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I must confess that when I am invited to write about heaven or hell I feel an extreme reluctance. Does this reluctance spring from the promptings of the Holy Spirit, or from the promptings of the Devil? How much of it is due to a proper fear that it is presumptuous to try to inquire in detail into mysteries that God has left veiled? And how much of it is due to an unworthy determination to focus the mind on things of this world and not on things above? I suspect that the latter motive is strong in all of us. The young do not want to think about the afterlife because it is too far off, and the old do not want to think about it because it is too near.

Biblical teaching will not allow us to shrug off all thought of life hereafter. It promises "everlasting" life, life that is timeless. Clearly, therefore, any reflection on the character of life hereafter has to reckon with the immense differences that must exist between life that is subject to time and life that is freed from time. Although all human beings are locked for 60 or 70 years in a time sequence of hours and days, weeks and months, we Christians are accustomed to adjust our familiar temporal perspectives when we ponder the truths of Christian revelation. For these truths transcend the limitations of time. Jesus Christ is alive, we say, yesterday and today and forever. His entry into human life and his resurrection are not just historical events of the first century A.D., but realities of our daily experience now. The eternal impinges on the temporal whenever the Holy Spirit touches an individual, whenever a prayer is said or a hymn sung.

It is not only in prayer and worship that what is outside time impinges on what is inside time. Poets through the ages have described how awareness of the eternal came flooding over them as they contemplated the wonder of God's creation. When Wordsworth was overwhelmed on a walking tour by the grandeur of the peaks and crags, the winds and waterfalls of the Simplon Pass, he discerned that all the aspects of the magnificent scene before him were "types and symbols of Eternity / Of first, and last, and midst, and without end." He grappled with words to try to define an irruption into the fabric of time from a world beyond time. John Milton was so moved by music, he said, that it brought "all heaven" before his eyes. Coventry Patmore told how the beauty of the girl he loved had the same effect on him:

She seemed expressly sent below
To teach our erring minds to see
The rhythmic change of time's swift flow
As part of still eternity.

Earthly experiences that open a window in the framework of time are fragmentary. They come and go. In the same way, for most of us, our moments of conscious contact with God are fleeting, our sense of his presence is fragmentary. This fleetingness and fragmentariness are aspects of life in time.

We are always wishing that our life on earth were different in this respect. We use two words that, when put together, sum up the difference between the joys of life in time and the joys of eternity: "If only." If only the vigor and beauty of youth did not fade! If only the energy of youth could be experienced at the same time as the poise of maturity and the wisdom of age! If only there were no human sinfulness to plunge nations into misery! If only bodies could not be destroyed by cancers, wills broken by addictions, emotions poisoned by perversions! If only! And what would follow? Life would be "heavenly," of course.

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June (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47