The Surprise

continued

The next world was to be God's immense, joyful secret -- and what if she'd guessed too much of it already? "I've formed such a lofty idea of heaven," she said as her tuberculosis advanced, "that I wonder what God will do at my death to surprise me."

She would pretend to be surprised, she confided to her sister Pauline, even if she wasn't, so as not to disappoint him. It was God's delight, Therese believed, to astonish each of us, on our death, with the unimagined magnificence of his kingdom.

God of surprises ... I was meeting him all through the Bible. A chosen people sprung from a barren woman past the age of childbearing. A holy nation founded by fleeing slaves. The King of kings born in a stable. Eternal life won by a hideous death. And heaven itself the greatest surprise of all!

We have this hope as an anchor for the soul.
                                            Hebrews 6:19

Suppose, just suppose, I thought, that this surprising heaven really exists! All the "primitive" age-old questions would be my questions too. Where is it? Who gets to go there? Will we know each other? Will we have bodies? What would we do with an eternity of days!

My first question, though, was whether there was any point in speculating about such things at all. If the real heaven is unknowable, God's well-kept secret, how can we form any idea of it? In fact, should we even try?

In the years since I wandered the dusty basement of the Louvre, I've come not only to believe in an afterworld, but to feel that we Christians must try to picture it. Not to mistake our human projections for the reality, as the Egyptians did. But to give us that hope which Christians have always described as the anchor of the soul.

In the sixteenth century a woman expressed her hope in a poem:

Master and Maker! My hope is in thee.
My Jesus, dear Saviour! Now set my soul free.
From this my hard prison, my spirit uprisen,
soars upward to thee.

The woman was Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, awaiting execution in an English prison. Her serenity throughout her long ordeal, like that of Christians in every century, came from the hope of a better life to follow.

Faith. Hope. Charity For a long time after I started going to church, I was puzzled by the inclusion of "hope" in this great trilogy of Christian virtues. About Faith I heard many sermons. About Love even more. But scarcely a word about Hope.

Delighted at any excuse for research, I consulted the hefty theological tomes of various church libraries. Christian hope, it appeared, meant just one thing: the expectation of a glorious eternity in heaven. And for most of Christian history, it seemed to have been the most preached-about subject.

All very well, I thought, in the past, when most people could hope for little on this earth. Wasn't the historic emphasis on heaven simply escapism? Even, more ominously, a cynical ploy on the part of whatever group was on top - "the opiate of the people," pie in the sky by and by? Weren't we right, nowadays, to downplay another existence? Hadn't focusing on heaven meant neglecting real needs here on earth?

No, thought C. S. Lewis. "It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world," he writes, "that they have become so ineffective in this." From the deeds of a small group of apostles to the handful of English evangelicals who abolished the slave trade, "all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven.”