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

Let no one mourn that he has fallen again and again, for forgiveness has risen from the grave.
                 St. John Chrysostom

The lack of action in celestial imagery may also stem from thinking of heaven as the end of the story, a showcase for perfected souls, rather than a realm of ongoing growth and service. We give its citizens halos or crowns or martyrs' palms, but nothing to do, their work finished forever. It's a vision not of eternal bliss, but everlasting boredom.

"Heaven as conventionally conceived," observed George Bernard Shaw, "is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven." A life without challenge... It's a state of being we can't relate to.

Hell, on the other hand, has always been sadly recognizable. We live in a world of evident evil -- war, disease, cruelty. We all know pain and grief; we all know our own propensity for sin and the weakness of our best resolutions. If I hope for heaven instead of hell, it's because a power stronger and more consistent than mine is conniving at the outcome!

Sixteen hundred years ago, a man wrestled with these issues and concluded that, real though hell was, it was a pitiful and defenseless place confronted with the might of heaven.

He destroyed Hell when He descended into it. He put it into an uproar even as it tasted of His flesh. Hell was in an uproar because it was done away with. It was in an uproar because it is mocked. It was in an uproar, for it is destroyed. It is in an uproar, for it is annihilated. It is in an uproar, for it is now made captive. Hell took a body, and discovered God. It took earth, and encountered Heaven.

It's the opposite of the aggressive hell, the sweetly passive heaven, of later art. Heaven, in John Chrysostom's view, is the formidable force!

In C. S. Lewis's novel The Great Divorce, hell is a gray urban wilderness of nearly empty streets, since its quarrelsome inhabitants are constantly moving farther from their neighbors. Any time they choose, these lost souls can board a bus for heaven. Ascending hour after hour through an infinite abyss, they arrive at last in a land of radiant beauty. Beside its solid residents, the busload of new arrivals are frail ghostlike creatures, too weak even to bend the grass of heaven.

"You'll firm up when you've been here awhile," the heavenly greeters assure them, trying to persuade the newcomers to stay. Most of them, however, for the very reasons that put them in hell, insist on returning there. The book's nicest touch comes when Lewis, as narrator, returns to the brink of the chasm through which he and the other passengers on the bus have ascended. The great abyss he remembers is impossible to find. From heaven's vantage point, it's an infinitesimal crack in the soil.

"All hell," Lewis's heavenly guide explains, "is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world. But it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World."