily imagine myself lying atop condor wings, sailing the blue skies and feeling the freedom that a condor must feel when he is up there all alone viewing the earth with his eagle-sharp eyes. I can imagine myself doing that. Could that be what heaven has in store for me? We’ll see.

Conclusion

What I would like to do is build up this intimacy with Christ through songs; revising the words to make them very personal to me; revealing my own shortcomings and failures; asking Him to strengthen me and make me more like Him, since that is what He wants in the first place. I know that, as I become more like Jesus, I will become more unsuited to the world.

But that’s alright. I already know that I do not want to remain in this life forever. I’m sick and tired of the duplicity and phoniness of life in this world. I want something better for myself. What could be better than to know without a doubt that I am one of the sons of God, to really live that life and have God look at me and see an extension of His Divine Son, Jesus?

Like Therese, I hope to spend my future looking for ways to help others draw closer to God and to be generous with them because my Father is fabulously rich in grace, and He is not stingy.