The Remoteness Of Heaven

No, I had never heard anything about a cloud before. I had heard the phrases “called home,” “rest in peace,” but a “cloud of witnesses,” I had not heard of before. It was most likely at my second session of counseling that the counselor mentioned Hebrews 12:1. Following the advice of friends, I had started to see a counselor at the Wesley Methodist Counseling Centre in November 2012. The counselor explained that when Christian souls leave this life, they join a heavenly host of Christian souls who watch over the living and cheer them on.

“When we see our loved ones in heaven, we do not resume our earthly relationships,” he explained.

“Do we recognize each other?” I asked.

“My mother will know that I was her son, and I will recognize her too, but we will not call each other by those names. We will all simply be God’s children.”

I struggled to understand this. How will we know that this person used to be my partner or that person my relative if our earthly ties no longer count for anything in the Christian afterlife? How can we recognize each other and yet not carry on with the lives we had together until everything was disrupted by death?

The afterlife. The ever after. How do I write about an experience that I have not yet experienced? What am I to say about it?

In my twenties I studied The Divine Comedy as part of research for my dissertation. When I started, I thought I would finish the dissertation in three years. It took me five years in the end, and the first one and a half years were spent reading The Divine Comedy. The work is made up of three canticles: “Inferno,” “Purgatorio,” and “Paradiso.” I had read the poem before, when I was an undergraduate. I got to the end of “Purgatorio,” I think, and I gave up. My favourite canticle then was “Inferno.” Plenty of drama and action, lots of graphic images – that was why I liked it.

It was only when I studied the poem in greater detail a few years later that I began to realise that Dante’s journey from Hell to Paradise is a journey back to God. A journey made by a living person through the different realms of the afterlife. God is at the pinnacle of heaven; and when the protagonist reaches this place, he comes face to face with “the Love that moves the stars and all other things” and there the poem ends. 

When I finished my dissertation in 2000, my choice of favourite canticle changed to “Purgatorio.” It is in this second canticle that Dante writes about souls who look back on their earthly lives with longing and nostalgia. His protagonist meets, among others, the souls of dead poets and musicians whose songs and poems are remembered and quoted with respect and affection.

The final destination of heaven in “Paradiso” where the protagonist meets soul after soul who have ascended to the circles of heaven and asks them profound theological questions (receiving profound theological answers) – that was not my cup of tea.

The “cloud of witnesses” in Hebrews 12:1 – now that’s Paradiso material, through and through. If we believe in heaven, if we believe in eternal life, then our eyes should focus on that, not on the things of this earth.

Many of the episodes and encounters in “Purgatorio” end with the souls singing hymns, reminding themselves to look ahead to heaven. Yet the call of the past is often still strong, and they cannot help but look back and remember the people they have had to leave behind, their families, their friends, their earthly loves and desires.

Nostalgia is easier to comprehend than joining a cloud of witnesses. Nostalgia begins and ends with the self. What I used to have. Who I used to love. Who I used to be. Becoming part of God’s community of souls in heaven, the earthly self becomes thoroughly irrelevant. This is difficult to accept because I am rooted still to my being here, in the here and now.

The reality of Boon’s presence in my life now is no longer as who he used to be in my life, but who he has become, joining God’s cloud of witnesses. I know this, I sense this. Yet the reality of that final place for myself is something that has not properly sunk in.  I have started re-reading “Paradiso,” but I find that I am still having trouble liking it more than “Purgatorio.”

Hebrews 12:1

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us”  

(to be continued)