Heaven: A Traveller’s Guide to the Undiscovered Country

The fact that it is unimaginable but nonetheless officially there is, however, just another aspect of heaven’s appeal. We can sign up for it without having to think too hard about what that means. It’s like taking out an insurance policy without ever having to study the small print.

When in 1999 Pope John Paul II pronounced that heaven was a ‘blessed community’ which was ‘neither abstraction nor physical place’, he was following the recent tendency to underplay what could be regarded as the Churches’ trump card. Clerics are curiously nervous of mentioning heaven, despite its potential as a crowd puller, especially with the elderly. When a senior English archbishop gave an address at a Roman synod the same year, in which he blandly mentioned heaven in passing, I wrote to him to ask if we might meet so he could develop what seemed an intriguing theme. He wrote back by return saying that he was busy for the foreseeable future and couldn’t really add to the words he had offered already. Yet he had said nothing.

One might almost conclude that the Western churches are, behind the scenes, realising that their Buddhist and Hindu confrères in the East have hit upon something in their lack of interest in the afterlife and so are gently repositioning their doctrines as a result. But that would be to ignore the lesson of history. For the Pope’s almost embarrassed talk of heaven is part of a long Christian tradition. There are mentions of heaven aplenty in the New Testament. Some Christian fundamentalists believe that the Book of Revelation goes so far as to provide a street plan. Saint Augustine, arguably the most influential writer and thinker in Christian history, would, however, be pleased to hear the modern-day Vatican trying to quell speculation on the hereafter. In the fifth century he insisted that heaven was ‘ineffable’ – beyond words. It was indeed Augustine who established the term ineffabilis in theology as a way of summing up one of his favourite maxims – that it is easier to say what God is not than to say what He is.

Augustine’s word, rather like John Paul II’s, has not always been law in this, nor in other matters. Sketching out their own imaginary topography of Christian heaven has been a long line of theologians, mystics, artists, writers and the builders of the great Gothic cathedrals, whose spires reached to the skies. Usually starting with Revelation, which pictured paradise as a cleaned-up version of Jerusalem without its Temple, these seers have constructed the pearly gates and enlisted harps (first heard in the New Testament Apocrypha – the early Church texts considered too unorthodox to make it into the Holy Bible).

Outside the cloister, Dante mapped out his Paradiso of the skies in the fourteenth century with Renaissance precision and with every bit the same authority as he had invested in his Inferno in the bowels of the earth, though by a quirk of human nature it is the latter that has continued to fascinate us more. The same, incidentally, is true of John Milton in the seventeenth century. His Paradise Lost has been vastly influential in shaping modern thinking on the Devil and his hellish lair, but those sections of the text which describe heaven are overlooked. Perhaps it is a desire amongst readers not to appear presumptuous as to their final destination that has traditionally allowed hell to eclipse heaven in terms of the popular imagination. Or perhaps it is just the dominance of fear in our emotional range. More practically, it may be art for once imitating the attitudes of those in power. The post-Reformation churches of Milton’s time were much keener on frightening people in to the pews with talk of hell than in enticing them with pictures of heaven.

Despite its unfathomable promise, heaven has eternally been the poor relation of hell; the quieter, paler sibling, the bland-looking friend that some attractive men and women take round with them so as to make themselves shine ever more brightly in comparison. George Bernard Shaw waspishly remarked in Man and Superman (1903): ‘Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside.’ Shaw may have correctly identified early the relative silence on heaven that took hold in the twentieth century, but he was, of course, exaggerating for effect. Down the ages, when heaven has occasionally managed to raise its subtly attractive head above the flames of the hell fires, it has gripped imaginations and produced some memorable and influential images. This is the world of Fra Angelico’s Last Judgement, Luca Signorelli’s Coronation of the Elect, William Blake’s The Meeting of a Family in Heaven and Stanley Spencer’s Resurrection: Cookham, a place of music, dancing, good health, sex, self-congratulation and plenty. It is the Elysian Fields, an image shamelessly borrowed from Virgil by the early Christians and entered symbolically through a gate, where, according to the Aeneid, those amongst the dead chosen for their heroic virtues ‘train on grassy rings, others compete in field games, others grapple on the sand; feet moving to a rhythmic beat, the dancers move in formation as they sing’. Heaven is where, according to Dante, the ‘Great Light shines in three circles’, where, the Revd Charles Kingsley wrote to his beloved wife, Fanny, ‘marital love will be without oscillation, even at the same glorious full tide of delight’, and where, in Steven Spielberg’s Always, Audrey Hepburn presides in a green glade.

Despite official urgings to the contrary, theologians, artists and writers have kept up a lively debate about the nature of heaven. There are three basic views. The first has appealed most to theologians and mystics – somewhere we spend eternal solitude with God alone. Here the traveller is in an unknown territory without landmarks, somewhere imaginable only in moments of intense prayer or spiritual introspection. All earthly relationships – spouses, parents, children – are as nothing in this place, and the body and bodily pleasures are exchanged for a vaguely defined inner peace. The imagination, a key component in any approach to heaven, is directed solely to God Himself and the backdrop is irrelevant. For the medieval mystics, God was so much the centre of their reveries that heaven was sexual fulfilment with Christ the Bridegroom.

The second view is much more tangible, familiar and easy to plot. It allows for some overlap between heaven and earth, and hence relationships outside the central bond with God. The necessary inspiration is all at hand. In the one and only conversation I ever had with my mother about death, on the occasion of my grandmother’s death, she told me that her own image of heaven was of a welcoming committee of my great aunts greeting their sister with, ‘Well, Annie, what took you so long?’ This is the flip side of Jean-Paul Sartre’s remark in Huis Clos that ‘hell is other people’. The same may be said, in more upbeat mood, of heaven.

The hopes of being reunited in death were never more poetically expressed than in the seventeenth century by Henry King, Bishop of Chichester, in his celebrated An Exequy, written in 1657 after the death of his wife, Anne:

Sleep on (my Love!) in thy cold bed

Never to be disquieted.

My last Good-night! Thou wilt not wake

Till I thy fate shall overtake;

Till age, or grief, or sickness must

Marry my body to that dust

It so much loves; and fill the room

My heart keeps empty in thy tomb.

But hark! My pulse, like a soft drum

Beats my approach, tells thee I come;

And, slow howe’er my marches be,

I shall at last sit down by thee.

The thought of this bids me go on,

And wait my dissolution

With hope and comfort.

The third and commonest approach historically is a hybrid of the first two – somewhere to be with God alone, yet also a place where the imagination inevitably wanders into providing some shape and form, usually a garden, and to other relationships which may continue from earth.

All three approaches have their appeal depending on whether it is comfort, freedom from fear, or the search for another dimension beyond the banalities of earthly life that is prompting the seeker. Opinion has vacillated between this trinity – one theocentric (or based on God), another anthropocentric (focused on the human) and the third without a grand tag, but fundamentally a cocktail of the other two. Often all three have been promoted by different groups at the same time and the Churches, for their part, have never quite made up their minds.

The New Testament, for example, talks of heavenly liturgies, bodies that are but spirit and an angelic, celibate lifestyle in the hereafter. In the same theocentric vein, St Augustine spoke of death as the ‘flight in solitude of the Solitary’. The Protestant reformers, the Puritans and the Jansenists embraced the God-centred view of heaven. Yet alongside this trend, there has been a parallel one which insists on creating heaven in the image of a spruced-up earth. In the second century, Irenaeus of Lyons, taking his lead from Revelation, held that the chosen would, for a thousand years after their death, inhabit what was in effect a renewed earth. In this plan whatever you had been denied the first time round, you received in abundance in the rerun.

Heaven as a compensation for all you have missed on earth has always been an attractive gospel. In Renaissance times, theologians joined with humanists and artists in humanising heaven. Borrowing from the Golden Age and the Isles of the Blest (an alternative form for the Elysian Fields) of classical mythology, they fashioned a ‘forever environment’ where men and women met, played, kissed and caressed against a pastoral backdrop. Often God would be removed from direct participation in this pleasure garden and heaven would be given two or even three tiers, the furthest away being the domain of the exclusively spiritual, characterised solely in terms of intensity of light.

More recently in the eighteenth century, the influential, though much-neglected writings of the Swedish scientist-turned-religious-guru Emanuel Swedenborg gave the earth-linked heaven a romantic edge. He is one of the architects of the modern heaven. His Heaven and Hell, part of a body of works known as Arcana Coelestia, which were much-read and remarked upon by the remarkable William Blake among others, describes the author’s encounter with angels as he moves between the spirit world and the material world. It was an image to inspire both popular nineteenth-century authors and twentieth-century film-makers who turned heaven into a cosy, twee copy of the earth, where love and good will conquer all.

There has always, it should be noted, been traffic between the different positions on heaven. Usually it has ended up in the fudge of the third way. Some of those who once preached of a God-centred heaven changed their mind in later life when it seemed they were about to test the validity of their theories. Augustine, in old age, began describing an afterlife where God was very important but where there was time too for long lunches with old friends and enjoyment of physical beauty, but without, of course, his bête noire, sex.

The rise of Christian fundamentalism has added a new twist to the eternal three-way split. For many born-again Christians have embraced a concept known as rapture, which represents a new departure in thinking about heaven. It has grown out of a very particular reading of St Paul’s prediction that when God descends in judgement ‘those who have died in Christ will be the first to rise and then those of us who are still alive will be taken up in the clouds, together with them, to meet the Lord in the air’ (I Thess 4:14–17). This meeting will, the new breed of fundamentalists believe, be shortlived; a refuge in the time of trial predicted by Revelation before Christ instigates a millennium of direct rule on earth and the visitors to heaven return to take their rightful place at his side. The concept that heaven can be a temporary haven, almost a holiday destination, goes against every other Christian tenet. Yet it is disarmingly popular. A key exponent of rapture, the former Mississippi tug-boat captain turned Christian fundamentalist, Hal Lindsey, has seen his book, The Late Great Planet Earth, sell thirty-five million copies worldwide.

Such a reappraisal illustrates, in one sense, how flexible the idea of heaven (and indeed the New Testament) can be in the hands of believers. Something that can only live in the imagination is, by its very nature, almost impossible to control. Yet for many of us who have some kind of faith, it can be, for much of our lives, almost an irrelevancy. Until very recently, on the rare occasions that I plucked up the courage to look my post-mortem fate straight in the eye, my instinct had always been to postpone thinking about heaven. Focusing on the next world, it seemed to me, was a cop-out.

Heaven, I therefore know from experience, can very easily be left to one side as one of those tricky parts of the total religious package, accepted implicitly but without thought, something to think about on a rainy day. It largely depends on what stage of life you’re at. If the subject did come up in my teenage years at my Catholic school, it was as the flip side of hell, an altogether more worrying entity in those angst-ridden years. Heaven was certainly too much to contemplate in my fallen adolescent state. In my twenties, I lacked the romantic spirit of Keats who, at the age of twenty-five, when passion for life is at its peak (and also just a year before his death), wrote in Ode to a Nightingale:

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

To take into the air my quiet breath;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain.

But in my late thirties, the recent experience of losing one of my parents and then a much-loved mother-in-law has led me, if not to welcome death as a form of release like Keats, then to consider both it and heaven as never before. As I drove behind the hearse carrying my mother’s coffin to the church for her funeral, I thought of all the hundreds of times I had seen other sombre processions pass and scarcely paused in the business of living, let alone said a prayer. Belief, A. A. Gill once wrote, is like holding on to the end of a piece of string that disappears into the sky. Sometimes that string is yanked and it forces you to think.

Having had my string pulled, this book is, at least in part, my own traveller’s tale of searching for some sort of answer via a journey, real and imaginative, to the place where the Catholic Church of my upbringing tells me my mother has gone. The notion of a metaphorical or spiritual journey to heaven is a tried, tested and often fruitful one. In both the apocryphal writings of the first centuries AD and in the visionary ecstasies of the medieval age those who told of heaven spoke in terms of having travelled there. Most of the lasting accounts of paradise have effectively been travel books. It is in this spirit that I have included in this account of my own journey brief extracts from the tales told by contemporary travellers who have attempted to go one step beyond, and also, at various key moments in the history of heaven, excerpts from the travel journal I kept when I visited particular places which seemed to offer the possibility of a glimpse of the transcendent.

In the interests of completeness I have tried to keep an open mind and see beyond the more standard tenets of my Christian start in life. Most faiths have some sort of belief in another life but some schedule the route as a domestic departure – i.e. as all about transcending this life. This then remains a book written primarily for a Western audience with a Judeo-Christian heritage, but written in the knowledge that such a heritage cannot be understood or evaluated with looking carefully at the alternatives.

Such a broad scope has the advantage of carrying with it the potential to quell my own greatest anxiety at the start of this journey, namely that there may be nothing at its end, that I may be going nowhere (now or ever), and that heaven is religion’s biggest con-trick, its way of ensuring that churches, synagogues and mosques will remain full and flourishing. If I reach such a conclusion, I comfort myself now, at least I can then fall back on the Buddhist position of seeking enlightenment in this life by way of consolation.

A Gallup Poll in the early 1980s suggested that in the West, at least, the majority of voters still place their trust in heaven, even if its manifesto is no longer very precise. The 71 per cent who signed up for it were only one point down on the number in a similar survey in 1952. As long as there are men and women afraid of death and anxious to believe that it is not the end, there is a ready audience, happy to take the anaesthetic to life’s worries that heaven provides. But perhaps oblivion shouldn’t be an anxiety for any of us. Nothing may be better than the torment which the old-style Catholicism of the Penny Catechism promised in purgatory, limbo or, worst of all, hell. If you put your faith in heaven, then you had to be prepared for the dreadful consequences of not getting your grades.

Today, of course, it is arguably easier. There is no mention of hell from the pulpits of the mainstream churches. Purgatory and limbo have been put to grass, and the assumption in most religious circles is that we are all bound for some sort of heaven, even if that isn’t stated categorically too often. When set against the secular alternative, this pared-down, consumer-driven religion should be more enticing. Yet the pews are emptying at a ferocious rate in the developed world. Why isn’t heaven still working its magic?

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that we live in an age when the whole thrust of contemporary attitudes is not to think about death. If it comes knocking at our door – if a close friend or relative dies – then we are encouraged to forget it as quickly as possible. The secular answer to the mystery of death is effectively to deny death an airing. We freely admit our inability even to contemplate the scale or the individual significance of the global deaths we cause and have the potential to cause with our nuclear weapons, our environmental destruction and our indifference to the north-south divide. And when we face death in our own backyard, as it were, amongst our family and friends, we sweep it under the carpet and instead grow ever more obsessed with our living bodies – new diets, health regimes and endless work-outs – in the hope that somehow we can arrest the march of time. Death has become a kind of failure – a failure to eat the right food, or exercise, or avoid the sun. Death has become each individual’s responsibility, not humanity’s destiny.

For those who are left behind by the death of a loved one, the message is clear: you’ve got to put it behind you, as I was told, countless times, by well-meaning souls in the weeks and months after my mother’s death. The subtext, I see now, was ‘for God’s sake don’t make us think about death’. Any suggestion that I didn’t want to rush to forget was taken as a sign of morbidity of Queen Victoria-like proportions and eventually prompted a referral to an analyst. Mourning is now considered perverse if it lasts more than a week. Twenty years ago we would not, for instance, go out to the cinema or the theatre or dinner if a close relative had just died. Today we are cajoled into outings on the grounds that they will be a comfort. Some comfort.

A hundred years ago we had great public funerals and private sex – one to do with the cult of death, the other with, inter alia, the hope of life. Now we have the opposite. And so with death, even among the rituals of a Christian funeral, we refrain from pressing our noses against the smell of our own physical corruption, from seeing, touching or holding a dead body. We rely on undertakers and hospices to maintain a cordon around the unpalatable reality and save our most flamboyant grieving for those we know only through the media and therefore can’t touch: for the British it was the Princess of Wales, for the Americans, John Kennedy Junior, when he dropped out of the sky.

Yet I sense a welcome reaction against this sanitisation of death, another Gothic revival. The literature of AIDS, as the historian Jonathan Dollimore has noted in his study Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture, has brought us back into touch with the trauma of death, questioning what happens next for so many promising lives which have ended prematurely. In Jim Crace’s Booker-shortlisted novel Being Dead, the intimate link between the physical horror of violence, sexuality and death dominates the narrative.

I hope that this very personal quest for some sort of heaven, wherever it may be, marrying the religious and the secular, the real and imaginary, will in its own way add some small momentum to this movement to reconnect us with death. If we ignore the pain and gloss over death, then we will spend correspondingly little time on heaven. To live fully we have to think about death when we are fully alive.