What Does Heaven Look Like?

My sense of God is that God is the power of life calling me to live, God is the power of love calling me to love, God is the ground of all being calling me to be all I can. Jesus lived fully, loved wastefully, and the job of the Christian church is not to make people more religious. The task of the church is to call people to live and to love and to stop tearing other people down in destructive ways.  Our job is to create a world where everyone has a chance to live fully, love wastefully, and be all they can be. That's the only mission the church really has.

One reason people shy away from exploring their questions and doubts is that they're afraid they'll somehow offend their friends and loved ones. And, often, I've heard people return to this issue of death -- fear of death. Raising too many questions can be very upsetting when one is approaching the Big-D: Death.  One of the strongest affirmations you make in this new book is: You don't fear death. Not at all. You're one of the world's most famous Christian skeptics and yet -- you're not afraid as you approach the end.  

I wanted to call this book Dancing with Death but Harper told me nobody would buy a book with the word "Death" in the title. People are terrified of death.  People don't even want to touch a book with that word in the title. But, I'm not terrified of death. I'm far more terrified of meaningless life.   

We should share with readers another remarkable point you make in this book. I imagine that a good number of your fans -- and your foes -- suspect that you don't believe in what we might call "Heaven" at all. And, what you describe in the book certainly is not a big fancy city with streets paved of gold. You've got a much different vision of what Heaven may be.  But in the simplest terms, you argue passionately for something that most people probably would call Heaven. Can you describe a little bit about your vision of this eternal life? It takes 250 pages in the book, but give us a little taste of what you're trying to convey.

That's really hard to do.  What I try to do as a religious person is to recognize religion's limits. Try to imagine a horse communicating -- with a horse's range of communication tools -- what it means to be a human. A horse couldn't do that! So when human beings try to describe what it means to be God, then I think we face the same problem. We don't have the capacity of language to properly talk about God and expanded life and expanded love and expanded being. We can get to the edge of expressing it, but our communication tools fall far short.

Yes, you explain this in the book. But you also write some important affirmations here about what eternal life means.   

One question I always hear is: Am I going to know my loved ones? And I say to people: I don't know how to answer that honestly. But it's a very important question because an important part of who we become in life are all the memories of the people we know and have loved.  If I'm going to share in whatever eternity really is, then the person I am is not just Jack Spong as a single, isolated person. I'm Jack Spong who has a wife who is a part of me, who has a mother and a father who are part of who I am, who has friends who are part of me. I can't imagine a life after death, where my humanity reaches into new dimensions, that doesn't somehow share in all of the people who have made me who I am. But it's beyond the boundaries of the human language to describe how that will be.

There's a lot more in this book -- many related topics you touch upon, but your message ultimately reminds me of wise words from a good friend of mine over the years -- Rabbi Daniel Syme who is well known in Reform Jewish circles for his talents at education and writing. He says that our language to describe Heaven breaks down very quickly. We know so little, really. And, if we focus too much on Heaven, we ignore the world around us now.  

I think it's well worth wrapping up this interview with your words ...
   

I end this book by calling you to live fully, to love wastefully, to be all that you can be and to dedicate yourselves to building a world in which everyone has a better opportunity to do the same. That to me is to be part of God and to do the work of God ... that to me is the way to prepare for life after death. Shalom.

This article originally appeared at ReadtheSpirit.org and is reprinted with permission.

David Crumm is an author, journalist, and filmmaker with more than twenty years experience as a Religion Writer for the Detroit Free Press, Knight-Ridder newspapers, and Gannett. Crumm is now the Editor of ReadTheSpirit, a new online home for important voices in religion and spirituality.