The strange distortions of secular ideology: My best possible life!
Part 3: Can we manage without heaven?
Once we have an inkling of grace, we, though still very weak in the weakness of our human nature, have at least some resources to cope with injustice and to forgive others. Living on planet reality, we have accepted our own flaws and we have accepted that we live in an unjust world. It has certainly been a long-standing source of anguish to religious people: how can it be that the omnipotent God of goodness and love does not end all suffering and injustice. There are some excellent theodicies (explanations for this) available, and I will return to address them directly on another occasion. All I will say for now is that – counter-intuitively perhaps – once you start to consider in detail exactly what you’d like God to do, life becomes ridiculous and impossible – and probably not holding much worth, if we demand that he must end all suffering.
However, we can focus on our earlier point that the Christian has resources to understand why the world is full of evil, and why so many people act so badly. Accepting our own flaws, we may have some chance of forgiving the injustices that others inflict on us. It is the Christian hope that God does have ways of providing justice ultimately, of recompensing people for their suffering, of putting right things that have gone wrong, of transforming situations that are, in worldly terms simply wicked and horrible, into occasions of grace and healing.
We need to consider heaven as a point of special interest. Traditionally, this is understood as receiving an eternal, spiritual life in the spiritual dimension of heaven, where everything will be made whole, and put right. We will, as it were, cast off everything that is unworthy of God so that, in the life of heaven, we can enjoy unalloyed communion with him, without ever having the pain of letting him down, or straying from him. We will, in fact, finally succeed in living the life that we longed to live here on planet earth, but continually failed to sustain because of our human weakness. (Quite how this could be probably deserves another article on another occasion).
I hope very much that the life of heaven is a reality. If God is God as I believe him to be, it seems entirely reasonable that he will make the life of heaven open to us. However, my concern is with secular thinkers, and they are quite right to discount heaven as unverified speculation. So, how are we to continue the Christian hope if we don’t rely on heaven? I once had a work colleague who was deeply drawn to his Catholic upbringing, but he was also deeply drawn to the attractions of adultery – and the latter regularly overcame the former. His attitude was that he would really like to live a Christian life, if only it didn’t involve having to give up so much. He regarded heaven as a wonderful reward, but only for those who keep the rules, and the rules were far too strict for him to keep. Now, if you hold that view, then the slightest doubt that heaven is not a reality is likely to undermine your resolve. You really would kick yourself if you gave up hugely pleasurable activities on earth, in order to get into heaven, only to discover that it was all for nothing, if heaven is not real.
Spiritual Devotion 