Daily Reading
More Than We Can Imagine
January 5, 2025
I knew a man who as a young boy hated the idea of heaven. He would puzzle and embarrass his Sunday school teachers by stating quite boldly, whenever the subject of heaven was brought up, that he didn’t want to go there. Finally, one of them had the sense to ask him why. His answer? “I don’t like peas.” He had heard the familiar Christmas carol “Silent Night,” with the lovely refrain “Sleep in heavenly peace” and thought it referred to the vegetable (peas). Like any red-blooded boy he figured there had to be better things to do.
Our images aren’t much better. We speak so seldom of heaven and when we do, the images are sickly: fat babies fluttering around with tiny wings, bored saints lazing on shapeless clouds, strumming harps and wondering what’s happening back on earth where the real action is.
The crisis of hope that afflicts the church today is a crisis of imagination. Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft writes,
Our images aren’t much better. We speak so seldom of heaven and when we do, the images are sickly: fat babies fluttering around with tiny wings, bored saints lazing on shapeless clouds, strumming harps and wondering what’s happening back on earth where the real action is.
The crisis of hope that afflicts the church today is a crisis of imagination. Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft writes,
Medieval imagery (which is almost totally biblical imagery) of light, jewels, stars, candles, trumpets, and angels no longer fits our ranch-style, supermarket world. Pathetic modern substitutes of fluffy clouds, sexless cherubs, harps and metal halos (not halos of light) presided over by a stuffy divine Chairman of the Bored are a joke, not a glory. Even more modern, more up-to-date substitutes—heaven as a comfortable feeling of peace and kindness, sweetness and light, and God as a vague grandfatherly benevolence, a senile philanthropist—are even more insipid. Our pictures of heaven simply do not move us; they are not moving pictures. It is this aesthetic failure rather than intellectual or moral failures in our pictures of Heaven and of God that threatens faith most potently today. Our pictures of Heaven are dull, platitudinous and syrupy; therefore, so is our faith, our hope, and our love of Heaven. ... It doesn’t matter whether it’s a dull lie or a dull truth. Dullness, not doubt, is the strongest enemy of faith, just as indifference, not hate, is the strongest enemy of love.
—Everything You Wanted to Know About Heaven
If our pictures of heaven are to move us, they must be moving pictures. So go ahead—dream a little. Use your imagination; let your heart speak! You were made for Eden, and “heaven” is Eden’s return. Picture the best possible ending to your story you can. If that isn’t heaven, something better is. When Paul says, “‘No eye has seen, ... no ear has heard, ... no human mind has conceived’ the things God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor. 2:9), he simply means we cannot outdream God. What is at the end of our personal journeys? Something beyond our wildest imagination. But if we explore the secrets of our heart in the light of the promises of Scripture, we can discover clues. There is in the heart of every man, woman, and child an inconsolable longing for intimacy, for beauty, and for adventure. That is because we are waiting for Eden’s return.
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