NINE
IS HEAVEN BORING?
The sound track to my college years was the band Talking Heads, and one of my favorite tunes at the time was their song “Heaven.” David Byrne, their lead singer and songwriter, was an art-school refugee, a hollow-cheeked, dark-eyed artiste who crooned the song with a spaced-out sweetness. The refrain goes like this: “Heaven, heaven is a place, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens.” Most of my friends from that era asked me to include that song in this book. Usually, they’d sing it when they asked me.
Like Defending Your Life and The Lovely Bones, the song “Heaven” is a cultural touchstone. I thought its popularity and resonance must mean something about what we believe about heaven now. Before meeting Byrne, I took a look again at those lyrics. The first verse describes heaven as a bar where the band is always playing your favorite tune. The second verse describes heaven as a party with no social anxiety, no chance of ever being ditched by your date in favor of someone more interesting or willing: “Everyone will leave at exactly the same time.” But the final verse is my favorite. It describes a kiss, presumably a wonderful kiss, happening over and over in an endless loop.
When this kiss is over it will start again,
It will not be any different, it will be exactly the same.
It’s hard to imagine that nothing at all
Could be so exciting, could be this much fun.
Byrne works out of a loft in New York City’s SoHo district. He’s now a visual artist as well as a performer, and his walls are covered with his photographs, but relics of his rock-star past are evident everywhere. The original painting for the album Naked—a smiling chimp against a red background in a gilt frame—hangs near the doorway to his office. A sketch for the album cover of Speaking in Tongues (gold, with Aztec-looking designs in the corners and designed by Byrne himself) lies on a desk in a plastic sleeve, waiting to be archived. Byrne has a deep, intellectual interest in religion, and as a purveyor of irony and disconnections, he continues to make art that turns Christian and other religious conventions on their heads. In 2001, he created a small book called The New Sins, which looks and feels exactly like one of Gideon’s bibles—and which Byrne distributed anonymously in hotels and motels across the land, just as the Gideons did. The New Sins is an art project. Produced by Byrne, the avant-garde literary entrepreneur Dave Eggers, and their friends—all of whom collaborated under the name The Better-Emancipated Strivers for Heaven—it purports to disseminate wisdom of the scriptural kind. “Heaven and Hell are both metaphors,” it says under the heading “What Happens When We Die?” “Good ones, too. So good, in fact, that they function as if they were real for many people, even unbelievers.” A small foldout chart of hell relegates journalists to the eighth circle, wedged between market researchers and demographic testers.
I keep an image of Byrne in my mind, sweating and dancing like a madman in a humongous white suit in Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense. As a result, everything about him in person is somewhat smaller than I expected. He’s slender, his voice is quiet, and as he pauses to think about a question, he loses eye contact. He’s wearing a knit cap, track pants, and sneakers, and though the famous cheekbones are still there, they’re less jagged than they used to be.
We sit together in his small office and I ask him if he remembers writing “Heaven.” “That was a rare one,” he answers softly. “It was a very clear reasoning went into that song. The traditional Christian imagery we get handed is that no one is ever doing anything. People are lying around on clouds listening to a kind of boring harp music. Even in more Eastern concepts of Enlightenment or Nirvana, in those concepts it’s also a thing where nothing really matters. You become disengaged and time stands still. The goal seems to be to attain a state where nothing happens. Nothing of any emotional import is ever going to happen and that’s implied to be a good thing. When you put it literally like that, it doesn’t sound as good.
“So I thought, ‘Well, okay, I’ll base this on my life at the time, going to a party, going to a bar or a club. It never ends, it goes over and over again. You kiss someone and it loops around and starts again. I’ll write it as if I’m singing about something desirable and heavenly. I’ll write about it in these terms that sound a little bit ridiculous. The voice singing it has an emotional longing. Everybody’s like those bobblehead toys but totally blissed out about it.’”
I defend the song. When I was younger, I say, I would have agreed that it makes heaven ridiculous. Who would want to wake up every day and have everything be exactly the same? But now, encumbered and aging as I am, the endless repetition of pleasant activities sounds appealing. He looks back but doesn’t say a word.
Do you believe in heaven? I ask him, finally. “Oh no,” says Byrne, laughing. “I would like to believe in, like, karmic retribution or divine justice, some of which is implied by heaven. I would like to believe that the people who cut in line will get their just deserts. But I don’t think they will.”
With his song, though, Byrne has put his finger on the most nagging of all modern heaven questions: What’s so great about heaven? In spite of war and a bad economy, twenty-first-century America is heaven compared to the world of the Bible and the Qur’an—and indeed compared to most places on earth where people live. Scholars suggest that our halfhearted credulity about the ancient promises of heaven is rooted in part in our contemporary material comfort. “No one demands that we have an insight or an inspiring word,” writes Peter Hawkins in his 2009 book Undiscovered Country: Imagining the World to Come. “It is enough to be spiritual, not religious—to shrug our shoulders and say, good naturedly, ‘Frankly, I have no idea.’” Pastors don’t preach very often about heaven anymore, and even modern hymns—the locus of some of Christianity’s most salient images—“tend to focus more on the person of Jesus, on salvation, and just on general praise to God rather than the afterlife or heaven,” says David Music, professor of church music at Baylor University.
Real life has now delivered on so many of Scripture’s promises of heaven. We have glittering cities, blossoming public parks with gushing fountains, libraries filled with books in every language, and a government predicated on justice and equality for all. We have gyms and Pilates classes that keep our bodies youthful, Botox to ensure that our faces remain unlined. At the peak of the housing bubble nearly 70 percent of Americans owned their own homes; even in the foreclosure crisis, the “many mansions” that Jesus promised are a reality here. Our supermarkets sell ripe fruits in and out of season—plus milk by the gallon and honey made by orange-blossom-or clover-loving bees. They even sell wine and beer that won’t get you drunk, just as the Qur’an advertises. To put it very crassly, it’s hard to convince people of a bountiful hereafter when in life they can buy almost anything they want.
The concern over celestial tedium is not entirely new: it can be traced back to the dawn of the industrial revolution, when Americans began to think of their land as a prosperous place where anyone could—and did—ascend to greatness. “Singing hymns and waving palm branches through all eternity is pretty when you hear about it in the pulpit,” complained Mark Twain in 1909 in Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, “but it’s as poor a way to put in valuable time as a body could contrive.” Modern Jews suffer especially acutely from the absence of convincing or exciting images of the afterlife. Rabbi David Fohrman, scholar in residence at the Hoffberger Foundation for Torah Studies, put it this way in a 2006 essay. “Say, for example, you really enjoy cruises. Someone comes along and offers you a free cruise to Alaska…. What if that cruise lasted for eternity? Year after year, it’s the same icebergs and the same old Beluga whales.”
The heaven-is-boring problem has theological as well as sociological roots. The heaven preached especially by twentieth-century mainline ministers was devoid of the cinematic particulars that made the visions of Dante and even Elizabeth Stuart Phelps so tantalizing. Too much imagining of heaven was seen in mainstream Protestant circles as the sign of an unsophisticated faith. Barack Obama’s former preacher, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, complained about this in a 1990 sermon at his Chicago church. His “educated friends,” he said, wished he wouldn’t talk so much about heaven “because that’s so primitive, you see.” These friends, Wright said, believed heaven-talk detracts from the real message of the Gospels, which is justice. But heaven, Wright insisted, is at the center of Christian belief. “If I drop heaven, I’m going to lose the first verse in my Bible,” Wright preached. “If I drop heaven, I’m going to lose two of my Ten Commandments…. If I drop heaven, I’m going to have to stop praying my favorite prayer, ‘Our Father.’…If I drop heaven, I’m going to have to do away with the Second Coming; I’m going to have to get rid of Pentecost. I’m going to have to throw Revelation out of my Bible…. Don’t make me drop heaven!”
Martin Marty, a longtime friend of Wright’s, is the premier historian of American religion, having taught at the University of Chicago for thirty-five years and written numerous books, including the best-selling Pilgrims in Their Own Land (1984). Now eight-two, he lives in a modern high-rise apartment building on the Loop with his beloved wife, Harriet. Another, smaller apartment on a lower floor serves as his office. Growing up—he is a Lutheran from Nebraska—he rarely remembers hearing his minister talk about heaven. The one image that sticks in his mind is this: “He would say, ‘There’s a mountain somewhere a mile high, and a mile long, and a mile broad.’” (Marty adds that there weren’t too many mountains in Nebraska, but he’d seen pictures.) The preacher would continue: “He said, ‘Every hundred years, a bird pecks a mouthful from the mountain and flies away. As soon as that mountain has disappeared, one second of eternity has gone by.’ I said, ‘I don’t want that—it’s a pretty boring thing.’” The heaven offered in early-and mid-twentieth-century pulpits, says Marty, was dull, dull, dull.
This emptiness in the place where heaven used to be created an opening in our imagination for every kind of satirist. Boring-heaven jokes are now as much a part of our culture as heaven itself. Robert Mankoff, the New Yorker’s longtime cartoon editor, told me one afternoon in his office that heaven is second only to the desert island as a favorite setting for his cartoonists. “Basically, we laugh at incongruity,” he explained. “Why are people in clouds? Maybe an angel is agoraphobic. Maybe they don’t have harps—they have iPods or boom boxes.” The Simpsons, the hilarious cartoon characters who have become even more than the Archie Bunkers enduring American archetypes, worry frequently over the question of what they’ll do in heaven. In one episode, Bart and Homer threaten to convert to Roman Catholicism while Marge frets that her WASP heaven will be much more boring than theirs—as indeed it is. When she goes up to take a look around, Marge finds herself trapped with sour-faced J. Crew–wearing badminton players, while Bart and Homer rage like rowdy wedding guests at the Mexican fiesta and the Irish bar in theirs. The British comedy troupe Monty Python took on heaven in their 1983 movie The Meaning of Life. This version of paradise is a Vegas-style nightclub, starring an eternally bland and upbeat lounge singer. His signature number—“It’s Christmas in Heaven”—includes such lyrics as “It’s nice and warm and everyone / looks smart and wears a tie.”
For the devout, this sort of humor is nothing less than a crisis. Those who take seriously the promise of heaven clashed recently with those who don’t over, of all things, a paper cup. Starbucks, the Seattle-based coffee company, prints thought-provoking aphorisms on its cups, and in 2007 it released this one: “Heaven is totally overrated. It seems boring. Clouds, listening to people play the harp. It should be somewhere you can’t wait to go, like a luxury hotel. Maybe blue skies and soft music were enough to keep people in line in the 17th century, but heaven has to step it up a bit. They basically are getting by because they only have to be better than hell.” The author of this quotation was Joel Stein, the young columnist for the Los Angeles Times, erstwhile contributor to Time magazine and generally acknowledged enfant terrible. Conservative Christian groups reacted strongly, not so much against Stein, but against Starbucks—a few even called for a boycott. Five people sent Stein a copy of Randy Alcorn’s book Heaven.
Alcorn is an evangelical Christian minister who lives near Portland, Oregon, and specializes in heaven. He was sitting with his mother and reading to her from the book of Revelation as she lay dying of cancer more than twenty years ago when it hit him: heaven is a real place. Alcorn had gone to a Christian college and to seminary, yet “the impression I had gotten along the way was that heaven is a disembodied spirit realm where you drift around.” After his mother died, Alcorn went back to Scripture and mined it for its descriptions of the afterlife. This research resulted eventually in his book. “I didn’t come up with this on my own,” he says. “It is my understanding of what the Bible is saying.” Heaven will be on a renewed earth. “We’ll be doing things. There will be places to go, people to see…. Scripture talks about the New Jerusalem. Heaven will be the New Portland, the New Boston.” In heaven there will be a river, Alcorn says, and glorious parks, museums, and sports arenas. The heavenly cities will have no litter, no crime. Alcorn published Heaven in 2004. He doesn’t have a church or a congregation: through his nonprofit Eternal Life Ministries, Alcorn evangelizes about heaven.
Virtually unknown in secular circles, Heaven is a must-read for committed evangelical Christians. Rick Warren, the charismatic and powerful pastor of Saddleback Church in Orange County, California—a man with millions of people on his e-mail list—told me to read the book nearly five years ago, and when I got myself a copy, I found that Warren himself had written a blurb for the front cover: “This is the best book on Heaven I’ve ever read.” Without concrete visions of heaven, Alcorn believes, Christianity has no hope. After receiving Alcorn’s books in the mail, Stein called him up and they had a polite conversation. Stein wrote a column about Alcorn, and Alcorn blogged about Stein online. Each was civil in print. Stein describes in his column speaking to a woman named Shelly Migliaccio, one of those who sent him Heaven. In her vision of heaven “the colors are more brilliant, we all have jobs we love, we are free of the lies and horrible stuff she sees on the news. And for at least a little while…I believed in Migliaccio’s heaven too.”
THE RETURN OF HEAVEN
The fight to bring back vivid images of heaven that resonate in today’s world is occurring on two fronts. On the one hand, you have the conservative faithful, whom I will discuss further on. On the other, you have the “seekers”—the approximately 30 percent of people who call themselves “spiritual but not religious.” They cobble together a picture of heaven based not on creeds and dogma but on what they’ve seen in movies and on television and what they’ve read in books, along with residual messages from parents, grandparents, and Sunday school lessons—and, especially, on their own, individual experiences of transcendence. They think of heaven as a walk in the woods, a trip to the art museum, a night at the symphony, or an evening out with friends. These people tend to imagine heaven as the perfect culmination of their greatest desires—no restrictions.
For these folks, heaven is whatever you want it to be. “To me,” wrote Ernest Hemingway in a 1925 letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, “heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on 9 different floors.” In a song with the same title, the country singer Hank Williams Jr. proclaimed that “if heaven ain’t a lot like Dixie,” he doesn’t want to go there. These images may be ironic, even humorous, but they make the point. For many Americans, heaven is the kingdom of ultimate personal fulfillment.
A striking example of this individualistic vision is The Lovely Bones, which spent seventy-eight weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Five million copies are in print. The book’s wild success was due in part to its lurid subject matter (the narrator, fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon, is monstrously murdered) and in part to its detailed, personal vision of heaven. In The Lovely Bones, everyone lives in a personalized heaven, and these heavens overlap with each other. Shot putters and javelin throwers play in the fields of Susie’s heaven, forming a kind of sporty backdrop, but when the sun goes down, the athletes retire to their own heavens. Susie has a best friend—they chat as they eat peppermint ice cream—but the friend leaves Susie for hours at a time to go play her saxophone in a jazz band. Susie sits in a gazebo in her heaven; there—like the medieval visionaries—she can see the whole earth from a distance, as if in an airplane. At the same time, she can watch her friends and family members up close, as if she were in the room, as they fall apart and, finally, pull themselves back together.
Though the book of Revelation says there will be no tears in heaven, Susie has not left her emotions behind. She is not, as Byrne puts it, “blissed out.” She feels vengeful rage at her murderer, as well as typical adolescent loneliness and isolation. She regrets her inexperience with sex and watches from heaven as the boy she loves gets over her. She lives in heaven, in other words, much as she would have lived on earth. In the end Susie is finally able to “move on” to another sphere where she will be able to let go of her earthly concerns. Christians have noticed, rightly, that God was nowhere in the picture, and suspected, again rightly, that The Lovely Bones implied an indictment of traditional Christian views of heaven. “When there is more talk of heaven in novels, television shows and pop songs than in sermons,” wrote Mark Ralls, pastor of St. Timothy United Methodist Church in Brevard, North Carolina, in the Christian Century, “Christians must shoulder some of the blame for the fact that visions of life beyond death fail to include God.”
I once interviewed Alice Sebold and she conceded the point. She grew up Episcopalian, and Susie’s heaven is a rejection of what Sebold herself learned in church. “I’ve always felt that there were so many rules and exclusions out there in conceptions of redemption and the afterlife—it didn’t include me and a lot of my friends. The guiding principle in [my conception of heaven] is that it’s inclusive: it allows you to have what you want and what you desire.” Sebold doesn’t want heaven to be a perfect place: “There needs to be a little angst in heaven to make me happy.”
In a universe where all people received exactly what they want in heaven, how do they manage to coexist? One person loves dogs but another hates them. How does this work out in heaven? The undergraduates in Stephen Prothero’s Introduction to Religion class at Boston University confronted this problem squarely in 2007 when Prothero asked them to divide into small groups, design a religion, and then vote on the best one.
Prothero is the kind of teacher who, I wrote in a Newsweek profile, “makes you want to go back to college.” Tall, blondish, and rangy with an occasional scrubby beard, Prothero looks like the young Billy Graham if Graham were a world religions professor and not an international evangelist. Prothero’s lectures make connections designed to delight the postadolescent mind. On the day I observed one of his classes, he veered with agility between Hinduism, Docetism, Socrates, and Disney World. His main complaint about his students is their fervent political correctness. They refuse to articulate any belief that might offend. In an environment as diverse as BU, this political correctness works to suppress what Prothero believes may be the most interesting, if provocative, ideas. Talking about religious truth in general—and heaven in particular—can be a minefield.
The winning religion was designed to please. It was called 
-ism. (Prothero and his students pronounced it “huh-ism.”) Its prophet is Tupac Shakur, the rap star who was shot and killed in a gang fight in 1996. According to 
-ism, Tupac became enlightened in the world beyond; he evolved into a magnificent musical savant, the celestial embodiment of all music, all rhythm, and all dance. Human life is called “The Party”: people dance and feel the rhythm throughout their lives, and they attend weekly services in “Music Domes,” where there are no ministers but deejays. After death, adherents ascend to “The After Party” (unless they’ve been bad, in which case they go to a place of eternal silence, called “The Hangover”). At “The After Party,” individuals live out all their earthly dreams. They can skydive or dine at five-star restaurants. As in Sebold’s heaven, no one’s dreams impinge on anyone else’s.
In the heaven of 
-ism, people can have bodies or not, as they wish, and there is no God. “It’s not a traditional afterlife,” concedes Adam Greenfield, who was one of the religion’s founders. “It’s more like a modernized afterlife.”
Among young people, “the afterlife is an afterthought,” says Prothero, ruefully. Prothero himself was raised Episcopalian and had a brief flirtation with evangelical Christianity. When he was a young man, heaven, he says, was not just something he believed in; it was someplace he really wanted to go. Like so many people I’ve met—and like me—he mourns the disappearance of traditional heaven. His 2007 book, Religious Literacy, is an explication of that disappointment. Too many people, he writes, don’t know the Scripture of their own tradition—let alone that of their neighbors. They don’t know what they believe about God and heaven and are afraid to hash their ideas out in public for fear of causing offense.
To put things right, the orthodox—Jews, Christians, and Muslims—are trying to revive belief in a traditional heaven by embracing its mystery. We don’t know exactly what it will be like, they say, but it will be wonderful beyond our imaginings—not boring, certainly not ridiculous. In two books, Paradise Mislaid and A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence, the theologian Jeffrey Burton Russell attempts to re-create a picture of heaven and heavenly activity that both adheres to a traditional Christian view and appeals to modern readers. “My solution,” Russell told me, is to “get a definition that isn’t hard and fast; it’s fuzzy bordered, but it reflects the tradition over the past twenty centuries.” His heaven is radically—and you could even say euphorically—paradoxical. The saved are there and everyone is there. It is both in time and out of time: “It is motion and stillness; it is silence and song,” as he writes in A History of Heaven. It is, above all, God’s love. “So those whom we have never known, or with whom we have quarreled, even those whom we have hated or who have hated us, all these we love, for whatever is evil in them has been washed away, and all that remains is the pure goodness that God has made, which is perfect love loving.” The sillinesses of contemporary visions—ice cream and puppies—have no place here.
What is so wrong, modern theologians ask, with believing with all one’s heart in a heaven that’s both known and unknown? In his recent book Surprised by Hope—a play on C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy—the Anglican theologian N. T. Wright exhorts Christian readers (and, as he says, “anybody else who’s listening!”) to forget about the fuzzy cultural concept of “heaven” and reclaim something more like the early Christian view of the afterlife. It’s a two-stage reality, he says. God’s final new creation will come at the end of everything. It is “like this present world only much more so, its physicality more real, its beauty more vivid, its pulsating life more intense and at the same time its peace more deep and rich.” In the meantime, Christians should live with the knowledge that since the resurrection of Jesus, “God’s sovereign reality has come to new birth within our present world.” What this means, on a day-to-day level, is that believers should keep the heavenly ideals of beauty and justice continually in mind. Heaven is hope—but real hope—“for change, rescue, transformation, new possibilities.” The Orthodox Jewish scholar Jon Levenson is, as we’ve seen in chapter 5, committed to bringing a full view of resurrection and the afterlife back to contemporary Jews. Such a view, he believes, can only be attained through regular practice and prayer. Heaven, he told me in an interview, “should be thought of as the perfection of everything in this world and then some.” The UCLA jurist Khaled Abou El Fadl offers an interpretation of the Qur’anic heaven that’s rational and mystical at the same time. Heaven is light, he tells me, but it’s also enlightenment. “Our true tranquility is to know God, which is to know yourself. First God gets our attention with all this material stuff, then after that it’s explorations of the intellect and the spirit.”
WE WILL SEE GOD
Byrne, Sebold, Mitch Albom, and the students at Boston University are all missing the main point, the orthodox say: in heaven, we will see God. Saint Paul promises that while on earth we see through a glass darkly, in heaven we will see God face-to-face. The first Epistle of John promises that, in heaven, “we will see him as he is.”
But what is it like to see God? The Church Fathers, the writers and thinkers who in the first few centuries after Christ wrote the theology that would form the foundations of the Roman Catholic Church, tried to work this out. Would they see God with their dead, human eyes? With their resurrected eyes? Or would they see God, somehow, with their spirit—a kind of transcendent physical vision? “Perhaps,” Augustine wrote, “God will be known to us and visible to us in the sense that he will be spiritually perceived by each of us in each one of us, perceived in one another, perceived by each in himself.” Perhaps, in other words, in heaven God is everywhere and visible in and to everyone.
Dante, as we’ve seen, imagined seeing God as gazing at a very bright, all-encompassing light, a light that embodies and bestows love and perfect understanding. “For my sight, becoming pure / rose higher and higher through the ray / of the exalted light that in itself is true.” With this imagery, Dante was giving poetic form to the theology of Thomas Aquinas, the medieval monk who insisted that knowing and seeing God was the most any human could hope for. Our ultimate destiny, Aquinas held, was “perfect union of the soul with God, insofar as it enjoys him perfectly, seeing him and loving him in perfection.” As if anticipating David Byrne’s complaint, Aquinas adds that “nothing that is contemplated with wonder can be tiresome.”
But for other Christians, then as now, such a vision was too abstract. In the medieval period, while Dante was framing a heaven of pure light and perfect understanding, religious mystics took the idea of perfect union with God in another direction altogether. Being with God is sublime, they said, casting about for metaphors. It’s like sex without intercourse, inebriation without alcohol, warmth without fire. Bernard of Clairvaux, the founder of the influential Cistercian abbey at Clairvaux, imagined union with God to be something like the heady feeling of having had too much wine. “In the life of immortality,” he wrote in the twelfth century, “we will be inebriated and overflow in wonderful abundance. And the bridegroom intoxicates his friends. Hence results inebriate sobriety, which is inebriated by truth, not by wine; which is soaked not in wine, but burns with God in eternity.” The thirteenth-century German nun Gertrude of Helfta imagined her union with Christ as sexual—but also somehow completely chaste. In one of her visions, which she wrote down in the third person, “the Lord took her into his arms, holding her fast in his embraces and caressing her tenderly…. He covered her eyes, ears, mouth, heart, hands, and feet with kisses.” She hoped that when she died she would achieve a perfect union with God in heaven. “In conjugal love and nuptial embraces show me your greatness…in a kiss of your honeyed mouth take me as your possession into the bridal chamber of your beautiful love.” Her communion with God was individual—and yet not. Every virgin committed to Christ could experience heaven in this way.
In Judaism, God has no body, but Jewish mystics have long imagined life after death as a union with God; they have sometimes described that union in physical terms. Merkabah mystics, in the Second Temple period, reached ecstatic states by meditating on the vision of the chariot ascending in Ezekiel 1: “Like the bow in a cloud on a rainy day, such was the appearance of the splendor all around. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD.” The goal, according to Merkabah literature, was to “gaze upon the King in His Beauty.” The following account, attributed to the first-century rabbi Ishmael and edited into its present form by the eighth century CE, demonstrates God’s—and heaven’s—unimaginable hugeness. “The soles of his feet fill the whole world. The height of each sole is three ten thousands of parsangs [roughly ninety thousand miles].” The Zohar, a Jewish text written in Spain in the late medieval period, promises that individuals will upon their deathbeds be granted a vision of the Shekhina, a formless radiant presence that comes from God. In fact, the soul does not leave the body, the Zohar says, until it sees the Shekhina. Righteous souls will then cleave to it “in joy and love.” The unrighteous will be left in the cold, “like a cat which is driven away from the fire.”
Sufi mystics talk about seeing God, but obliquely, in the ritual they call Sema—known to us as the whirling of the legendary dervishes. In the Sema, holy men wearing white robes and tall hats gather in a circle. As the circle turns, the monks also whirl individually, arms outstretched and heads tilted. The circle and the people in it start slowly and go faster and faster for as long as twenty minutes—until finally they stop, almost abruptly. You expect them all to fall down in a pile, like five-year-olds, but they don’t. The whirling is a form of meditation; in the ecstatic state, practitioners describe a feeling of union with god. “Do you know what the whirling is?” wrote the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic and poet Rumi. “It is…opening the eyes of the heart and seeing the sacred lights.”
In modern times, artists and writers have not given up trying to describe the moment when a soul beholds God. No one has done it better than C. S. Lewis in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in a scene where the four children finally see Aslan, the lion king (and Christ figure) they had heard so much about: “People who have not been in Narnia sometimes think that a thing cannot be good and terrible at the same time. If the children had ever thought so, they were cured of it now. For when they tried to look at Aslan’s face they just caught a glimpse of the golden mane and the great, royal, solemn, overwhelming eyes; and then they found they could not look at him and went all trembly.” The lion knows who the children are without being told, of course, and when they come to stand before him, “his voice was deep and rich and somehow took the fidgets out of them. They now felt glad and quiet and it didn’t seem awkward to them to stand and say nothing.” I read the Narnia books when I was a child without knowing they were Christian parables, and I can still remember how I felt upon finally meeting Aslan. He was magnificent and brave, familiar, warm, and comforting.
A face-to-face encounter with all-powerful God is not always cozy, and Bee Season, published in 2000, offers another heavenly meeting, this one as terrifying as a horror show. The heroine of Myla Goldberg’s novel is Eliza Naumann, a young girl with a dysfunctional family and a savant-like gift for winning spelling bees. She becomes enamored of and then obsessed with Kabbalah mysticism, the repetitive chanting of certain symbolic letters and verses in the Zohar. One night, alone in her room, while her mother is locked away in a mental institution and her father is arguing with her older brother, who’s become a Hare Krishna, Eliza ascends through the letters and words to God himself. “She is mauled and licked clean by a lion…. She is choked and crooned to, slashed and kissed, stung and cuddled, fed upon and fed…. This is the pain of creation, of life emerging from void, of vacuum birthing being.” This picture, like those angels in Revelation, describes a heaven not wholly pretty, and never placid.
WE WILL SING
Not only do souls see God in heaven, they praise him, constantly, with song. To their arsenal of heaven’s pleasures, the faithful always add singing. The Torah and other Jewish scriptures are full of music. Miriam, the sister of Moses, has a tambourine. David, the king of the Jews, has a harp. David’s poems, the psalms, are full of exhortations: sing praises to the Lord and blow trumpets in joyous celebration of him. For the Jews who kept the great library at Qumran, which came to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the connection between singing on earth and singing in heaven is clear. One Qumran author writes that while he was singing prayers of thanks to God, he was raised “to the height of the universe…to stand among the ranks of the host of the holy ones and to join together in the assembly of the sons of heaven.” These first-century Jews understood singing as something angels did in heaven—and as something people did on earth that made them more like angels.
The book of Revelation—the heavenly Christian vision with Jewish roots—is also full of singing. There are those terrifying angels, buzzing around the throne of God and singing “Holy, Holy, Holy.” Twenty-four elders with harps stand before the throne: they’re singing, too. Surrounding the throne and the elders are “ten thousand times ten thousand” angels, and they’re also singing. Music reverberates everywhere, around “every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them.” And this is the song the creatures in heaven sing: “To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!”
The earliest Christians understood that when they were singing God’s praises in unison they were participating in the activities of heaven. In the fourth century, the Syrian preacher John Chrysostom made the connection explicit. Don’t worry about the quality of your voices, he told his listeners, don’t worry if you’re old or young. Just sing. “Above, the hosts of angels sing praise; below, men form choirs in the churches and imitate them…. The inhabitants of heaven and earth are brought together in a common solemn assembly; there is one thanksgiving, one shout of delight, one joyful chorus.” The stained glass windows in many of Europe’s great cathedrals show angels singing. They serve as a constant reminder: when a choir on earth sings, the angels do, too. In a 1995 sermon, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger—who was to become Pope Benedict XVI—declared that “the sacred liturgy is not something which the monks manufacture or produce. It exists before they were there; it is an entering into heavenly liturgy which was already taking place.” The singing in heaven is happening all the time, and humans can join.
In an essay on heaven, the novelist Rick Moody describes the fearsome organ music he heard in church as a child. Bach, he says, echoing many before him, will certainly be Capellmeister of the heavenly choir. (“It may be,” wrote the philosopher Karl Barth in a 1956 letter on the two hundredth anniversary of Mozart’s birth, “that when the angels go about their task of praising God, they play only Bach. I am sure, however, that when they are together en famille they play Mozart and that then too our dear Lord listens with special pleasure.”) And though Moody knows that choral singing is traditionally the musical activity in heaven, he can’t resist putting a contemporary, individualistic spin on the concept. A musical omnivore, Moody hopes that in heaven God will be in possession of some kind of massive figurative iPod, which plays everything he wants to hear exactly when he wants to hear it—even songs with profane lyrics, even songs by cheesy bands like Rush.
Not everyone imagines the singing in heaven to be harmonious, however. In most Puritan churches, harmony singing was strictly forbidden. Even today, in the churches of the Old Regular Baptists, the congregation sings without accompaniment and with some members “lining out,” or “curving”—intentionally fraying the unity of the song. The idea, born around the time of the Reformation, is to keep congregants focused on the words, not the tune, and to help everyone—even people who couldn’t read from the hymnal—to join the chorus.
My family and I belong to a Reform Jewish temple in Park Slope, Brooklyn. As I became more immersed in this project, I began going more frequently to temple and I found that the service I liked best was the family service, at nine-thirty on Saturday mornings. It’s a very informal, coffee-and-bagels affair. Parents come in jeans, and there’s a rug so the littlest kids can sit on the floor. Although some members of my family are extremely musical, I am not, and one of my human failings is my relative lack of interest in music (despite my love for David Byrne’s Heaven). However, the family service has a musical ritual that brings me to tears every week, without fail. The most ancient Jewish prayer is the Shema. It’s at least twenty-five hundred years old and staggering in its simplicity: “Hear, people of Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.” It’s a declaration of belief in One God, and when you realize how fragile that belief was all those years ago, and how miraculous it is that this particular prayer—and the Jews themselves—have survived, and when you think about all the generations of Jews who have intoned these same words for so many centuries all over the world—in Poland, Belgium, Holland, Austria, Lithuania, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Ohio in my family alone—it’s enough to make anyone weep.
At the family service, though, the rabbis in their wisdom have doubled down on the poignancy. The Shema is sung by the congregation’s kindergarteners and first-graders, and to accompany the singing, the rabbis have taught the kids the words in the international sign language for the deaf. So there they are, with their small faces, un-combed hair, and Ugg boots, singing the ancient words and signing for the deaf, and I’m a basket case. In those moments, I am aware, all at once, of the ancient history of the Jews, of the miracle of human life and human love and its fragility and brevity; and I sing, and my daughter sings, too, and we are united with one another and with all of the Jews who came before us and all of those who will come after. Ancient ideas of heaven come alive in those moments. We are praising God, together, in a community, in history, out of history, in the context of overpowering love.
Paul Westermeyer is a historian of church music at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, and he believes that the feeling I have during the Shema—and that so many people describe having in worship—is the best answer to the question of whether heaven is boring. I spoke to him at length one winter weekend afternoon, just after he’d finished installing new carpeting in his family room. “It’s hard to imagine anything less boring than seeing God and singing to him,” he says, “if God is worth anything.” Westermeyer believes that when people sing together the angels sing with them—and that when people stop singing, then heaven grows silent.
The problem with too much American worship today, Westermeyer says, is that it’s conceived as entertainment, not as something participatory and transcendent. Too many Christian pastors concern themselves with growing their churches, Westermeyer says, and they see music as a marketing tool, a way to pull in the greatest number of desirable people. In these churches people sit and listen to a band during the service; they sing, karaoke style, as the words to the hymns appear on a giant movie screen that hangs behind the altar. They are passive, not active; they are earthly, not angels. But Westermeyer has hope: all across the country are small churches where singing together—whether it’s folk or gospel or traditional hymns—is alive and well, and in those churches, he says, the people are, in some small way, experiencing heaven.
Heaven is certainly alive and well at Transforming Life Ministries, a small Pentecostal congregation that used to worship on the second floor of a falling-down building in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. (It has since moved to another part of the same neighborhood. Half a block away, across Eastern Parkway, the residents are all Orthodox Jews.) One Christmas, I went there with Beverly Adjodha, who has taken care of our daughter since she was four months old. Beverly came to Brooklyn from St. Lucia in 2001, when she was twenty-four. Though raised a Roman Catholic, Beverly was, immediately upon her arrival, adopted by this small, vibrant congregation to which her aunt belonged. Soon it was the center of her life. Beverly goes to church three nights a week and all day on Sundays. She met her husband there, and when she became pregnant, the church threw her a baby shower with gift bags for everybody. Pentecostalism, the fastest-growing brand of Christianity in the world, is characterized by a belief in “the gifts of the Holy Spirit”—outward manifestations of God that include healing and speaking in tongues. There are over 550 million members of Pentecostal and related charismatic movements in the world today. Pentecostalism is growing so fast in the developing world that the Boston-based minister Gene Rivers predicts that within a generation, it will become the dominant form of Christianity everywhere.
As I ascend the dark stairwell to the church, I can’t believe I’m in the right place. The hallway is unlit, the stairs are rotten. Then I push open the door and face a brightly lit maze of rooms: women in suits and dresses are preparing breakfast as children learn Sunday school lessons. At ten a.m., the singing begins. Most Christian services warm up with two or three hymns, but at Transforming Life, the initial singing goes on for a full hour.
Up on the dais—no pulpit here, only a lectern in front of gauzy gold curtains—there’s a small band: two electric guitarists, a bass player, and a drummer. The congregation is comprised mostly of West Indian immigrants, and the music has a calypso lilt, even though today’s songs are such conventional Christmas carols as “Oh, Come All Ye Faithful” and “Good King Wenceslas.” There’s a song leader, a middle-aged woman whose brow furrows intensely in concentration. Four women flank her, two on each side. None is dressed alike. All five sing with their eyes closed and their palms upward. I have never heard anything like this. The singing is strong—jubilant—but not exactly harmonious, and always, in the background, is the babble of people speaking in tongues.
During the singing, the people rise from their folding chairs and dance. Across the aisle, a woman tilts her chin up as she sings, sways her hips, and makes big, cupping motions with her arms, as though she’s trying to pull the Spirit nearer to her. In the front row, the minister’s wife has both arms in the air and hops from one foot to another in a jagged little dance. As the hymn fades away, the babble in the background grows louder. Up on stage, one chorister is murmuring, “Praise God, praise God, praise God, praise God,” while another is saying, “Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah.” A third intones, “Oh most excellent king.” The babble, dissonant, cacophonous—lasting sometimes for as much as ten minutes—reminds me of those angels in Revelation singing “Holy, holy, holy.” When I ask the pastor, Albert Paul, what he believes people do in heaven, he says, “We will do the things of God. We will rejoice. We will be with Him, from morning till night.”
WE WILL LEARN
Still, David Byrne has a point. All of this seeing God and praising God may be wondrous, but it’s static. It doesn’t “get” you anywhere. Christian theologians might argue that in heaven, ambition, competitiveness, drive—and time itself, in which such notions make sense—cease to exist. But for the kind of person who doesn’t like to read at the beach, the absence of forward motion sounds like a jail term. For them, a world in which achievement doesn’t matter can’t mean very much. Going to heaven has to mean getting on with it. There has to be a notion of progress.
Earlier Christians had no idea of progress in heaven. In Dante’s conception, heaven has nine levels but every saint is happy within his or her designated place. By the nineteenth century, though, “progress” had become a Western ideal, and a number of Protestants began to conceive of a heaven in which a person could continually improve, ascending higher and higher, attaining greater and greater understanding of God—who, in His infinitude, gives them more and more to learn. In Swedenborg’s vision, the more a person loves God in heaven, the more that individual becomes fully himself. Striving persists in Swedenborg’s heaven, though the angels get occasional days off for relaxation and pure enjoyment. Latter-day Saints refer often to postmortem progress, to the idea that the afterlife is a continuation of this life. “There’s so much work to be done [in heaven],” said the religion’s founder, Joseph Smith, “we need to be in a hurry in order to accomplish it.” After death and the resurrection, wrote Methodist minister Jeremiah Dodsworth in 1853, the saints would be busy attaining “higher and still higher degrees of perfection.” When I went to Tampa in 2007 to interview a group of Vietnam veterans about heaven, I was especially struck by what their pastor—a Methodist chaplain with straw berry blond hair and a wide-open face—said he believed. “Well,” he said, as we sat eating cheeseburgers at a Perkins Family Restaurant, “we have to work in heaven. I think God made us to be people who have to work and strive and that’s how we find happiness…. I can only stand so much vacation.”
In the nineteenth century, a group of Muslims calling themselves the Ahmadiyya movement broke away from mainstream Islam to follow an Indian Messiah named Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. The Ahmadis—who still consider themselves Muslims, and claim tens of millions of followers worldwide—believe strongly in the idea of progressive enlightenment in heaven. On Judgment Day, wrote Ahmad in his 1896 essay “The Philosophy of the Teachings of Islam,” the righteous will be offered the gift of perfect light, and “their supplication for the perfection of their light indicates that their progress will be unlimited. They will attain one perfection of light and then will behold another.” Imagine Dante’s tiers of heavenly light combined with forward movement.
Within Jewish thought, this strain is stronger still. Almost every Jew I spoke to joked about heaven being a place where the rabbis are sitting around learning Torah. Rabbinic authorities even speak of scholars who die as having been summoned “to the Academy on High,” where departed sages pass eternity studying and debating theological minutiae with God himself. “Heaven is a Talmud class, without recess and without lunch,” quipped David Berger, the noted Maimonides scholar, recalling a joke a classmate made in college. This idea, of heaven as a place of continual, endless study, is based on part of the Talmud: “In the world to come there is no eating, or drinking nor procreation or commerce, nor jealousy, or enmity or rivalry—but the righteous sit with crowns on their head and enjoy the radiance of the Shekhina [divine presence].” The rabbis, who considered the ultimate spiritual activity to be learning Torah, interpreted this passage as a Torah class and imagined they would enjoy the divine presence in this fashion. Berger explains the movement of souls after death this way: “People speak about rising from one level to the next, because our soul is learning things. This is a class. But since God is infinite, there is an infinite amount to learn.”
When Bob Dylan decided to study Judaism in 1982, he called upon the Lubavitch rabbi Manis Friedman. The Lubavitchers are a group descended from Jews who lived in Russian shtetls in the nineteenth century. Their approach to Judaism emphasizes spiritual and mystical experience, not dogma. Friedman is a scholar, a television host, and the author of Doesn’t Anyone Blush Anymore?: Reclaiming Modesty, Intimacy, and Sexuality. I met him one day in Rockefeller Center. He was easy to spot: a handsome, white-bearded rabbi with warm brown eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. We talked, as planned, in the backseat of a banged-up car as a young Israeli drove Friedman to La Guardia Airport, where he was to catch a plane home to St. Paul, Minnesota. Friedman speaks of heaven as a place where souls are active, where they continue to ascend, to learn, to perfect themselves. Souls, he explains, are eternally alive. They cannot die. “What is dead can’t live, what is alive can’t die. Then what does death mean? This living soul, which cannot die, enters a body, which cannot live. For 80, 90, 120 years, the body lives off the soul. When they separate, the soul continues to live. The soul goes back to the universe of souls. We call it heaven.”
“There are different places in heaven,” Friedman continues. “Endless levels. Since God is infinite, there is infinite closeness that God can achieve. Heaven is not stagnant. You’re always growing, you’re always moving. In heaven, they don’t rest. The body should rest in peace. The soul does not rest. When a soul reaches a really high level of closeness to God, it becomes more and more like God and then it wants to come back to earth.” Is Rabbi Friedman talking about reincarnation? “Yes.”
At least since the Middle Ages, reincarnation has been a strong thread in Jewish thought. Discounted by certain rabbinic authorities, including the tenth-century philosopher Saadiah Gaon—and regarded as fringe by most contemporary Conservative and Reform rabbis—reincarnation is central to Kabbalah mysticism, and thus plays a role in the life of any Jew who regards himself as an heir to the mystic tradition. Kabbalah has its roots in ancient oral traditions, but became more widely known in the twelfth century, when Spanish Jews began to publish tracts outlining the movement’s doctrines and symbols. The most important of these texts was the Zohar, a series of biblical commentaries written in stilted Aramaic in the thirteenth century and traditionally attributed to the second-century Palestinian teacher Simeon bar Yohai; kabbalistic mystics meditate on the text, and on individual letters within the text, and in so doing produce “out of body” experiences. Kabbalists speak of gilgul, a revolution of souls, in which souls ascend to God and then back down to earth on a sort of invisible Ferris wheel. Those souls that have attained perfect righteous ness remain on high; those in need of further perfecting—either to fulfill more mitzvoth or to cleanse themselves of sin—return for another try. “Truly,” says the Zohar, “all souls must undergo transmigration; but men do not perceive the ways of the Holy One…not the many transmigrations and the many mysterious works with many naked souls.” Today, most Jewish adherents of reincarnation tend to be among the Orthodox, explains David Berger of Yeshiva University—for the simple reason that the Zohar and other mystical texts have been “accepted either overtly or tacitly by most modern rabbinic authorities.”
The prevalence of mystical belief among Jews has had a viral effect. The Kabbalah Center, with headquarters in Los Angeles, dispenses Jewish mysticism to the masses—though serious scholars scoff at the simplistic version on offer there. It teaches reincarnation, though, which may explain the center’s popularity with celebrities: Why reside forever in heaven when life on earth is so good? As noted in chapter 5, nearly 30 percent of Americans say they believe in reincarnation. “We all want the here and now, and reincarnation is about the here and now,” Steve Prothero told me in an e-mail. “Reincarnation is fueled in part because now people WANT to come back and live again. Of course, the whole idea before was to get OUT of the cycle and not to stay in it. Now we WANT another life.” Before, life was hard. Now, at least in Western countries, life is bountiful, blessed, and fun.
WE WILL BE ONE
Early in the second act of West Side Story is “Somewhere,” Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s vision of heaven. In the 2009 Broadway revival, dancers from the two warring tribes meet before a shimmering silver-blue scrim. In pairs that real life would make impossible, the couples dance sweetly, chastely, delicately. It’s a beautiful dream in which the only thing that matters is love. As every fan of West Side Story knows, the marriage of Tony and Maria can only endure somewhere else, in another time, another place, after death, in heaven.
This vision—heaven as a place for all followers of the same Truth—is a progressive interpretation of an orthodox view. You can’t get to heaven through belief in Christ or the Qur’an, in other words. You get there through your commitment to Love. Or Justice. That, anyway, is what Salman Ahmad believes. Ahmad’s beautiful face could only belong to a rock star—and it does. He is the lead singer and guitarist in a band called Junoon (“obsessive passion” in Urdu)—one of the most popular bands in Pakistan. The New York Times has named Junoon “the U2 of Pakistan,” and called Ahmad “a figure like Bono.” For Ahmad, heaven is the abode of the people of God in a global world.
Ahmad was born in Lahore, Pakistan, to parents who dreamed the American dream. (His mother had spent some time in California as a girl and always yearned to come back.) His father, an airline executive, moved the family to the small colonial town of Tappan, New York, when Salman was eleven, and the boy seamlessly entered the life of a suburban teenager in the 1970s. He listened to Led Zeppelin and smoked marijuana. He taught himself to play guitar and joined a band. His priority was then—as it is now—to emphasize the sameness he felt with his white Jewish and Irish-Catholic friends. Not difference. “I don’t want to belong to any tribe,” he told me.
From his earliest childhood—even when he still lived in Pakistan—Ahmad rejected organized religion. His grandfather on his father’s side was very pious. He prayed over every mouthful of food—and often begged for young Salman’s company during Friday prayers. Ahmad always found an excuse to say no. Too much homework, he would say. Going to the cricket match. “For me,” he remembers, “that was, like, man, you’re turning us into robots.” Later, as Ahmad entered high school in Tappan, his mother began to worry about her oldest son’s soul. Never very observant herself, she began to nag her boy the way traditional Muslim mothers do about his spiritual seriousness and direction in life. She would urge him to look at the floor respectfully when he passed a girl in the hall at school. She pressured him to become a doctor. She agonized over whether her Muslim son was becoming too American. “I would have none of it,” Ahmad says. “I just rebelled. This was 1970s America in the age of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and the pressure from my family was driving me to be a schizophrenic. I chose to be a rocker.” His mother had the last word, though. When Ahmad was eighteen, the entire family moved back to Pakistan.
My family and I piled into the car one Saturday and drove to Tappan, where Ahmad lives once again, now with his wife, Samina, and their three teenage sons. They are Americans. Ahmad speaks about waking up before dawn on Election Day in 2008, so excited was he to go vote for Barack Obama. The Ahmads live in a small, two-story house marked by large wagon wheels in the driveway. Inside, the living room is furnished with low couches slung with gray and blue silk pillows. Above a sofa hangs a framed Punjabi inscription that Salman translates as: “God lives in your heart. He is not unreachable.” We sat, eating chips and Samina’s famous biryani—rice with vegetables and chicken—until day turned into night. Salman and I drank red wine. For dessert, there was apple pie and ice cream.
Ahmad says he became a student of Islam after falling in love with Samina, whom he met at a wedding in Lahore. “Within this chaos, there was beauty,” he says. “Within this chaos there was love.” She was devout. Thanks to her, he began reading the Qur’an, and also the Sufi mystics—especially the poet Rumi. He became a doctor to please his mother. He started a rock and roll band to please himself. Junoon sounds like what it is—South Asian psychedelic rock, both hard driving and euphoric. The band plays wherever Muslims live, even—or should I say especially—in places like Peshawar, where live rock concerts are neither normal nor welcome. Ahmad sets Islamic poetry to music. The lyrics to the song “Khudi” (“Self”) are based on a poem by the twentieth-century Pakistani poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal:
There are worlds beyond the stars
Many trials of faith and desire still to face
You are the falcon
It is in your nature to fly and more horizons for you to transcend
Raise yourself so high
I imagined Ahmad would tell me that heaven for him was in the transcendent feeling he got from playing music. He did not. Ahmad believes—both ideologically and spiritually, if you will—in Oneness. He believes, as so many have said, that God does not care about religion: “Ritual, dogma—it’s man-made.” For Ahmad, heaven is in the perfection of people doing something sublime together, so the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Like what? He gives a surprising answer. “The Pakistani national cricket team, in 1992. They came back from the dead to beat England that year. They were so behind, one Pakistani newspaper wrote ‘Bury Them.’ To understand each player’s unique personality and gifts, the harmony between free will and predestination, how it worked, it was like…wow.”
Ahmad believes—some would say naively—that heaven consists of the Sunni and the Shia and the Buddhists and the Hindus and the Jews and the Muslims and the Christians getting along. He sees heaven, as he did in 2008 when he performed at a benefit concert for the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles, in the ability of his friends Rick Warren, who opposes gay marriage, and Melissa Etheridge, who is gay, to see the best in each other, and he refutes my skepticism on this matter by looking at me, silently smiling, and drinking his wine. He calls this central idea of his tawhid, “divine unity” in Arabic. It is the driving force in his life. You’ll notice that he answered my question—“What is heaven?”—by not really answering it at all.