Heaven

Mary Chapin Carpenter wrote a song several years back entitled "My Heaven," in which she included the line, "your childhood pet in Dad's old chair." The song is her vision of what Heaven might be like, and it is full of familiar images to her, and to many of us. I just finished reading Lisa Miller's Heaven:Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife, and I found it to be a really good summertime read. She does not claim to be a scholar of religions, though she is the religion editor for Newsweek. She interviewed dozens of theologians, thinkers and writers from the three major monotheistic religions, and has done what I think is a good job of sifting out some salient observations about heaven. Is it a place, or a state of being? Why is it that the vision of heaven for many Muslims, Christians and Jews seems to be the same place? And what of Miller's conclusion that, for her, at least, heaven is not a place, but a dynamic state of being when people love and feel loved and also experience a sense of the transcendent? For years I have taught an undergraduate course on death and dying. Before that, I led eight bereavement support groups, advised or worked on the volunteer staffs of four hospice programs, led workshops on bereavement support and also presided at an abnormally high number of funerals during my early years in the parish. So, death is something to which I have given much thought. As I get older, I find that I have few answers about death, and even fewer certainties. And to those who would say, "What do you mean you have few certainties about death? Are you not a Christian, sir?" Yes, I am a Christian, and as such, I have certainty that I can never be separated from the love of God through Christ Jesus my Lord. But, let's face it, much is left up for grabs when it comes to what happens when we die. Americans have a particularly American way of describing heaven, with streets of gold and deciduous trees and verdant meadows everywhere. When I was in my mid-thirties, I traveled to Jordan, Israel and Palestine.I discovered rather quickly that my ideas of Jesus' world were steeped in the Chestnut Ridge of the Allegheny Mountains in which I grew up. Aside from Nazareth, where Jesus spent his childhood, his world was dusty and semi-arid. I felt like an alien in that climate and terrain. Why? Because I had painted a picture in my mind that the world of Jesus looked just like my world. I think we do the same with our idea of heaven, not to mention our idea of God. Yes, I have an idea of heaven in my mind, but it is muddled. I guess that's because I have never given much thought to the afterlife. While I think that life after death is the icing on the cake, too many sincere people of faith think it is THE cake. I have tried to spend my time helping to represent, however imperfectly, the God that I serve and to help others to feel that love that emanates from God. For Miller, that is part of what she means by heaven. I think I agree.