Lo! I shall tell you a mystery. —I Corinthians 15: 51 The sun is shining in an azure sky, mockingbirds are chirping in the snow-white blossoms of the pear trees, and the bees are buzzing from one glorious daffodil to another. It is early March, the middle of Lent, and Catholics all over the world are immersed in contemplation and penance over the passion and suffering of Christ. But just outside the chapel where David Burton is teaching a class for new Catholic initiates, on the green grounds of the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Nashville, Tennessee, the season seems intent on fast-forwarding beyond late winter and penance right into renewal — to Easter, perhaps. Or perhaps to something even more glorious.
Burton likes to think about heaven. He might even be said to revel in it. Oddly enough, he has had to struggle to think about it or at least to find fellow believers and pastors whom his thoughts don’t embarrass. And more oddly still, his struggle is not unique. It began about 14 years ago, when Burton, then attending the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, converted from his childhood Southern Baptist faith to Catholicism. For the most part, the switch suited him fine. The Baptists were a little too easygoing for him; he preferred the Catholic view that salvation depends not only on accepting Jesus but also on what you do with your life. There was one hitch. As the months following his conversion turned to years, it dawned on him that the same Catholic chaplains who had welcomed him into the fold were reticent about discussing salvation’s reward. This was disturbing. “I felt a real lack in my life,” says Burton, who now teaches mathematics at Vanderbilt University. “There was this hope of heaven I thought we all should have. But the priests didn’t like to talk about it. We have the Commandments from the Lord: feed the hungry, and clothe the naked. Most of us don’t just have the knack for those things; it takes willpower. But as soon as someone would say, ‘Let’s do this so we can go to heaven,’ someone else would say, ‘No, no, no, no. Let’s do it because we should do good.’ It got to the point where I began to think that heaven was too much like an ace in the hole, that it was sort of like cheating. I almost felt guilty thinking too much of heaven.” Now there’s a peculiar idea. Is it possible for a Christian to think of heaven too much? How can one enjoy robust faith without envisaging faith’s ultimate consummation? “Heaven is the greatest good,” says Peter Kreeft, a professor of philosophy at Boston College and author of the 1990 volume Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Heaven…but Never Dreamed of Asking. “It is the reason that God banged out the Big Bang 18 billion years ago. Next to the idea of God, the idea of heaven is the greatest idea that has ever entered into the heart of man, woman or child.”
It is certainly one of the most powerfully joyous in the cosmology of practicing Christians, who can affirm: heaven is destination and reward, succor and relief from earthly trials. It is reunion with those we love, forever, as we loved them. It is our real home, our permanent address, our own true country. It is the New Jerusalem and Paradise Regained, the community of Saints and the eternal Eucharist; everlasting Easter and a million Christmases. It is an end to death’s sting; it is the eternal, ongoing, ever growing experience of God. It is the ecstatic dream of St. John: “Holy, holy, holy.” And yet, in a curious way, heaven is AWOL. This is not to say that Americans think death ends everything or even that they doubt heaven’s existence. People still believe in it: it’s just that their concept of exactly what it is has grown foggier, and they hear about it much less frequently from their pastors. To reverse the words of the old spiritual: Everybody’s goin’ to heaven, just ain’t talkin’ ’bout it. The silence is such that it sometimes seems heaven might as well not be there. Kreeft complains that even if our basic belief has not wavered, “our sense of beauty, glory, wonder, awe, magnificence, triumph has shrunk” into something “joyless.” Marked by an apparent combination of lay ignorance and pastoral skittishness, the minimization of paradise not only creates problems for heaven-hungry believers like Burton; it also suggests the marginalization of one of Western civilization’s greatest ideas. See the 25 most influential evangelicals in America.
