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

Breathe on me, breath of God,
so shall I never die,
but live with thee the perfect life
of thine eternity.

                 Edwin Hatch

Remembering me in Indonesia, Kiloto in New York, John and I often play a little game: describing to one another the "perfect life" of heaven as we envisage it. Each person's image, of course, is different. I recall Ruth Graham's children asking, after a beloved dog died, if their pet was now in heaven. Instead of smiling at the question, Ruth went to the Bible. Heaven, she concluded from her Scripture search, is where each of us will be totally happy And if someone's happiness depends on finding a particular animal there, then yes, heaven might well house dogs - horses, cats, canaries.

For someone else, happiness might require dance, or music, or a garden to tend. For Len LeSourd, heaven had to have meaningful work. In the last decade of his life, Len collected everything he could find in print about the next world. "I don't think we'll just float about praising God on our harps," he'd say.

He believed praise would indeed be unending, but also that God would have jobs for us. Among his papers, after his death, I found this paragraph:

Humans go to heaven as elected persons but flawed spirits. Broken relationships that aren't dealt with here have to be healed there. The immature who haven't grown up here, have to do so up there. Many mature spirits are trained to teach the immature. The teaching process is widespread and endless.

How Len looked forward to attending classes taught by St. Paul! "After that I'd love to be trained to teach a class of spiritual beginners. What a way to serve!"

He believed our work on earth prepared us for work we would continue to do in heaven. An editor in his earthly life, he joked about landing a job on the Heavenly Gazette. He admitted that communication in the next world won't require editing. But he was very serious in believing that God will go on using the gifts he's given us - more fully, more perfectly, than ever before.

For Len, heaven meant service. For John, who sings in St. Mark's choir, it includes chorales led by a brilliant but tolerant conductor. Isabella d'Este, patron of Renaissance artists, was wealthy enough to build an earthly model of her celestial vision. In her paradiso, she surrounded herself with paintings, carvings, books, tapestries, cameos. Today in her five-hundred-room palace in Mantua, there's not much left of her paradise; her treasures are scattered through the museums of the world. But enough remains to glimpse heaven through the eyes of a lover of beauty.

What's in my own heaven? Lecture halls and libraries! An eternal schoolroom where I can study literature, botany, history, astronomy - all the fascinating subjects a single lifetime can't begin to explore. "Are you sure," I quiz John when we play our heaven game, "that I won't wake up in the next world suddenly knowing everything?" For me the process of discovery is part of the joy. And John assures me solemnly that I will arrive with my ignorance intact.

Is it only idle daydreaming, this designing of a heaven to suit our own taste? A self-indulgent fantasy; teasing ourselves with false hopes?

Or ... is it possible that heaven is doing the designing?

On the wall in St. Paul's Church on Nantucket is a small wooden panel with a painting of the church's namesake. St. Paul is shown half length, his withdrawn, inward-looking eyes seemingly fixed on eternity. I recognized it as an icon, those archaic, rather rigid devotional images of the Eastern Church, so I was surprised to learn that it was painted in the 1990s by the church's rector at that time, Andrew Foster. "I didn't know you were an artist," I told him.