What is heaven like?

Home - Quora Link

Before diving into this answer, I want you to go through these two essays.

Vincent Guidry's answer to As a Christian who believes in hell, what do you imagine it to be like?

The Don Draper video is great not just because it illustrates the kind of hell that people make for themselves because they can’t accept the hard truths about themselves, but also for two other reasons. For one, it speaks to the specifically Christian theme that entry into heaven is predicated on faith and not deeds. None of Draper’s many and notable deeds helped him, but rather acceptance and realization. Just squint a bit and conflate acceptance of self with acceptance of Jesus and you get the idea.

For the second, because applying stories that we see ourselves in to ourselves is the primary vehicle by which spirituality is supposed to work. Whether Heaven or Hell actually works the way that I’ve articulated in the second essay is besides the point of using imagined realities to help us in our current one. For any atheists out there wondering why believers persist even though religion looks so farcical on the face of it, this is why.

So if you’ve gone through both pieces, you should have a rough understanding of where I’m getting at here. Humans are flawed, and our flaws drive us to ever more self-destructive behavior until we decide to stop hurting ourselves. This ‘final’ act, the climax of our stories, when we decide to accept the hard truths and so break the cycle and start proceeding afresh, is the moment that Christians call “turning to Jesus,” or absolution.

We believe that belief in Jesus can wipe away our sins and grant us entry into Heaven, not just after death, but also right here on Earth, one example of which is found in the story of Don Draper. At the end of the story, Don accepts who he is fully, and is transformed in the process.

So what is Heaven? Heaven is a place that is close enough to God that it offers a kind of ‘constant absolution’. You’re never so far away from Jesus that you can’t obtain the same kind of absolution that Draper achieved at the end of his story. It’s an accelerated sort of evolution of self that’s not available on Earth because that’s the way it had to be constructed.

Have you ever been with a new lover, or with someone you’ve known for ages and ages, and so you just click on a level that you don’t normally even see most of the time? That’s what it’s like in Heaven all the time. You have experiences predicated on the flaws in yours and other’s characters, proceed through interesting experiences that reflect those flaws back onto you so you can see them, then once the moment arises where you realize that you’ve been holding onto this aspect of self and that it’s not helping you, you simply surrender it to God and He transforms you into someone new, ready for new adventures where you discover more flaws.

On Earth, this process is painful and annoying, requiring you to go through cycle after cycle before you finally reach the point where absolution becomes possible. What helps is the specific mystic process advocated by Christianity, turning to Jesus, accepting that you are limited and small, while God is infinite and vast, and giving up control over your life to Him, as much as you can.

Earthly life is a crucible, the brief moment in time where you discover your character, the set of flaws that determine the arc of your eternal existence after you die. The hope of Christians is that you’ll discover this essential truth about self, that it’s just not worth doing alone, before you die so your soul isn’t lost, so that it can participate in the world after, because everyone matters, and having more people in Heaven just makes it that much more awesome.

Now, everything I’ve written above about an actual place, all the way up to the idea that you persist after death, is simply imaginative speculation. You can simply toss out all the ‘silly’ nonphysical stuff and what you’re left with is the Christian understanding of morality and self. I just happen to believe in an afterlife and I spend a great deal of time speculating on what it’s like.

But even if you don’t, I challenge you to spend some time considering the idea of absolution, how it might be obtained, and how a faith might allow you to accelerate the process. Even if you don’t accept the need and urgency for faith and belief, I guarantee it will make it easier for you to better yourself as a person, if that’s indeed a goal you have in life.