The Catholic Church Loves Odd Perspectives

Indeed, I sometimes fancy our entire tradition of theological contemplation has been built up by people capable of taking a cock-eyed look at things and seeing something brand new. As the Prophet Chesterton once observed, “If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.”

So my reader needn’t feel intrusive when he writes:

I’m sending you this because I have a question that’s a little odd and you seem to be the Master of the Odd Question/Perspective – and I mean that as a complement.

The question is: Why is there very little or seemingly no discussion about place in heaven? Although Jesus chastised the apostles for projecting their place in heaven, it seems to me that there’s a lot of readings that hint that not all places in heaven are equal. Two things have made me think about this. (1) I’m a basketball fan and have gone to my share of basketball games over the years. Then, once a friend surprised me with floor seats at an NBA game. What a great 3 hours. It was like watching a different game, sometimes you felt like you are part of the game. Lesson – Not all seats in the arena are the same. (2) I read Rev 3 11-12: “I wish you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.” To me – the scariest verses in the Bible. I think I’ve always been a lukewarm Christian. And part of that is an attitude that I had(have) and I think a lot of people that show up at church have – all I need to do is be good enough to get into heaven, you don’t have to do well – just don’t fail the test. Just be good enough that God can’t send you to Hell for eternity. Is it inherently bad to aspire to a good seat in Heaven? And maybe this is something that has been discussed or thought about. Any insight you may have would be greatly appreciated.

The New Testament is unabashed in saying that everybody should aspire for heaven and desire to be a saint. When St. Peter comes to Jesus and asks “What’s in it for us?” Jesus does not in the slightest upbraid him for vaulting ambition. Instead he says frankly, “Truly, I say to you, in the new world, when the Son of man shall sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. And every one who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold, and inherit eternal life. But many that are first will be last, and the last first.” (Matt 19:28-30)

Likewise, Paul tells us “eagerly desire the greater gifts” (1 Cor 12). There’s nothing wrong with holy ambition. St. Thomas Aquinas, offered whatever his heart desired by our Lord, brashly replies, “I will have Thyself!” St. Therese of Lisieux, even as a young girl, says she will take everything God offers because “I will not be a saint by halves.”

We recoil from this because we’ve been fed a false idea of modesty which tells us that to aspire to sainthood is prideful. Au contraire: it is only prideful to assume we have achieved sainthood. But to desire it–which is to say, “to desire Jesus”–is not immodest. It’s to desire the whole point of one’s life, to desire to be the person you were created to be, to desire freedom, sun on the leaves, children’s laughter, and the smell of baking bread. People who insist that there is something unnatural, immodest or wrong with desiring what is right and proper and desireable are the ones who have a screw loose. If they tell you it’s an “escapist fantasy” to desire such things and that you need to “get back to real life”, just remember the wisdom of Peter Kreeft: the only people who are concerned about escapes are jailers. Any talk of “real life” that urges us away from God the source of Reality is jailer talk.

The way to get past this is to remember what C.S. Lewis talks about in the chapter on Heaven in his invaluable book The Problem of Pain. He points out that the New Testament talk about the “reward” of Heaven is rooted in the idea that some forms of reward are simply the flower of virtue, not something extrinsic to it. Our culture has the notion of “heaven” as a thing extrinsic to the practice of virtue. So: if we are good little boys and girls in this life, then (it is fancied) God will “reward” us with “heaven”–a place where we will (depending on who you ask) get our 72 virgins, or free cable, or camping forever on the Skagit River, or our favorite cat back alive again. Such a concepton of the heavenly reward has basically nothing to do with a living relationship with God. It’s just a brownie of a slightly higher order–a sort of bribe for “being good.” It has nothing to do with inner transformation. It’s just a gold star stuck on your forehead for all eternity.

Lewis points out that there is another sort of reward: one intrinsic to the virtue practiced. So, for instance, a man who marries for money is getting a “reward” that has nothing to do with the thing he ostensibly seeks. A man who seeks his true love and finally marries her has precisely the reward proper for the virtue of his love. Likewise, a general’s proper reward is victory in battle. An artist’s proper reward is the satisfaction of creating good art.

Heaven is “reward” in that sense. The Lord gives us the desire of our heart and we find that He has always been the deepest desire of our heart. Of course, such is the superabundance of God that we will not merely have him, but all other goods in him: the saints, the pleasures of the senses in our glorified bodies, a new heaven, and a new earth will all be taken up into the glory.

Does that mean we will all be “the same” or “equal”? God forbid! We will all be gloriously different (Scripture uses the image of each saint being given “a white stone, with a new name written on the stone which no one knows except him who receives it” to communicate this individuality that we will take with us into eternity). We will, in short, have “different seats” in the heavenly bleachers. Or, as St. Therese put it, some of us will be buckets or swimming pools, while others of us will be thimbles. We will have different capacities for God, but we will all be as full as we can be. There will be on envy of those with a greater capacity for God and no gloating over those with a smaller capacity, for all will be charity and wonder over the infinitely varied ways in which God is present in glory in his saints.