What’s Heaven Like?

Avoiding contemplation of his own mortality had been easy when he was a young man.  It had become increasingly difficult, however, as he grow older—especially right now, in conversation with an inquisitive granddaughter.

“Do you say prayers, Gramps?”

“Prayers?  Ah…yes, sure, I say my prayers.”

“Every night?”

“Actually, I do it in the morning, before I get out of bed.”

“Do you pray to God or Jesus?”

They were alone in the house, he reading a book, she playing with her Lego set.  Music was playing softly in the background.  He wasn’t sure if she was just engaging in idle chatter, or whether this was a significant moment.

“Well,” he began, “aren’t they really the same?  I guess I pray to both.”

“Do you believe in Jesus, Gramps?”

He put his book down on the table beside his chair.  She kept building her blocks, but he could tell she was listening attentively for his answer.

“I believe in the things Jesus taught us,” he said.  “That we should love each other and try to be good.”  He was hedging a bit, because he’d long had difficulty with a literal reading of the Bible.

“If we’re good, we go to heaven when we die, right?”

“That’s right!” he said, on firmer ground now.  “That’s one of the things Jesus promised us.”

After a few moments, she said, “Old people die before kids die, right?”

“That’s right,” he said again.  “Most of the time, old people die first.”

“What do you think heaven is like, Gramps?”

He wanted to tell her that heaven, for him, was having this opportunity to talk with her, listen to her, and feel the love swelling in his chest.  But that wasn’t what she was after, so he tried a reply he’d heard years before when a friend, shortly before his untimely death, was asked the same question.

“I don’t know,” the friend had said, a sly twinkle in his eye.  “Nobody’s ever come back to tell me.” 

The little girl gave that some thought as she continued connecting block to block, building something recognizable only to her.  It was colourful, though.

“I know nobody comes back, Gramps.  But what do you think heaven is like?”

“Hmm,” he said, trying to figure how he might answer.  He’d never thought of heaven as a streets-paved-with-gold place where he would meet again with every person he’d ever known—assuming they all made it there.  His own perception had been evolving over many years—more urgently as those years mounted—and now his granddaughter was pressing him to explain it.

Deep down, he thought he believed that heaven is bound up in the vast universe everyone inhabits—an ever-expanding universe if science is to be credited.  And he thought he believed that every living thing is, in and of itself, already a part of the creator that, in several different languages, people have called God.  So in that sense, everyone was inhabiting heaven already, tracing an eternal voyage through the stars.

He thought he believed that all living things were animated by an inextinguishable spark of energy—he called it the soul—that enlivens them during their mortal journey. He thought he believed that, when his own journey came to an end, blotting out his conscious existence as one little girl’s grandpa, his soul would carry on, perhaps to animate some other form of life somewhere in the universe.

He was actually surprised how badly he wanted to believe that—that his soul, an unquenchable amalgam of light and heat, would live eternally.  For if it were not so, he reasoned, trying to convince himself—if all that energy from all those dying souls were to simply dissipate and die—the universe, rather than expanding, would surely be shrinking, bit by bit by bit.

But then, every time he’d managed to attain some assurance about such things, he would remember a long-ago admonition from who-knows-whom—Don’t believe everything you think!

“Gramps?” his granddaughter said, looking up from her blocks, waiting for his answer.

“Hmm,” he said again, realizing he was out of time.

“It’s okay if you don’t know,” she said, standing up from her Lego endeavours.  As she climbed onto his lap, she added, “I just don’t want you to die.”

It was several moments before he could speak again, so he held her close in his arms, offering a silent prayer.

And in those precious moments, he knew he’d discovered what heaven was like.

_{© J. Bradley Burt 2021}