DANCING IN HEAVEN?: I just finished Life on the Mississippi, which was fun, and you’ll get several posts springing off from various Twain statements. But Twain falls into an annoyingly common trope when he writes, “The loneliness of thiws solemn, stupendous flood is impressive–and depressing. League after league, and still league after league, it pours its chocolate tide along, between its solid forest walls, its almost untenanted shores, with seldom a sail or a moving object of any kind to disturb the surface and break the monotony of the blank, watery solitude; and so the day goes, the night comes, and again the day–and still the same, night after night and day after day–majestic, unchanging sameness of serenity, repose, tranquillity, lethargy, vacancy–symbol of eternity, realization of the heaven pictured by priest and prophet, and longed for by the good and thoughtless!”

Not quite. “Blackadder” had a hilarious bit about this cheap-atheism view of heaven–“No; you see, the thing about Heaven, is that Heaven is for people who like the sort of things that go on in Heaven, like, uh, well, singing, talking to God, watering pot plants.” Even this, of course, is more energetic than Twain’s sly caricature! But it’s common for atheists to deride heaven by saying things like, “One eternal church service? Borrrring!” If said atheists were raised Christian, this judgment should cause their childhood ministers some concern–and maybe the ministers should learn some rhetoric, just read from the majestic Bible some more, or maybe hit the coffeepot Sunday morning–but there are at least three things to say about this portrayal of heaven:

1) When the reality of what’s going on at Mass has truly struck my heart–which happens rarely, as it’s so astonishingly easy to get distracted and self-centered–it’s as powerful, as ecstatic, as seeing the face of your beloved suddenly appear in a doorway. It’s as awe-inspiring as any ice-hung mountaintop. At the Mass at which I was confirmed, I was sick (due to stress and doubt) and couldn’t really focus, but after we’d all received Communion I glanced over at the woman next to me and saw that she was crying with joy. If that’s what heaven’s like–that piercing realization of God’s love and Jesus’s sacrifice–sign me up! The sudden understanding that the Communion wafer, breaking between your teeth, is the body of Christ Who was broken on the Cross for you and for all mankind–how terrible, how exalting–a realization most of us simply can’t sustain, emotionally, for more than a few seconds.

2) In heaven we will see God face to face. Deriding this act of contemplation as “boring” is as silly as deriding other contemplative ecstasies–the mathematician lost in the beauty of the labyrinth of numbers, the reader who looks up from her book and stares out the window in distracted meditation on what she’s just read.

3) There is singing in heaven. We don’t really know what that means–I expect all our metaphors will look wan in the face of eternal life–but I do think we can gather that eternity is not the same as stasis; that heaven is not a stagnant pool or a mummification.