I’ve been in Berlin all week with our link churches in the Diocese of Berlin-Brandenburg. They keep Reformation Day (October 31st) there in a big way – I attended two full services, one in Berlin Cathedral and one at St Nicolai Kirche in Potsdam – the Bundespräsident Horst Köhler was present there – although it was most memorable for the Reception that followed...
The Lutherans were somewhat surprised that we as Anglican ‘protestants’ do not make more of Reformation Day. And they were mildly horrified that we kept All Saints Day and completely scandalised that we observed All Souls Day. But then the Church of England arguably owes its theology more to a shrewd Queen (ERI) and a Book of Common Prayer than to Luther.
Personally, I always loved Luther’s earthy sense of humour, most of which was far too scatological for a Knightsbridge pulpit. I’m encouraged by one of his famous quotes: “If I am not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don't want to go there.”
In popular culture heaven is full of clouds, harps and halos; angels peeling grapes, chubby little cherubim. Each age has represented Heaven as the best of their own geography, cuisine and music, although they have often done so with a little tongue in cheek.
Here’s Alan Bennett, presumably calling on childhood holiday memories, in Habeas Corpus:
“My life I squandered waiting, Then let my chance go by.Today we keep the solemnity of All Saints, transferred from November 1st on which it has been celebrated in the Western Church since the 8th Century. (In the 4th Century All Saints were remembered on the Sunday after Pentecost and still are in the Eastern Church.) It is a day when we think about the men and women of God who have gone before us in the faith and who surround us now, represented as they are in the statues and angels around us here - the great cloud of witnesses in heaven.
One day we’ll meet in Heaven. That Matlock in the sky.”
All Souls day, which follows on November 2nd, was a day set aside to pray for those lesser mortals who have preceded us but whose final destination is thought to be a little less certain. The Church of England abolished this observance during the Reformation, but with typical ambivalence has continued to make provision for it in its liturgies.
On both days we look to the promise of heaven: those unspeakable joys which God has prepared for those that unfeignedly love him.
Is the concept of heaven just whistling in the dark, keeping ourselves cheerful in the fearsome face of death? This is what bare-fact atheists such as Richard Dawkins or Ludovic Kennedy would have us believe.
No, death itself points any reasonable person to the continuity of personhood in the life to come. The natural inclination of all humankind has been to suppose that there is yet more.
Who has not lost a friend, a family member - perhaps someone vibrant with life, loving and much loved; or perhaps at the end, weak and frail. And is not the sense that they are still ‘here’ overwhelming and almost tangible at times?
This is how that great rationalist CS Lewis felt about the death of his friend Charles Williams:
“No event has so corroborated my belief in the next world as Williams did simply in dying. When the idea of death and the idea of Williams thus met in my mind, it was the idea of death which changed.”It is only simplistic ‘nothing buttery’ - human life is ‘nothing but’ this or that - which says, that because there is no scientific evidence for the life to come, then there is none.
It is only simplistic ‘nothing buttery’ which says, that because there are psychological reasons why we should fool ourselves into believing in the life to come, any such belief is naïve and misguided.
No, we are those who dare to believe that as we sit here, we are already part of the innumerable but unseen host of heaven, which is not somewhere else; a journey distant; a far country. Here we are mystically caught up in the communion of the saints.
Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham, puts into words a valuable and common insight of Christian thinkers:
“A proper Christian understanding of heaven is not as a place remote from the present world, but rather as a dimension, normally kept secret, of present reality… ‘Heaven’ is God’s dimension of present reality.”Religions are still divided in what they believs to be the nature of life after death.
Re-incarnation has a long and honourable history both among Hindus and Buddhists. And recently in the West it has become fashionable to remember a past life in which you were a consort to the Pharaoh or a Lady in Waiting to Elizabeth I. Less frequently, I find, do people remember their life as a goose or as a wretched medieval serf. But that is to trivialise beliefs which in our western culture we find difficult.
However, there is no place for reincarnation within the Judaeo-Christian tradition, for it is neither in the Scriptures, nor does it sit easily with the view that every person is of infinite value to God; loved by Christ; the temple of the Holy Spirit.
More popular in recent years is the idea that we will be absorbed into nothingness. This again has come from the East. Here is the Hindu Upanishad:
“ My friend, welcome the joy of impersonal nothingness - nothing, this is the end, the supreme goal.”For the Buddhist, Nirvana is a similar concept. And of course it has had its adherents within the Christian church.
Historic Christianity has used art and music to paint a picture which emphasises the relational aspects of the world to come: a place of completion, but not dull stasis.
Heaven is the place where the object of our worship can be viewed with unveiled face. Where we will gaze on the Lamb that was slain, who yet lives. Where we will no longer peer anxiously through a glass darkly, but see and know, even as we are seen and known. Where our thirst for knowledge will be satisfied by the eternal wisdom of God.
We will be the people we have, at our best, always wanted to be. We will be free at last from the restlessness that drives us and the whole human race towards great beauty and ingenuity and deep love, and towards madness and self-destruction.
And we will be with the saints, and the angels, and with those whom we have loved in this life, now made perfect in Christ. Heaven is a social concourse, for there can be no being, no personality in isolation from others. God is Trinity and we are bound up in the loving circle of his relationships.
Dear Michael Mayne, Dean of Westminster till 1996, died two Sundays ago. He kept a diary of his dying, and towards the end he quoted his old friend John Austin Baker:
‘He who holds me in existence now can and will hold me in it still, through and beyond the dissolution of my mortal frame. For this is the essence of love, to affirm the right of the beloved to exist. And what God affirms, nothing and no one can contradict.’And here in the bread and the wine, at this altar where the veil is thin, the dimensions of heaven break through into our own dimensions.
The mystical Body of Christ, lifted towards heaven, is viewed by another innumerable company, on another unseen shore, and we are knit together with the saints, who remind us of the reward of abiding love.
“Rejoice and be exceeding glad; for great is your reward in heaven.” Matt 5.12
