The Five Things You'll Do in Heaven

by Todd Aglialoro - October 31, 2008

Reprinted with permission.

Tomorrow is All Saints' Day – a time for honoring those spiritual brothers and sisters who have run the race and won their eternal rest, and for celebrating our connection, through the Mystical Body, to the Church Triumphant.

I think it's also an appropriate time for reflecting on our own eternal destiny. Back when I used to work in diocesan ministry, I liked to remind listeners at my workshops that human beings are designed for immortality; that we will never cease to exist, never cease to be who we are – not when a trillion-trillion years have passed.

How does that make you feel? The best response I ever got at a workshop was, "Tired."

I remember, when I was a teenager, my father – then a zealous revert to the Faith and still an equally zealous photography enthusiast – confiding to me that he thought heaven would be like a giant camera shop. I found this appallingly ignoble, not to mention unimaginative, and countered with an image of Paradise that was as clichéd and spiritually antiseptic as my father's had been secular and base: All I knew was, heaven was bright, it was ethereal, and it involved singing Hosanna 24/7 and liking it.

Time, study, and contemplation would teach me later that heaven must be, above all, a human place. That is, it will be perfectly fitting to us, in both body and soul; not an alien exile but a homecoming. And it will not be static – like an everlasting freeze-frame shot at the end of a movie – but dynamic: a place of growth where we will gorge ourselves on God's infinite goods; never hungry but never full.

I've also come to permit myself the small indulgence of believing that, although the earth will pass away, whatever was good in it will be recapitulated. If, even seen through a glass darkly, earthly wisdom, joy, beauty, charity, and so on are intimations of heaven – good because they bespeak and share in something of God's goodness – then I'm holding out hope that in heaven, too, we'll enjoy particular experiences of them. I think the radiant delight of the Beatific Vision won't simply trump the pleasures of food, or art, or music, or conversation (as it might seem it would, since what further need have we of the sacramentum when we have the res?), but rather enrich them: removing from us the veils of mystery and sin that on earth prevented us from grasping their analogy to the Almighty.

So, in light of my speculative ground rules above,what do we want to do when we get there? In one sense it's an incredibly vain question, of course. But on the eve of this great feast I beg God's indulgence, and yours. Let me share with you five very human things I'd like to do in heaven, and invite you to reflect on the same question.

1. Speak with the tongues of angels. The confusion of human languages is, of course, a punishment from God – a fittingly ironic payback for the sin of Babel. But I think that, like the Fall, it's a felix culpa. Surely the richness and variety of human expression can testify to God's glory, even as the pied beauty of nature does. In The Path to Rome, Hilaire Belloc muses how the French allons and the Italian andiamo – although both mean "let's go" in English – are so very different in their signification. How many millions of other things and concepts are similarly nuanced and enriched by different words in the thousands of tongues seeking to capture them from all sides?

I want to learn all those languages, as well as those that are long forgotten and those that were never heard on earth. In my 37 years I've learned bits and pieces of this language or that, and accordingly I'm able to order a beer in many parts of the world. What would I be able to do with, say, 10,000 years per language? I'd love to have another crack at all those Koine Greek tests I failed in grad school.

Actually, better make that 20,000 years.

2. Run and not grow weary. Contrary to the pseudo-gnostic conception of heaven that I harbored as an adolescent, heaven (after the general resurrection) must be a place for human bodies. But not for the post-Fall, labor-pained, sweat-of-your-brow, strain-to-lose-ten-pounds-after-Christmas lumps of flesh we're saddled with down here. The glorified bodies of Humanity 2.0 will be not only perfectly integrated with the soul and obedient to the will, but they'll be strong, fast, and tireless.

If there's any trace of transcendence in physical activity here on earth, then I'll soldier on in hope that heaven, too, will be a place for running, jumping, swimming, competing. A place where we'll still be able to fill our lungs deep and raise a touch of crimson on our cheeks as we test our corporal limits – only we won't need ice or Advil after. And I'm betting it wouldn't take me more than an eon or two to get my handicap into single digits.

3. Be still and know. When I'm done climbing mountains and learning to dunk a basketball, it will be time to rest. I'm looking forward to this especially, for one of the worst modern manifestations of our fallen earthly condition is perpetual busyness.

In heaven there will be no need for making and doing in order to live. No noisy drone of distractions preying on our short attention spans. We will contemplate without boredom, read and think without fatigue, rest without restlessness. In this state of perfect peace and intellectual quiet, I should like to spend, oh, a few geological ages plumbing each of the minutest facets of God's infinite goodness.

4. Redeem the time. Does human history hold any interest for the Blessed? The answer at first would seem to be "no." Sure, we believe the saints can and do intervene in human events, and that the merits of even our own prayers can be applied out of time. But will we want to bother watching, say, a replay of the Battle of Lepanto when we are face-to-face with the Lord of History himself?

I think it's possible. Again, I appeal to the principle that the world is a significant place to be; and so the vast sum of goodness to be found in the history both of mankind and of the cosmos will not vanish like a mist in the light of Christ, but will be re-presented in that light and seen clearly for the first time.

If I'm anywhere close to correct, then in heaven I want to spend a few hundred millennia watching how it All Came Together, from "Let there be light" to the wheel to the Patriarchs to the Incarnation to the Crusades to last Thursday. I want to perceive, free from the confusion of a darkened intellect and the limits of the calendar, how grace-filled time really was. I want to see all the previously hidden things that God did for the world, and praise Him for them.

5. Rejoice, therefore. After Babel, human tongues became confused. But this is a small thing compared to the confusion of human understanding. From each man to every other there exists a barrier that makes perfect communication, even between the most intimate, impossible. The sadness of this disunity is twofold. First, it wounds communion between persons; it's our lot forever to be hurting, misunderstanding, and talking past one another. Secondly, combined with the darkness of sin, it means that billions never fully grasp the gospel, and the truths of faith and morals it teaches.

In heaven I expect both these conditions to be remedied. I look forward to endless thousands of years of barrier-free communion with my closest earthly friends and the most distant strangers, in a loving imitation of Trinitarian life.

I also anticipate – and this may be my most unbearably delicious hope – stumbling across some of the Faith's worst earthly enemies, persecutors, and detractors, saved by some unforeseeable grace… and rejoicing with them.

Do you see? It was all true.

Todd M. Aglialoro is the editor for Sophia Institute Press and a columnist and blogger for InsideCatholic.com.