Where is Heaven? I used to wonder about that question a lot in the days when I didn’t question anything. I didn’t exactly have a religious upbringing, although my grandma, Nellie, would severely admonish me if I took the Lord’s name in vain. I’d get a frown if I said something like “Oh God!” and if I said “Blimey!”, she would send the fear of, well, God into me by warning me that God would strike me blind if I kept saying it, blimey being a misspelling for blind me. As my eyesight began to fail during my teenage years, I wonder if she’d actually been on to something. My school mates had another explanation for my failing eyesight…
I didn’t worry too much about dying because children don’t worry about it. We know we’re going to live forever and there’s no time to think about it. in any event, I couldn’t get my head round where Heaven was and what it would be like.
It was certainly a very long way since astronomers couldn’t see it. But then, it occurred to me Heaven was probably in the spiritual world because we leave our physical bodies, or what’s left of them following cremation, here on Earth.
I reckon I’d have a fair chance of getting to Heaven if there actually was one. I didn’t always treat the women I dated with the respect I maybe should have and once I put some dog shit in a library book, but I haven’t gone round killing people or stealing things from them. None of this came from religious instruction: my moral compass came about through evolution and probably by trial and error.
The great philosopher Belinda Carlisle pointed out that “Ooh, Heaven is a place on Earth” which didn’t help me at all. I seem to remember considering that possibility too, but despite the fact some of the Earth remains unexplored, I can’t imagine there’s somewhere big enough to home the many billions who must be there already.
So, let’s assume that Belinda has got this bit wrong and Heaven isn’t a place on Earth but instead a spiritual place inhabited by spirits. Do we grow a new physical body or a ghostly version, which somehow still looks like us? Christ – and I apologise for yet another bit of blasphemy – how do we know and when we will find out?
What happens when we arrive at those Pearly Gates? St Peter will give us the once over but he will know already whether we’re suitable. Once we go in, what sort of state will we be in? What age will we be? I want to be 28 or 29 years old for reasons I needn’t go into now. I presume God has that all worked out. Will my stepdad, who was a thoroughly decent man, still have Parkinsons and Dementia, because that’s probably not the afterlife we might have imagined. With people who died of cancer no longer have it? And will I still need reading glasses? These are the practical bits. But we’ve only just begun to ask difficult questions.
We’ve all seen those sweet messages people send to the dead. “Until we meet again,” being a prime example. How the hell will we find each other? Will everyone have ghostly lanyards and be easy to locate, perhaps through a heavenly kind of world wide web? After all, there will be billions of us, unless the bit in Revelations is true and God restricts membership, rather like an elite golf club, to 144,000. How frustrating would that be? Be good all your life only for St Peter to block the Gates saying, “There’s no room here, son. Go to Hell.”
Having got this far, I now find myself getting confused. Where in Heaven will I live? Will it be a kind of socialist place, or will there be Heavenly Palaces and Council Houses? Will I need to eat and drink? Will there be supermarkets, pubs and football stadia? Will there be television? Or will we just drift through the clouds all day long, saying hello to angels playing harps, occasionally bumping into people we used to know?
I just can’t see it and I don’t expect I’ll ever find out if any of this Heaven malarkey is true unless one day I get there. Certainly God, if he exists, is doing an excellent job in remaining completely invisible, incapable of speaking to us or shaping and influencing life and death. Either he doesn’t care or he isn’t there. We know really, don’t we? And Belinda is right, sort of: Heaven isn’t quite a place on Earth but the nearest thing we will ever find to Heaven will almost certainly be on it.
