A friend of mine once described heaven as utterly still –elaborate and dazzling, yes, but completely without motion forever. I do not know if my friend was inspired by Mark Helprin who depicted a reminiscent cosmology in his book Winter’s Tale. Helprin had the constellations as manifestations of beasts bigger than the universe who moved constantly, yet were utterly motionless. I think Helprin said something like the distance was sufficiently great that the whole beast could be seen at once, both all its physical proportions and all its proportions in time, from it’s beginning to the end of time.

This seemed to me to be, in a vague way, horrible. If I declaim my own inadequacy in comprehending this idea, please don’t take it as vanity: I know I will apprehend it, if only because I desire so much to do so. But I always shuddered at such a view of eternity because it seems to suggest we will be like insects eternally stuck fast in amber. In this life we value uncertainty. We like the fact that we are free to choose one thing or choose another, or wait a bit and choose later, or not choose at all, or unchoose and rechoose. The possibilities are not actually endless, but they do stretch far beyond our line of our sight. Will heaven lack this freedom? Surely not. How could it, and still be heaven?

On the other hand, there is a sense in which we want this life to stand still. What is the sweet wine of nostalgia if not the wish for things to be as they once were? Moments which were rough and bitter when they passed us by may later become fine, inlaid with gold, and music and love. We want those moments back. Or maybe we just think we do: if they really came back as they were, instead of as the tender feelings they evoke in later times, would we really want it so much? It isn’t always an exactly re-experiencing of the moment that we want. I think, somehow, we have a longing to re-experience and simultaneously remember such moments. We want both the rich, tactile texture of the experience, and the ripened nectar which it later becomes. An experience does not reach its azimuth until we have long since finished experiencing it.

And that, I think, is a key to understanding heaven. When we imagine heaven as a golden concerto hanging in the heavens, full, complete, dazzling, motionless and timeless, we are failing to imagine the little textures which enrich this life. Little things like breeze on the face, or choosing to follow a country lane simply because it looked interesting at the time, or the warmth of watching someone warm to a fire you have stoked — these are absent from the glorious, all encompassing visions of heaven. The problem is those visions do not encompass all. If heaven is as great as it is supposed to be, no single abstract image could ever encompass all of the thing itself, anymore than a painting of a farm in springtime could encompass everything about the farm.

Heaven must be timeless and full of time without end, larger than a billion universes and as intimate as a table for two in a tiny cafe, thrillingly cold and as warm as the sands of the Bahamas. The thing to remember is that when it does not seem attractive enough, this is because it is more attractive than we are able to apprehend. In this life we are gamblers whose hopes and dreams swim in the vast reservoir of everything we don’t yet know. But eventually the dice must roll, and all possible outcomes funnel down to exactly one. What if heaven is the gamble and the outcome all at once?

See also Freedom: What Is It Good For?