Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding.
                 Book of Common Prayer

A decade after my wanderings in the Louvre basement, I began for the first time to read the Bible. And there I encountered the New Testament's view of the afterlife. Not yet a believer, I took its references to a "kingdom of heaven" no more seriously than other ancient ideas about a blissful life-to-come. Here were the usual worldly pleasures. Like the rest of the Roman world, Christians looked forward to a never-ending banquet - the "wedding feast" of the Lamb. Here were the negatives overcome: For the persecuted early church, heaven would have stout walls.

But then I noticed something else. Something different. Alongside the typical earthly imagery was a concept of the afterworld unlike that of any other tradition.

This world will surprise us!

It will not be what we think. Not what we can think. It will be another order of experience altogether. We can't come at such things, said St. Paul, by earthly extension at all:

No eye has seen,
no ear has heard,
no mind has conceived
what God has prepared for those who love him.

1 Corinthians 2:9

Surprise had been the hallmark of every step of my Christian walk, and surprise - this idea of heaven as the utterly unexpected - was the first hint to me that it might, after all, be real.

Therese Martin, the French girl who died in 1897 at age twenty-four, spent much of her short life thinking about heaven. John and I have often stayed in the small provincial city of Lisieux where the girl often called "the greatest saint of modern times" grew up in an ordinary-looking middle-class home still standing not far from the enclosed convent she entered, never to leave again, at age fifteen.

In her joyous anticipation of the life to come, only one thing worried Therese. Because she'd thought about heaven so much, she feared the reality would not be enough of a surprise. That God wanted to surprise her, she was certain. Hadn't he forbidden St. Paul to reveal what he'd seen when he was "caught up into paradise"? Hadn't he warned Paul that "man may not utter" the glories there?