Saturday, 16 October 2021

What is Heaven like?... A place of uniqueness of nature and creativity, harmonized by love

One of the difficulties of describing Heaven in detail is that people are so different. 

Heaven is the resurrection of actual individual people - and since these people remain their original selves (but elevated to the divine) then Heaven cannot be summarized any more easily than people. 


Consider the question: What are people like? Any accurate answer you gave to that question would fail to capture the specifics of actual people, and would necessarily be very generalized indeed - and probably very abstract. 

Because all people are different - so much so, that (except with respect to specific traits - like differences between men and women, younger and older) no two people are alike


Consider the people you know best - probably your family. All my grandparents were different characters, each an individual, each distinct from each other - and add-in my mother, father, brother, sister, son and daughter and there is a collection of unique individuals. There are some family and social resemblances of course; but fundamentally and very clearly, each is absolutely unique. 

Add-in those who have been intense or close friends across my life, and consider them as well. Each friend was a distinct person - had an unique 'flavour'; and for none of them could I think of anybody else in the world who he or she was really 'like'. 


Heaven is populated by people - and people who are more themselves in Heaven than on earth - because divinity raises up the real self while discarding the passively absorbed or expediently inculcated social 'personality' aspects. 

And it is only in these 'personality' aspects - the product of socialization, environment, propaganda, fashion etc - that Men appear to be superficially similar. When we get to know somebody, we see past these temporary common traits - and that is the case in Heaven.   


So your Heaven will be different from my Heaven according to our different fundamental nature - just as your life is fundamentally different from mine, here on earth. 

Indeed, I know of nobody, have heard of nobody, who lives as I do (or thinks as I do) - even in this mortal life! How much more this will be the case in Heaven, when the necessities of mortality are gone. 


Heaven differs according to those with whom we are most associated - and/ including those whom we most love; because although Heaven is the place of love - that does not mean 'equality' of love, since love is of its nature unique between persons. 

We do not love any two people in The Same way, nor to the same degree - because love is two unique divine souls in relationship. Each love is unique in quality, as well as varying in strength. 

Your life and work in Heaven will be even-more-different from others people's lives and works than it is here on earth; because all that generic stuff about jobs, sustaining the body, dealing with bureaucracy, the effects of mass media etc will be gone. 


Presumably; in Heaven my life will be shaped, but even more so than now, by the nature of my creativity - and this is extremely different from the creativity of nearly everybody I have met or heard of (and identical with none). 

By 'my creativity' I mean what I actively want to participate in, and which is a never failing source of satisfaction: the only never failing source of satisfaction in this mortal life. 

Creativity by this meaning is a word for the distinctive engagement of our real selves with God's creation. In this sense: creativity is the only activity that never palls

Hence: creativity is the only activity fit for eternity


I know enough to see that what absolutely fascinates me in this respect is of near indifference to nearly everybody else (nearly- but not every- body else - which sharing is what makes creativity valuable). Also, what other people find endlessly (eternally) absorbing often leaves me pretty indifferent. 

In other words; in Heaven our lives will be more different from each other than they are on earth - because we will be more different, because our lives will be shaped by those who (most) love; and because we will be expressing our individual creative nature. 

In Heaven there will be no homogeneity at all! 


It is only on earth that cohesion is imposed by making people 'the same'; whereas in Heaven all coheres by love.

So in Heaven we can and shall be as different from each other, and do such different things from each other, as might be imagined to happen in the largest and most (wholly) loving extended family, village, college or workplace.