Don Piper was driving his red Ford Escort from a meeting to his church near Houston on a rainy January day in 1989. There was a thick fog, and Piper had just slowed to read a plaque on the side of the narrow bridge across which he was driving when an eighteen-wheeler crossed the center line and crushed his car. When they arrived at the scene of the accident, the emergency medical team found Piper lifeless. His left arm dangled behind him. His left leg was shattered. The medics pronounced him dead, put a tarp over the vehicle, and proceeded to assist passengers in other cars. That’s when Piper, who was thirty-eight years old, a father of three, and a Baptist minister, went to heaven.
The story he tells—in his book 90 Minutes in Heaven and in person as he travels the country—is both familiar and moving. He remembers an enveloping light and a feeling of intense joy. He remembers standing before an ornate gate and being greeted by a crowd of familiar faces—his grandfather, a high-school friend, his great-grandmother who in life had been toothless but now had perfect teeth. As he recounts his experience, he repeatedly says that although he knows he must tell his story chronologically, time has no meaning in heaven. He also insists, even as he tries to describe them, that the sights he saw there were indescribable. “Everything I experienced was like a first-class buffet for the senses,” he writes. He saw light, which grew brighter and brighter but was never blinding. “I was amazed that the luster and intensity continually increased,” he writes. “The farther I walked, the brighter the light. The light engulfed me and I had the sense that I was being ushered into the presence of God. Although our earthly eyes must gradually adjust to light or darkness, my heavenly eyes saw with absolute ease.”
And then he heard the music. At first, it sounded like the swishing of birds’ wings—familiar from his boyhood in Arkansas. He soon realized it was the wings of angels. The sounds of heaven “differed from anything I had ever heard or expect to hear on earth”—as though three different CDs were playing at once, he says, yet all the sounds blended together into one jubilant noise. Even now, when Piper lies down to sleep, he can hear the sounds of heaven.
Piper was brought back, he says, by a colleague who happened upon the scene, and, following a command from God, climbed into the back of the Escort to pray. When the friend started to sing a hymn—“What a Friend We Have in Jesus”—Piper joined in. The friend rushed over to the EMTs, screaming, “He’s alive!”
Piper had thirty-four surgeries. His recovery was slow, his wounds more than physical. He suffered anger, depression, and suicidal thoughts. Finally—through long conversations with understanding friends—he came to understand that his personal catastrophe was a message from God, and he devoted his life to spreading the news: heaven is real. He travels constantly—Georgia, Texas, California, Florida, and Alabama in a single month—speaking mostly to church groups and at retirement communities. His pain is constant; he always asks hosts to put him up on the ground floor so he doesn’t have to climb stairs. “People want to know that God does answer prayers,” he told me. “They want to know that miracles can still happen.” Published in 2005, 90 Minutes in Heaven was on the best-seller list for more than two years; a sequel, Heaven Is Real, came out in 2007.
Is Don Piper a crackpot, a huckster—or a prophet? The same has been asked of every visionary since long before Jesus. Piper falls into a long tradition of travelers to heaven—men and women who say they find themselves, usually by accident, in the Kingdom of God and return, changed, to speak truth to a skeptical world. The vision of Jacob, the books of Enoch and Revelation are the early monotheistic precursors, but of course there are others. The Mesopotamian legend of Gilgamesh, written about four thousand years ago, describes the journey of a hero who travels to the glittering gardens of the gods to discover the secret of eternal life. Gilgamesh learns that there is no secret: embrace this life, his guide tells him, for nothing else awaits. “Enjoy your life,” says the goddess Siduri. “Love the child who holds you by the hand, and give your wife pleasure in your embrace.” He returns to the human world, having failed to attain immortality but blessed with an understanding of the beauty of life on earth. Homer’s Odyssey is said to have been inspired partly by Gilgamesh.
Nearly every image of heaven we hold in our minds—throne room, banquet, and singing angels; garden, rivers, and sweet-smelling flowers; sparkling city, jeweled walls, golden streets; harps, clouds, blinding light; saints and martyrs gathered in worship—comes from such firsthand accounts. Over time, the images have evolved and their emphasis has changed. Travelers to heaven used to see the throne of God, then the saints and martyrs, then characters from history, royal courts, and lush gardens; now, like Piper, they see grandparents and high-school football coaches. In this chapter, I also include artists (writers, painters, movie directors) among the visionaries, since imaginative renderings of heaven—based, however loosely, on the firsthand experiential accounts—have influenced our conceptions most of all.
MEDIEVAL VISIONS
In the earliest apocalyptic literature, as we’ve seen, visionaries went to heaven, looked around, and received from God a lesson about the fate of the earth. In these visions, heaven is the terrifying throne of God, the seat of Judgment. It is neither pretty nor comforting. The first book of Enoch, written by multiple authors over hundreds of years ending in the second century CE, is a Jewish apocalypse—a glimpse of things to come for those who obeyed—and defied—the law of the Torah. The narrator—named Enoch after the character in Genesis who “was no more, because God took him”—recounts his trip to heaven the way a young boy would tell a ghost story. First, there’s mist. Then lightning. Then, “I proceeded until I came near to a wall, which was built of hailstones, and a tongue of fire surrounded it, and it began to make me afraid.” Enoch, our hero, faints. The lesson of Enoch, said the scholar James Charlesworth at Prince ton Theological Seminary in a phone call, is clear: “God lives in another region, called heaven, and Enoch alone is allowed to go there…. He reports that those who are righteous—and suffering—will be rewarded.”
John, the author of Revelation, is guided to heaven by an angel and upon arrival immediately sees the Throne. “Around the throne are twenty-four thrones, and seated on the thrones are twenty-four elders, dressed in white robes, with golden crowns on their heads. Coming from the throne are flashes of lightning, and rumblings and peals of thunder.” John sees a great battle with Satan, the destruction of the earth, and finally “a new heaven and a new earth.” In the last paragraphs, he has a talk with Jesus, who claims to be the one who can turn everything upside down (or right-side up, depending on your point of view). “I am the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” The end is coming soon. John ends his story by swearing its truth. Let anyone who embellishes or erases any part of this tale be among those sent to hell, he says.
The apostle Paul deflected questions about what future was in store by saying it was too much for the puny human mind to imagine: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind conceived what God has prepared for those who love him.” But Paul knew what heaven looked like: according to the Second Letter to the Corinthians, he had been there. Fourteen years ago, he went to “the third heaven,” he says, “whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows.” What was it like? Paul said only that he “heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.” For centuries, Christian ministers have echoed Paul when they tell their flocks that words cannot express the wonders of heaven.
But humans can be literal-minded, and the gaps in the apostle’s narrative proved too tantalizing. At least one storyteller tried to fill them in. The Apocalypse of Paul was a fourth-century best seller, translated into most European languages. Written by an unknown author, posing as Paul, it tells of Paul’s trip to heaven.
Guided by an angel, Paul first watches the souls of the good and those of the wicked leave their bodies. Good souls are greeted upon death with a kiss from a guardian angel and a reminder to remember their bodies, for they will need them at the end of time. Together, soul and angel ascend to the throne of God to await the soul’s judgment. The angel vouches for the soul, and then God hands down his ruling. “In as much as this man did not grieve me, neither will I grieve him; as he had pity, I also will have pity.” Angels, archangels, and cherubim sing.
In the third heaven Paul sees a great golden gate, and “columns of gold…full of golden letters.” Upon each of the letters is written the name of one of the righteous; the angel tells Paul that the fate even of the living is recorded in heaven. In the third heaven, Paul sees an old man, whose “face shone like the sun” they embrace and Paul is introduced to (none other than) Enoch, “the scribe of righteous ness.”
The next level is a kind of holding pen for the righteous, a heaven before the end of time. Called “the land of promise,” it has all the attributes of what many people today imagine heaven to be. On the banks of a river flowing with milk and honey grow trees that bear fruit every month; the whole place shines with a light “seven times brighter than silver.” Souls reside here without their bodies. Paul’s guide then escorts him to a golden ship, which sails, in the company of three thousand angels, to the City of Christ, the place where the saints, martyrs, and patriarchs wait for the Second Coming of Jesus. Here are the twelve gates and four rivers of Revelation, and here is the great King David, psalter and harp in hand, singing hallelujah and waiting for the return of the Christian Lord. In this version of events, the Jews are singing praises to Jesus in heaven.
From the earliest decades of Islam, Muslim poets and storytellers have also told of a trip to heaven. These are not visions, exactly, but retellings of Muhammad’s “Night Journey,” an out-of-time trip from Mecca to the place that is now the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem—on the same hill where the Jewish Temple allegedly once stood. Based on a snippet of the Qur’an—“Glory be to Him Who carried His servant by night from the Sacred Mosque to the Furthest Mosque, whose precincts we have blessed, to show him of Our wonders!”—Muslims have traditionally understood that from Jerusalem, Muhammad ascended through seven levels of heaven until he finally met with God.
The story, given in the hadith tradition, goes like this: Muhammad is sleeping in a cave when he is awakened by an angel named Gabriel who has with him a white, winged steed, bigger than a donkey but smaller than a mule. They fly through the night until they arrive in Jerusalem, where they ascend to heaven on a staircase with alternating gold and silver steps. In the first heaven, Muhammad sees Adam. In the second heaven he sees Jesus and John the Baptist; in the third, Joseph. In the fourth, fifth, and sixth, Muhammad sees—naturally—Enoch, and then Aaron and Moses. Finally, in the seventh heaven, Muhammad sees Abraham, whom Muslims also revere as a patriarch; a big tree covered with butterflies; and a heavenly house, where every day, seventy thousand angels perform something like the hajj—they enter the house, then leave, never to return until the day of resurrection.
Beyond heaven, Muhammad enters paradise, populated mostly with the poor. In some tellings he sees houris there, and celestial servants—ten thousand per resident—holding gold and silver trays. Finally, Muhammad sees the Throne of God. It is supernaturally large, so much bigger than the heavens themselves that it both covers and encompasses them, as the oceans do a mustard seed. It is not for sitting. It is a symbol of God’s power.
During the Middle Ages, as such Christian theologians as Thomas Aquinas sorted the sinners and the righteous into their various categories, the heavens of Christian visionaries became more stratified. The three heavens of Paul become a seemingly endless succession of walled-off sections and subdivisions in “The Vision of Tundale,” a twelfth-century legend. Tundale was so popular that for centuries it was considered pleasure reading and not just an edifying religious tract, says Eileen Gardiner, editor of a collection called Visions of Heaven and Hell Before Dante. In Tundale, the narrator is a knight who has had a stroke and is guided by an angel through layer upon layer of heaven (and hell). As Tundale ascends, the righteous ness of the creatures he encounters increases.
After a visit to hell, in which Tundale encounters Lucifer himself, a monster with a thousand hands, he and his angel guide begin to climb. First, they encounter a place for the “not very evil.” The stench of hell is gone, and the inhabitants—though hungry, thirsty, and sad—are not in torment. Then they pass through a place for the “not very good,” where they see “a beautiful field, fragrant, planted with flowers, bright and very pleasant, in which there was a multitude of souls that no one was able to count.” Further on, the place for the faithful married had such a “sweet and delightful odor” that Tundale begged to stay, but his guide urged him forward toward the superior heavens for martyrs, virgins, monks, and the builders of churches.
In the heaven of the monks and the virtuous, Tundale sees one of my very favorite celestial images: a community of tents and pavilions, all in gray and purple silk. From inside the tents, Tundale can hear the strains of delicate music: strings and organs, drums and zithers. Above him, hanging from the sky, are gold chains from which dangle goblets, sweet-smelling flowers, bells, and golden globes. When the angels fly among these celestial wind chimes, “they produced the softest and sweetest song.”
Although Tundale sees heaven layer by layer, at the end of the story he also sees it whole. As if from a spaceship, he can see armies of virgins and martyrs, all clothed in white and singing praises to the Lord. The angel guides Tundale back to his body, where he wakes from his coma. He gives all he has to the poor and enters a monastery.
Gardiner, a scholar who has been studying medieval visions for two decades, runs her own small publishing company in Manhattan. She reminds me that these medieval visions—and even the early Jewish and Christian visions—were written, like Piper’s books, as true stories. These are not artful metaphor; there is no “as if” here. These are powerful, literal accounts of events that the tellers say really occurred—not unlike accounts by people who have seen UFOs—used by believers to underscore the reality of worlds beyond this one. Don Piper is exactly this type of visionary. He saw what he saw, he believed it to be real, and he returned to earth changed, an evangelist determined to tell his story to the world.
PARADISO
Dante Alighieri changed the rules of the game. His Divine Comedy is both things—a true vision in the tradition of its precedents and a work of art. The pilgrim on the journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven is Dante himself. He writes his story in the first person; he uses his own name. Other medieval visionaries arrive in heaven after a near-death experience—a stroke (as in Tundale) or an injury. Dante’s vision is triggered by depression, a sense of being lost, from which he is rescued by Virgil, the Latin poet and his guide through hell and purgatory. He asserts his account’s veracity throughout, with claims like “It happened; I swear to you” certainly some of his readers thought—for real—that the poet had been to hell and to heaven. His near contemporary Giovanni Boccaccio tells this story of a group of Veronese women who spied Dante in the street: “Do you see the man who goes down into hell and returns when he pleases, and brings back tidings of them that are below?” one asked. “To which one of the others naively answered, ‘You must indeed say true. Do you not see how his beard is crisped, and his color darkened by the heat and smoke down there?’”
Sensational immediately upon publication (Inferno was in wide circulation by 1315, Purgatorio by 1320; Paradiso was finished the year Dante died in 1321), the 14,233-line Divine Comedy was transfiguring. Unlike Tundale, which was intended to be news, Dante’s poem was news and art, and as such, it opened the way for the generations of imaginative accounts of heaven that followed. Many readers believe Dante’s most astonishing innovation is his choice of heavenly guide, for she is no scriptural angel. Instead, the person who leads the poet through the nine spheres of heaven is a young woman named Beatrice—named after a girl whom Dante allegedly glimpsed on the street in Florence. They exchanged smiles, the story goes, but she married someone else. (So did he.) Beatrice died young, and Dante’s love went unfulfilled: “Nothing else in Western literature,” writes the literary critic Harold Bloom in The Western Canon, “in the long span from the Yahwist and Homer through Joyce and Beckett, is as sublimely outrageous as Dante’s exaltation of Beatrice…. Beatrice is the signature of Dante’s originality, and her triumphant placement well within the Christian machinery of salvation is her poet’s most audacious act.”
Paradiso has influenced our images of heaven almost as much as Revelation—though in modern times, it is more frequently assigned to university students than taken up for pleasure by mainstream readers. Paradiso affects our visions of heaven because so many of the West’s greatest poets, painters, and writers thought it inspiring and magnificent, among the greatest achievements of Western art. It is difficult going, full of veiled references to literature, history, and Scripture—a knotty theological conversation about the nature of God in terza rima (three-line rhymes with an internal rhyming structure). My own volume has nearly three times as many pages of notes as it does of poetry; it’s no wonder Paradiso lives on mostly in graduate seminars.
Michelangelo adored Dante and wrote sonnets to him: Dante “rose a living man to gaze on God.” It was, perhaps, the poet’s own years-long effort to create with words a picture of heaven and hell—massive, stratified, both human and divine, and populated with characters both famous and unknown—that inspired Michelangelo two hundred years later to do something similar on the walls and ceilings of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. At around the same time, another Florentine, Sandro Botticelli (known better for his erotic paintings of pagan goddesses) made the connection between Dante’s vision and early Renaissance art more explicit. He created nearly a hundred drawings of The Divine Comedy, exquisite in their simplicity, for the great arts patron Lorenzo de’ Medici. In Ascent to Primum Mobile, which looks like a modern sketch, Dante covers his eyes as his guide Beatrice points skyward toward the God-light, a sun surrounded by nine circles of stars. In 1667, John Milton published his own heavenly epic, of course: Paradise Lost. The British poet and illustrator William Blake spent the last years of his life, in the 1820s, illustrating The Divine Comedy. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Joyce, the mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers, the playwright Samuel Beckett, and the contemporary poet Seamus Heaney—all have loved Dante and credited him as inspiration. (Beckett once told a friend that all he wanted to do was “sit on my ass, fart and think of Dante.”) In a poem called “Station Island”—named after the location of St. Patrick’s Purgatory mentioned in the previous chapter—Heaney uses terza rima to evoke the bright-light vision of Paradiso in modern, murkier terms:
As if the prisms of the kaleidoscope
I plunged once in a butt of muddied water
Surfaced like a marvelous lightship
“How many ways can you say ‘light’?” complains Jean Hollander, as I sit in her Prince ton, New Jersey, kitchen with her husband, Robert, and their rambunctious German shepherd, Josie. The Hollanders had, in the weeks before my visit, just published their joint translation of Paradiso. Robert, the Prince ton scholar, knew the poem as well as he knows his own name—its sources, its history, its scholarly controversies and, of course, the medieval Italian dialect in which it was written, the language that became modern Italian. Jean is a contemporary poet. Together they created a sophisticated poetry translation—with ample notes—that modern readers can still find beautiful. One of my favorite passages is this, in which Dante asks Beatrice whether a person might stint on certain good works and substitute others and still gain salvation:
Beatrice looked at me with eyes so full
Of the radiance of love and so divine
That, overcome, my power of sight faded and fled,
And, eyes cast down, I almost lost my senses.
Beautifully done, but the problem of all that light obviously rankled Jean. “All anyone ever does is stand around and look at the light.” She reveres Dante, but his vision of heaven doesn’t sound like a place to which she’d want to go.
Dante’s heaven is a place of light, sweet smells, and music. At the beginning of Paradiso, light is like air, part of the atmosphere. “It seemed to me that we were in a cloud, / shining, dense, solid, and unmarred, / like a diamond struck by sunlight. / The eternal pearl received us in itself / as water does a ray of light / and yet remains unsundered and serene.” As Dante ascends through the spheres, guided by Beatrice, he meets saints and martyrs, people he knew in life, and people he knows from history. The light grows brighter and brighter, and in the third-to-last canto, when he reaches the Emyprean heaven, Beatrice bows out of her role as his guide and sits down. Dante addresses the light directly. Atmospheric light, with a lowercase l, becomes capitalized—the “Light” of God. Dante looks into the Light and says he has finally arrived. “I reached the Goodness that is infinite.”
Inside the Light, Dante sees that all the variety in the universe is bound together by love, and he understands the wholeness of everything. The Light then changes color and becomes three circles, the Trinity, and as Dante gazes upon it he sees that it is “painted with our likeness.” It is light, it is color, it is three, it is one, and it looks like us. As he’s struggling to understand what he sees, his mind is “struck by a bolt / of lightning that granted what I asked.” He grasps something divine, but like Paul, Dante insists that words fail him in describing his vision—that trying to remember it is like trying to remember a dream. That bolt of understanding changes him so he is no longer separate from the universe but one with it—and then he goes home. “My will and my desire,” he concludes, “were turning with / the Love that moves the sun and all the other stars.”
Robert Hollander would say that Dante saved his life. He is not exaggerating. He and Jean had finished their translations of Inferno and Purgatorio and were nearly through with Paradiso when Robert had a massive stroke. His brain could not retrieve any words in English—let alone in Italian. Several weeks into his recovery, Jean brought to the hospital their translation of Paradiso, and Robert began working on it, word by word, line by line. “It was like waltzing in mud,” he told me. But the Commedia has been Robert’s life’s work—he fell in love with Dante while a young teaching assistant at Columbia, and has never recovered. Paradiso has been his sustenance and inspiration for more than forty years. And although he does not believe in an afterlife, he wishes he did—and if he did, it would look exactly as Dante describes it in Paradiso.
In Canto 23, the Virgin appears to Dante, and she is surrounded by whirling music and flames. Her head is encircled by a sapphire crown. Dante reaches toward her “like a baby reaching out its arm / to mamma after it has drunk her milk.” The saints, dressed in white, reach toward her, too, singing “Regina celi with such sweetness / that my feeling of delight has never left me.” Unseen, but presiding over all, is Jesus. Hollander’s body sags in his chair, but his dark eyes are alight with intelligence and love. “I think he’s got it right. It’s absolutely convincing to me. If I’m wrong and nonetheless saved, that’s what I’ll see. It’s a tempting thing. If I ever convert, it will be because of Paradiso 23.”
ARTISTIC VISIONS
With his example, Dante gave generations of artists permission to imagine heaven as they wished—and in the decades after the celebrity-poet’s death, Italian painters envisioned it just as Dante did. Frescoes of the Last Judgment in the Strozzi Chapel in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence depict the heaven—and hell—of the Commedia. Saints are seated in happy rows; Dante himself is among the elect. In the early 1300s, the Paduan aristocrat Enrico Scrovegni commissioned the painter Giotto to render the Last Judgment on the walls of the Arena Chapel, and Giotto used as his template the Commedia. The saints, again arrayed in tiers, all gaze at Christ, encircled by light. Not by chance, Enrico himself kneels before the Virgin Mary at the bottom of the picture, offering his chapel as a gift to her: Dante had consigned Enrico’s father, Reginaldo, to the seventh circle of hell for usury. By sponsoring the picture, the son was endeavoring to redeem his father’s sins—and reputation.
But as the Renaissance bloomed, painters began to feel freer with their imaginative visions. I met Ena Heller in her office at the Museum of Biblical Art (MOBIA) in Manhattan. The executive director there, she specializes in early Renaissance art, and over coffee one morning we gazed at one of her favorite depictions of paradise—which she pulled up on her desktop computer—created by an unknown Rhineland painter around 1440. In it, a low stone wall encircles a blossoming garden of fruit trees, iris, and lilies. Birds flit in and out of shrubs. The Virgin and saints are seated or standing in the grass. A baby plays a lyre. In the Renaissance, “the heavenly narrative becomes more detailed and complex,” explains Heller, “and they go much less by the strict standards mandated by the Middle Ages.” She pulls up another favorite image on her screen. This one is a sixteenth-century fresco on the exterior wall of a church in Moldova. It shows an old man, with white hair and a beard—this is Abraham—rocking a handful of miniature white-clad souls, like babies, to his breast.
With the Reformation, Heller explains, images of heaven—and saints and angels—came down from the church walls. Calvin, especially, discouraged every kind of imaginative rendering; paintings, frescoes, tile work, stained glass were seen as corrupting influences. “Your connection is to be with the word, the word over images. You just need to read the Bible, and you shouldn’t imagine it,” Heller explains. Heller—who was raised in the Eastern Orthodox tradition—grew up in churches covered from floor to ceiling with gold icons. The first time she stepped into a church in Switzerland, she says, “I stood there thinking, ‘How can people pray?’ I can’t imagine ritual without images—just not to have it on the walls, it was really weird to me.”
This very human rebellion against the Reformation—with all its abstractions and austerity—produced the Counter-Reformation, and with it a renewed appreciation in the Roman Catholic Church of music, culture, and art. Many of the images we have come to associate with heaven today come from that period. In the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, Peter Paul Rubens’s seventeenth-century Antwerp altarpiece, pink, fat-faced angels with feathered wings whirl and whoosh around the Virgin as she, smiling, floats upward, her skirts moving with her. Beams of beckoning light gleam from above. This is the heaven of Christmas cards and of our conventional contemporary imaginings. Popular visions—in painting, at least—ceased evolving about a hundred years later during the Enlightenment just as the Church stopped patronizing the arts, Heller explains. “There’s nothing really new that gets created. That’s why these images have such enduring power. There wasn’t anything to replace them.”
Today, artistic visions tend to be idiosyncratic. In the modernist German artist Anselm Kiefer’s 1990 book The Heavenly Places: Merkaba (the name of a school of early Jewish mysticism in which visionaries ascend to heaven and return to earth with eyewitness accounts), he presents page after page of black-and-white photographs. First he shows a bare, cellarlike space strewn with rubble and dotted with pillars. As the book continues, the images gradually resolve into a woman screaming (either in ecstasy or horror). Book with Wings is a sculpture: a volume of Scripture looks ready to fly, thanks to the enormous angel wings attached to each side. In all religious traditions, of course, Scripture is itself a door to heaven—and for mystics, chanting, praying, reading with steady repetition, one gets closer to God. Kiefer, who was raised Roman Catholic, turned in later life to Kabbalah and other forms of mysticism. “Heaven,” he told the Times of London in 2007, “is in each of the little sparks of the body.”
Writers, too, continue to try their hand at heaven. In 1946, C. S. Lewis wrote a visionary journey to heaven called The Great Divorce, and in it articulated the interpretive problem that Dante left implicit. For the believers, even the highest literature leaves much of heaven unimaginable: “Do not ask of a vision in a dream more than a vision in a dream can give.” Alice Sebold and Mitch Albom followed—but the medievalist Gardiner suggests that some of the most interesting recent results have been in the realm of science fiction. Ursula Le Guin’s short story “Paradises Lost” from her collection Birthday of the World has a plot rather like the 2009 Academy Award–winning animated movie WALL-E: aboard a spaceship on a two-hundred-year journey, the passengers begin to believe they’re in heaven. None of earth’s problems affect them anymore. There’s no hunger—the spaceship crew instantly gives them everything they need. There’s no disease, no war. When they arrive at their destination, the passengers must decide whether to disembark onto the “dirtball” on which they’ve landed—or to stay aboard. “Did our ancestors send us from one hell to another hell by way of heaven?” asks one.
If you want to create an enduring and salient image of heaven for the masses these days, you’d best make a movie. With Defending Your Life, the director Albert Brooks in 1991 produced and directed one of the twentieth century’s most inventive afterlife visions—although What Dreams May Come, from 1998, gets an honorable mention for special effects. The hero, Daniel Miller (Brooks), dies unexpectedly and ascends to a kind of celestial way station—not heaven, exactly—where he has to defend his life in a courtroom setting. The judgment of the court determines his final destination. Miller has led an unexceptional life, marked by conservatism, fear, and anxiety—and in retrospect, seen in short recorded flashbacks, it all looks bad. During his stay, he meets Julia (Meryl Streep), whose life has been brave and glorious: she was the kind of woman who rescues children and pets from burning buildings. They fall in love, and through love, Miller grows brave—and as the Mormons would say, “worthy” of ascending to the next level.
Like Paradiso, Defending Your Life is a complete imaginary vision of the afterlife. Brooks created a whole world, in which electric trams shuttle the dead back and forth between their court appointments and the hotels where they temporarily reside; in which the food you order at restaurants arrives at the table before you’re finished ordering and is always delicious; in which every resident wears a white garment called a tupa, a cross between a hospital gown and a toga. Brooks even envisioned entertainment for the dead—floor shows, stand-up comedy, or, in the Past Lives Pavilion, a retrospective look at your previous incarnations.
I spoke to Brooks one evening by phone. Nearly twenty years on, he is still extremely proud of Defending Your Life, and Daniel’s late arrival at self-knowledge and emotional bravery can make him cry when he catches the film unexpectedly on television. Brooks says he knew Defending Your Life would succeed only if he established every detail of Judgment City: what everything looked like and how things worked. “It took a lot of thought over a long period of time,” he says. “I had these charts all over the place. I had to make up all these rules. How long you were there, for instance. You could eat all you want…. How does that work? How much arguing could you do in the courtroom? It had to be made up from scratch—the transportation system, what you would feel, what you wouldn’t feel…. If there was consciousness, what consciousness? The tupas—the idea of what you wear and what that looks like. You can’t hire a costume director and say, ‘Do what you did in Titanic.’”
Brooks has not read Dante, but he has a similar interest in death and justice—and the possibility of justice after death. He is Jewish. He had a bar mitzvah, goes to temple on the High Holy Days, and lights Yahrzeit candles in memory of those he’s lost. “The one thing I like about Judaism very much, what I gained from it, was the Golden Rule,” he tells me. “That always made sense to me. I don’t want to be shitty to people because I don’t want them to be shitty to me.”
Like many Americans, Brooks is of two minds about heaven. His father died when he was just twelve. “The percentages say nothing happens to you after you die. We can see that any night we fall asleep and don’t dream. That could go on for eternity. But, having said that, I don’t know. Maybe. It would be great if the movie was right, if someone said, ‘You still have a lot of fears, but you figured it out, so come with me.’…If I am right, I’d like to be awarded a posthumous Nobel Prize. More than that. Free parking.”
NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES
Carol Zaleski is the mother of modern heaven studies. A practicing Roman Catholic, she became fascinated with heaven as a young child. “Heaven has always been the best, most perfect place people can imagine,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Who wouldn’t want to think about that?” Now a religion professor at Smith College, she and her husband, Philip, have together written or edited a number of books relating to heaven, including an anthology called The Book of Heaven (which I thumbed heavily during my research) and a book on prayer. Her most intriguing book by far, however, is the one that came out of her doctoral dissertation at Harvard University. Otherworldly Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times, published in 1986, puts the popular visions of antiquity and the Middle Ages in the same category as near-death experiences (hereafter referred to as NDEs), though she adds that both need to be interpreted with care. Some are touchy about this analysis, for they feel it undermines the truth of their experience. Don Piper explicitly denounces those who say that what he saw was merely an NDE. “I didn’t undergo anything like [that],” he writes in Heaven Is Real. “One second I was alive, and the next instant, I stood at the gates of heaven.” Nevertheless, it’s a connection worth exploring.
I met Zaleski one winter afternoon in the beginning stages of researching this book, in a coffee shop in Northampton, Massachusetts. It was the Christmas season, and the streets outside were covered with slush. In the bustle of the shop, Zaleski’s calm, placid manner struck me—as if she herself had seen heaven and come back, changed. In a sense, she has. Zaleski grew up in a nonobservant Jewish household in Manhattan, amid tall buildings and other families like hers who “had ham for Easter dinner.” Her lack of formal religious training left a hole, a sense of something missing, and so she began to seek to fill it. She read poetry books given to her by her grandmother—William Butler Yeats and Allen Ginsberg. She volunteered downtown at the Catholic Worker Movement, the social justice group founded by Dorothy Day. She befriended a group of Benedictine monks in northern Massachusetts. In 1991, at the age of forty, she was officially received into the Roman Catholic Church. Her conversion was a long, slow process that came about after decades of resistance—she didn’t want to betray her roots. She believes in heaven—she likes the idea “that a perfect life is available to us, a more meaningful cosmos than the world allows.” Her favorite vision of heaven, she says without hesitating, is Dante’s Paradiso—“definitely.”
In modern America, with all the resuscitation techniques available to us, the number of NDEs is surprisingly high. According to a 2000 article in Lancet, between 9 and 18 percent of people who have been demonstrably near death report having had one. Surveys of NDE accounts show great similarities in the details. People who have had NDEs—like some religious visionaries—describe a tunnel, a light, a gate, or a door, a sense of being out of the body, meeting people they know or have heard about, finding themselves in the presence of God, and then returning, changed. Such experiences are common across cultures and religions, although they’re interpreted differently. Zaleski warns against taking these visions too literally and speaks movingly of what Catholics call “discernment,” the process—with divine help—of deciding what is true. “There are a lot of clues to authenticity,” she says. “Does the experience shed more light? Does it make you more loving? Does it have a quality of reality to it? Does it connect you with other things you value? If yes, then I’d say go with it, but wear it lightly even so.”
Skeptics might frame this question of authenticity differently: Can these visions be explained simply through the chemical and physiological processes of dying? Or have people who have had NDEs really made some kind of extra-conscious journey? (Or, to get really tricky, is this a meaningful distinction?) This is a difficult field of study for obvious reasons: most people in the process of dying do die, and those who survive approached the brink of death in such different ways—car accident, stroke, heart attack—that it’s impossible to compare their experiences scientifically. But over the years, science has posited a number of theories about the connection between visions of heaven and the chemical and physical processes that occur at death.
Andrew Newberg is an associate professor in the Department of Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania and has made his reputation studying the brain scans of religious people (nuns and monks) who have ecstatic experiences as they meditate. He believes the “tunnel” and “light” phenomena can be explained easily. As your eyesight fades, you lose the peripheral areas first, he hypothesizes. “That’s why you’d have a tunnel sensation.” If you see a bright light, that could be the central part of the visual system shutting down last.
Newberg puts forward the following scenario, which, he emphasizes, is guesswork. When people die, two parts of the brain, which usually work in opposition to each other, act cooperatively. The sympathetic nervous system—a web of nerves and neurons running through the spinal cord and spread to virtually every organ in the body—is responsible for arousal or excitement. It gets you ready for action. The parasympathetic system—with which the sympathetic system is entwined—calms you down and rejuvenates you. In life, the turning on of one system prompts the shutting down of the other. The sympathetic nervous system kicks in when a car cuts you off on the highway; the parasympathetic system is in charge as you’re falling asleep. But in the brains of people having mystical experiences—and, perhaps, in death—both systems are fully “on,” giving a person a sensation both of slowing down, being “out of body,” and of seeing things vividly, including memories of important people and past events. Does Newberg believe, then, that visions of heaven are merely chemical-neurological events? He laughs nervously. “I don’t know.” He laughs again. “It’s, um…. I don’t think we have enough evidence one way or another to say.”
Since at least the 1980s, scientists have theorized that NDEs occur as a kind of physiological self-defense mechanism. In order to guard against damage during trauma, the brain releases protective chemicals that also happen to trigger intense hallucinations. This theory gained traction after scientists realized that virtually all the features of an NDE—a sense of moving through a tunnel, an “out of body” feeling, spiritual awe, visual hallucinations, and intense memories—can be reproduced with a stiff dose of ketamine, a horse tranquilizer frequently used as a party drug. In 2000 a psychiatrist named Karl Jansen wrote a book called Ketamine: Dreams and Realities, in which he interviewed a number of recreational users. One of them, who called himself K.U., describes one of his drug trips this way: “I came out into a golden Light. I rose into the Light and found myself having an unspoken interchange with the Light, which I believed to be God…. I didn’t believe in God, which made the experience even more startling. Afterwards, I walked around the house for hours saying ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.’”
To some people, the explanation of heaven as an event that happens in your brain as you’re dying is enough. My friend Christopher Dickey is one of these people. He told me that his father, the writer James Dickey, had a recurring dream in which heaven was like a swimming pool around which his friends sat, chatting. “There was nothing special about the pool itself,” wrote Chris in Summer of Deliverance: A Memoir of Father and Son. “Nobody walked on the water. And he never told me who the friends were…. But what he took away from the dream was a sense of contentment, of being at ease with himself and the world, as if he had gotten a preview of heaven. He called that place “The Happy Pool.” Chris recounted this anecdote to me with a sweet smile and then said he imagined that everything we think we know about heaven happens in the moments before death. After that, there’s nothing. (The narrator of Philip Roth’s Indignation is dead—or rather, thinks he’s dead—and he believes much the same thing. Death is not “an endless nothing,” says Roth’s Private Messner, but “memory cogitating for eons on itself.”)
Others, though, remain dissatisfied. Emily Williams Kelly is a psychologist who works at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies, which treats the study of NDEs as a legitimate science. Her résumé is impressive: she has degrees from Duke, UVA itself, and the University of Edinburgh—not institutions one usually associates with the study of the supernatural or paranormal. Kelly has spent her career researching, as she puts it, “the interface between the brain and the mind.” Practically speaking, she interviews dying people and tries to find patterns and similarities among their experiences. Kelly believes the experience of people who have had near-death visions demonstrates that consciousness exists even after normal brain function ceases—a theory that could suggest explanations for an afterlife beyond the scientific. “If our conscious experience totally depends on the brain, then there can’t be an afterlife—when the brain’s gone, the mind’s gone,” she says. “But it’s not that simple. Even when the brain seems to be virtually disabled, people are still having these experiences.”
What is she saying? That upon death people really go to another realm—and that science can prove it? Kelly shrugs. NDEs, she says, “tell us to open our minds and think there may be a great deal more to mind and consciousness—that’s as far as I’m willing to go. Whether it means they’ve actually been to heaven—I couldn’t go that far…. But our current model of how the brain works doesn’t explain it.” The frequency and uniformity of NDEs “opens up the possibility that these experiences are what they say they are, and we have to take that seriously.”
Mally Cox-Chapman would agree. We are sitting at her kitchen table, in her large, comfortable house in Hartford, Connecticut, and she is using an analogy to explain the way our limited minds think about heaven. One of her hands is in a fist on the table. That’s “space bug.” The other is flat, palm down. That’s “flat bug.” Together, they cruise, side by side, toward an obstacle—a coffee mug—before them. Flat bug, who’s two-dimensional, can’t imagine how to get around the obstacle. He only thinks in two dimensions. But space bug just hops across. Easy. He exists in space. Why is it so hard, Cox-Chapman wonders aloud, to imagine a soul discovering another dimension? Cox-Chapman is a believing Christian, and she wants to convince me that a supernatural dimension created by God is, at least, a possibility.
Cox-Chapman is the author of The Case for Heaven, a collection of interviews with near-death experiencers published in 1995. Her argument: that experiences of the millions of people who have been to the other side corroborate the claims of faith. According to their own testimony, they come back changed. Unbelievers find belief; travelers say the memory of their NDE never fades; some learn things in the after life they didn’t know before. Cox-Chapman believes there must be a portal—or a gate, a fence—and through it must be heaven, a place, as the accounts testify, of love, light, and overwhelming joy. Audience ratings soared when she appeared on Dateline NBC in 1996.
She herself had what she calls “close to a near-death experience” in 1983, while she was driving in the dark and the rain near the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. Her car hydroplaned and started to spin. As she careened toward the river, Cox-Chapman heard a voice coming from somewhere near the sun visor. “Relax,” it said. “It’s not your time to die.” Cox-Chapman relaxed and let go of the wheel. (I am reminded here of the 2005 Carrie Underwood hit single, “Jesus, Take the Wheel,” a country song with a similar plot line.) Within seconds, her car had stopped, up to its chassis in mud, feet from the river. Cox-Chapman walked away from the scene utterly calm and unbruised. “Some people would call that disassociation,” she says. “Some might wonder if there’s been an angelic presence.”
The memory of the accident and her miraculous escape stayed with her, and a decade later Cox-Chapman began work on a book about near-death experiences, which she collected by the dozens. Anxious not to appear discreditable, Cox-Chapman reminds me, again and again, of her secular-elite credentials. She went to Yale University. She married a successful physician. She worked for years as a freelance journalist. She is not unhinged, she assures me. She simply can’t refute what she sees as incontrovertible evidence: heaven must be real. In her first chapter, she tells the story of Mary Dooley, a fashion designer who went to heaven during her surgery for uterine cancer. She leaves her body and sees a bright light ahead; Dooley chides herself at first for having forgotten her sunglasses. “However,” she says, “when I reached the brightness, I found no strain to my eyes, nor did I need any adjustment for the light. Though it was extremely bright, there was much softness to it. Soothing would be a good word.” Later Dooley feels the presence of God. “His radiance was everywhere,” she says, echoing Dante. “He was the light.”
I find myself staring into space in Cox-Chapman’s cozy kitchen, at a child’s painting that’s a decade old. I am confronted, again, with the question of what I believe. I believe the believers, I tell Cox-Chapman, slowly. I believe they saw what they said they saw. But I don’t believe that their testimony, as consistent and thrilling as it is, adds up to proof that there’s a heaven. I am much more comfortable, I tell her, with the idea of heaven as a matter of faith, not proof. I think of the words of Maimonides, who echoes Saint Paul: “As to the blissful state of the soul in the World to Come, there is no way on earth in which we can comprehend or know it.” I can tell that I’ve disappointed her.