Why go to heaven? When you consider the popular “Family Circus” image — sitting on clouds, playing harps, singing hymns, and watching the doings on earth as if they were some reality-based TV show — you may rightly ask, why would anyone want to? Earth seems to be where the real action is. Two recent films, What Dreams May Come and City of Angels, both involve a descent from up there to down here, since up there was lacking something. So why go?

Is it fear, a failure of nerve in the face of oblivion, born of a natural self-love — “I like myself, at least enough to want to keep on existing indefinitely”? Is it fear of the eternal torments of hell, for those who believe in that sort of thing? Is it desire for pleasure, propped up by Mommy’s promise that in heaven, you’ll get all the ice cream you can eat, any time, any flavor, and you’ll never gain a pound or get sick? Is it weariness with the suffering of this world, a longing for a place where we can just sit back and relax, without aching feet and breaking hearts? Is it something else?

One’s view of heaven, and of its ability to attract, will be influenced by one’s view of who or what God is. It will also be influenced, more or less explicitly, by one’s view of what humanity is. If heaven is a place where we’ll be happy, then to know heaven, it helps to know human happiness. I asked people from six different denominations and faiths — Lutheran, Catholic, Hare Krishna, Swedenborgian, Mormon, and Jehovah’s Witness — about what heaven is, how to get there, and why we’ll be happy there. I also spoke to representatives of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and the Baptist denomination of Christianity, but I did not include the results of these conversations. The accounts either lacked specificity or were very similar to those offered by others.

Where I could, I talked not to theologians or teachers, but to ministers, those who tended the faithful flock. I asked them to describe, from personal belief if not from doctrine, certain details about heavenly life. I asked about our relations with God and one another; in particular, about marriage, the most intimate earthly friendship many people attain.

These latter questions are helpful to the man who longs for heaven, or at least thinks he ought to long for it, because it is true that the more you know of a good thing, the more you are able to love it. As its wonders unfold, your devotion is fanned. The converse is also true — you cannot truly love what you do not in some way know.

When I was a child, I told my father, with a seriousness bordering on solemnity, that I didn’t want to go to heaven. My reason had to do with the inconceivable — to me, at least — quality of eternity. I was afraid of being eternally bored. I did not want my life to end, but the prospect of day after day after day forever did not appeal to me either. There was in it a tinge of drudgery, or perhaps the bloated feeling that comes at the end of a vacation that has gone on too long.

That fear of boredom was rooted in my fear of the infinite. I took a strange comfort in the security of knowing that this life would end one day, that it had a natural progression of growing up and growing old, all leading to a conclusion in death. Life outside those boundaries was scary in a way that left me as deeply shaken as a boy thinking about eternity can be.

One way to ease this fear is to ignore it. The world offers a host of methods by which we can distract ourselves from something so seemingly abstract and far-off as heaven: Family, friends, the pursuit of virtue and material goods, even holiness in our earthly conduct — all worthwhile and occupying of our minds and time.

This approach is a popular one, even among those who believe. Author and publisher Frank Sheed once remarked, “You’d think that people whose belief is that heaven is their destiny, and that the reason why they exist is to get there, would be more curious about it.” But many of us aren’t. We are satisfied with the promise of happiness, whatever that happiness may consist in.

Lutheran minister Rev. Gloria Espeseth, pastor at the tiny Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Serra Mesa, offers some explanation for this, saying that heaven is largely unknowable — that heaven, like God, is an object of faith. “The only thing we can say is metaphorical. I have to think of the highest good, the most peaceful, the most whole. I have to find terms like that. I have no words for it, just metaphors. There is no curtain anymore. We are face to face in wholeness. We are fully in the presence of God. Whatever that means, I trust it.”

The Bible, her first reference on the subject, uses “different images. It uses pastoral images, rural images of paradise. Then there’s the image of the New Jerusalem, which is an urban image. It’s interesting, with the Jerusalem image, that the New Jerusalem comes down. This creation is renewed in a way. Other images talk about this creation disappearing in a ball of fire. So the Biblical texts do not offer us a coherent, comprehensive doctrine of heaven. Different traditions vary because they will emphasize one more than another.

“But what’s common to all of them, I would say, is that it’s a place where God and the universe are in full apprehension of one another. It’s life with God. It’s where God is. It’s that place where there is no separation between the creator and the creation, where ultimate reality is available to everyone at every moment. Where God exists in all of God’s fullness.”

She leaves the unpacking of that statement to our own imaginations, our own souls. “One of the most interesting metaphors I’ve ever heard for hell is being stuck out on the South Dakota prairie, having to edit phone books interminably. I mean, that’s goofy, but it’s that sort of thing — you find a metaphor that works for you.”

For example, “the whole idea of singing hymns forever in heaven sounds really boring to some people. Now to others, who love hymns and are touched deeply by them, that just sounds like the most wonderful thing. My mother is a little country-church organist, and some of the greatest joy she has now is to go up and play hymns at the old folks’ home in this little town in North Dakota. For her, that image of singing with the angels is a beautiful, blissful image.

“I don’t have to have a picture to [think of heaven]. This is just what I trust it is. There are times when our faith, our experience of God, our experience of the world is just so whole and so good… Now, most people don’t stay at that level, but everybody has some of those experiences. Otherwise, I don’t think they’d stay a person of that particular faith. ‘Where is it? How will we not be bored?’ Those kinds of things really aren’t questions.”

The Bible, however, does not leave us entirely lost in the metaphorical woods. “Jesus, at one point, talked about Abraham and Isaac and Jacob being there, so that says that there’s a continuity of personality. It’s not just that I’m some blob of light in the midst of light. There’s an integrity to our personhood. We’re personal, we’re in relationship with others.… The historic Christian understanding is of a personal relationship…and that our relationships on earth matter. God has commanded that we take care of one another.”

The notion of personal relationship, though part of Espeseth’s doctrine of the integrity of the body and the integrity of each individual life, can overshadow the central point of heaven. Some people “understand it almost solely in personal terms. I know that’s an enormous comfort. I have a cousin who, when my father died, said, ‘Oh, I know that Mom and Dad are having coffee in heaven.’ I didn’t say anything. She looked at me and said, ‘You don’t believe that yet, do you?’ I said, ‘Well, that’s not an image I have.’

“But what I don’t hear people talking about is life with God. They talk about how neat it will be to have coffee again with that person, and not that that isn’t part of it, but it’s not the whole.” The concept of life with God “could enrich somebody’s experience, because it makes us realize that you don’t have to wait until heaven to be in relationship with God. We already have that relationship now, and it will just be greater. I believe we could make it more real now.”

Getting there is a matter of faith. “We are justified by faith through grace. Not by works. That’s the Lutheran passion. That’s our history. Medieval Catholicism had gotten into a position where they were telling people that there were hierarchies and that they could earn their way and so forth. Luther, in his personal torment over ‘What do I need to do? Have I done enough?’ came across Romans and Galatians — he was a biblical scholar. That ‘God has done all for us in Christ.’ It’s not what we do; it’s a gift of God. Faith is our saying yes to God’s yes to us.”

Espeseth acknowledges that her claim has its complexities: “Is faith required? Is faith a work? That’s an interesting argument that we have.” But over particular considerations, she throws this general principle: “God’s passion is to be in relationship with all of creation. I don’t believe that God is interested in figuring out rules to keep people out of heaven. The only unforgivable sin is denying the Holy Spirit. What does that mean? Rejection of God. But as far as specific sins go, I’m not willing to start a list, because I don’t know where that list ends.”

Time for the extreme case. How about genocide? Is Hitler in hell? “I am not in the position of saying what went on between Adolf Hitler and God in the last moments of Hitler’s life. Was that part of his suicide? Did he understand how wrong he had been? Jesus said to the thief on the cross, ‘Today you will be with Me in paradise.’ ”

Father Harry Neely, a Roman Catholic priest who often says Sunday Mass at Holy Cross Mausoleum, shares Espeseth’s belief that we can make heaven more real now by coming to know God. Neely, white-haired, black-spectacled, and black-robed, speaks quietly and at a measured pace. About our tendency to ignore heaven, he says, “We give ourselves an excuse. We think, ‘Oh, well, we can’t understand it,’ so we just think, ‘It’ll be great.’ But the saints were not like that.”

He tells a story from St. Augustine’s Confessions in which Augustine and his mother Monica, in discussing the life of the Blessed in heaven, actually “touched that unspeakable reality that is beyond experience” and then came back. “After that,” concludes Neely, “Monica had no more interest in life. She just wanted to be there.”

Neely grants an unknowability to heaven. “The apostle Paul says — and this is the quote we think of when you ask the question — ‘The eye has not seen, nor the ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man, the things that God has prepared for those who love Him.’ We cannot imagine it.

“But you know, faith gives us the power to invest those words with a meaning that we can’t put into words. I know that God is my lover. I’ve had little whiffs of that, little experiences of that light that is not of this world. I get a sip; I don’t get the full draft. But I know it’s something that I must have. If I don’t, I will be absolutely miserable.”

Fully having that something, he says, will prevent the boredom that I feared as a child. “Why does a man get bored?” he asks. “You can have the most exciting and pleasurable experience in the world. How long does it last? How long can you keep it up before you get sick of it? Boredom is not so much inactivity as the wearying of the activity we have, one that maybe was originally very satisfying.”

Illustration: “That’s an awful moment when a guy realizes that his wife is boring him. He’s got to do something immediately to overcome that. That’s a constant challenge in any human relationship. The most tender affection — you can get tired of it. In a human relationship, you can’t keep it at a fever pitch forever.

“The reason is that we’re made with a hunger that cannot be satisfied by anything except the infinite. I’m not infinite, but I have an insatiable hunger for good. Any particular good, even the love of someone very dear to me, that won’t do it forever. That’s why I get bored. It can distract me for a while…that’s what it is, really — a distraction from my essential hunger for the infinite. Pure goodness is what I need, what I was made for.”

The prospect of that goodness is what makes heaven attractive. In his account, Neely explains the mechanics — what will make us happy, and how. Heaven is “a state of perfect happiness, which consists essentially for us in possessing God. In this sense, we are incarnate spirit. Two powers are essential to this spiritual dimension: the power to know and the power to love. The union with God which makes heaven this state of blessedness is through these two faculties of knowledge and love.

“But this beatific, or happy-making, knowledge is not like anything we experience here.” Here, we first know a person abstractly, as a man or a woman. Then, through experience, we may become friends. “The love and knowledge go together. As I get to know you better, and admire the goodness in you, and you respond to me with a similar kind of thing, there’s a kind of communion that grows.… The knowledge and love that is beatific is kind of analogous to this,” with this distinction: “In heaven, I don’t have an idea of God. I am united immediately without any intervening image or thought. God becomes the object of my knowledge. Likewise with love. I can say that, but I can’t understand it, because I don’t have any experience of it.

“Scripture uses the expression, ‘We will see Him as He is.’ We are united with God in an embrace which is beyond experience, in which God Himself — the infinite perfection, beauty, goodness, wonder, holiness of God — is what satisfies our longing. But in becoming perfectly united with Him, we do not lose our individuality. Since He is the source of [that individuality], we become more fully and completely ourselves than we possibly could in this life.”

Neely makes this last point to repudiate the notion that “union” means a great indistinct lumping together of everything and everyone. Like Espeseth, he believes our personhood will endure, as will the personhood of other persons. “One of the secondary delights of heaven is association with the other holy ones who are sharing this love and life of God with us. In our present state, if something really absorbs you completely, you just pass out. You go into ecstasy, because your body can’t hold it. But in the life of the spirit, and in the risen life, there won’t be that limitation. In being absorbed into God, I now become more open than ever to other people.”

That openness, that communion, will be so complete that speech may be unnecessary. “When you have a friend here, you’re always at some distance from the other person. You can’t invade the other person without doing violence to them. I can’t admit you into my heart. I can tell you about things, but I can’t share that with you.” But when considering the saints, he wonders, “Will we be able to enter into each other’s consciousness without doing harm? Will we be able to almost exchange our inner selves, be united in a way that the thought of in this life is horrible? Will we be able to welcome each other into that really intimate inside-out communion? If so, we won’t need to talk.”

Not to say that we won’t communicate. Neely explains that angels who are closer to God radiate their superior knowledge of Him to the lesser angels and imagines that, along with sharing in a similar hierarchy (though one without envy), we will have a similar relation to one another. For example, “If St. Augustine were to embrace me in this way and allow me to know him — to look at God from his point of view, and because he loves me, to really get to know what I’m like — wow, what an experience.”

Marriage will be unnecessary, because there will be no need for children. And even if the unitive aspect of marriage is considered, the union Neely describes is as complete as possible. The intimacy that takes a lifetime of work and contact to achieve here will be instantly surpassed by our knowledge of our fellow members of the heavenly host and no longer limited to one person.

Though it will pass away, Neely sees marriage as a helpful image in anticipating heaven. “In Hebrew, the word for ‘to know’ or ‘knowing’ is what they use for the marital union as well. People united in marriage, making love, are as close as they can get physically.… And the union of minds and hearts that comes from a rare expression of love is a kind of suggestion of what it is, this union with God, the union of seeing and knowledge.” He cites other scriptural images, such as homecoming and banquets, explaining that since we know through our senses, we need these sensible images to gain some idea of heavenly bliss.

Along with the end of marriage will come the end of sex, though Neely claims that “we’ll have all the equipment” of our earthly bodies. Those bodies, he has been taught, “will all be restored to mature form” and “will bear the glories of our life.” Evidence for this might be the testimony that Christ still had His wounds after His resurrection. Those glory-bearing — glorified — bodies will not need nourishment, though Neely does note that Jesus, after His resurrection, “ate some honeycomb and fish to show He wasn’t a ghost.” But, he warns, “You can trivialize the whole thing, talking about enjoying ice cream cones and all this stuff.”

Still, it’s the trivial, or at least the particular, that the mind fixes on. I understand the abstract idea that boredom will never arise because my infinite craving will be satisfied, but what will we do all day? “The Book of Revelation describes heaven as a solemn liturgy,” answers Neely. “Or as a king holding court — God on His throne, and the angels and saints surrounding the throne with cries of delight and praise. If you take that literally, you say, ‘Well, I enjoy going to Mass, but I don’t know if I could keep it up forever and ever.’ ” He believes “that those very vivid images are just that — they’re symbolic of the absorption in God.”

So what will we do all day? “First of all,” says Neely, we have to consider “what kind of duration there is. Certainly, there is not going to be the time we know here, because our time is the consequence of our finiteness. We only get so much existence; we get a little bit at a time. It’s a flow. We’re constantly being reconstituted in being — we don’t have it all at once. Now, I don’t become infinite in the embrace of God, but I am in the embrace of the infinite one. So I don’t think time is going to be a factor as it is here. What are we going to do all day? Well, there may not be days or nights or years,” there may be “just all right now.”

So much for heaven; how do we get there? What is the chief factor in determining our entrance? To answer, Neely tells a story about a storyteller: “There was an auxiliary bishop who had an interesting story he told to the kids at confirmation. He said, ‘You know, there’s going to be a big final exam at the end of your life. It’s only going to have one question, and you’ve got to know the right answer. When you’re facing God the Father, He’ll ask you, “Why should I admit you into heaven?”… The only answer that will work is, “I am a close personal friend of Your Son.” ’ And [the auxiliary bishop] says, ‘Jesus is going to be there, too, so you better be telling the truth. The Father is going to say, “Is that right?” and what a sad moment when Jesus says, “You know, I always wanted to be his friend, but he never had time for Me.” ’

“That’s just a dumb story, but it really moves me when I hear it. Theologically, it’s pretty sound: friendship being the union of sanctifying grace in and through Jesus, with the Father and the Holy Spirit. That’s the entrance. Unaided human nature is incapable of entering into this beatific union with God. You have to be transformed somehow. God is offering that to us through His Son.”

Neely contends that no human heart is denied that offer, that everyone is offered God’s love, “because God wills the salvation of all. He insinuates Himself into the life of people who aren’t explicitly religious and invokes that response of supernatural charity. You can’t tell who’s in and who’s out by the robes, or the occupation, or the education. Only God knows.”

But he also grants that “you can’t love God and commit a serious sin at the same time,” noting that serious sin must be properly understood, “not measured simply by the external act. There is the subjective disposition as well.” Because of this, Neely says that he does not know “if Hitler committed sin or not — to what degree he was responsible, monster that he was. Who can judge? Fortunately, I don’t have to make that judgment.”

Though he doesn’t do the judging, Neely believes that judging is done, and so we come to the subject of hell. More specifically, we come to a statement once made by a tutor of mine, a tutor who enjoyed provoking his students. “The Blessed will see the damned in hell,” he pronounced, “and they will rejoice at the sight, for the damned will manifest the justice of God.” My tutor succeeded; I was provoked. I asked Neely what he thought of the claim.

“Well, that is one thing I can’t imagine: how a person who knows that someone they love is separated from that love forever [could be happy]. I can understand how you don’t have to think about it, but how could you be aware of that and not be saddened by it?” The best answer he has found is a story in The Great Divorce, by C.S. Lewis.

“Lewis pictures himself being in hell — he doesn’t realize that’s where he is. It’s this dreary city. It’s just sort of this gray twilight, and in the midst of all this grayness, there’s this brightly colored bus. Just dazzlingly attractive, and the driver is inviting people to come aboard.” After the right number of hell-dwellers claw their way onto the bus and it takes off, “it lands in this beautiful meadow. Again, it’s this twilight, but not the gloomy grayness. It’s a soft light. There’s a spring, and the rocks are all solid gold. The people are looking around, and they’re wondering what’s happening, and in the distance, they see these luminous figures approaching.

“Some of them scream in fear and run back to the bus. The others wait. These luminous figures are people they knew on earth. They’re coming to invite them to come with them to what’s beyond the hill. And, of course, each soul in hell has all kinds of reasons why he doesn’t want to go.

“There’s one guy, this tall and stately man who looks like an old-time Shakespearean actor, and there’s this chain on his wrist that’s attached to a little midget. The little midget is the real person, and the actor is like a marionette. The little guy speaks through the persona of the actor — that’s his false self. It’s his wife who’s come. ‘Frank, I’ve missed you so, come with me.’ All Frank can do is complain and recall little hurts and injuries — ‘You took the last stamp when I wanted to mail something.’

“He can’t talk to her. He only talks through this persona of the aggrieved husband, and his wife says, ‘Frank, I want to talk to you, not to him.’ And as he keeps getting more and more shriveled, the actor grows, and he gets littler and littler until he’s just a little bug crawling on the chain. Finally, the actor takes the chain and swallows him. Frank is gone.

“She says, ‘Sir, I don’t know who you are. You’re not my husband.’ And she gives up. That’s kind of an image of what happens to the soul in hell — unloving and unlovable. It isn’t the same person that you knew and loved. You can’t love them. They’re not real anymore. The person is so turned inside-out that it’s like it doesn’t exist. I don’t know if that’s the answer, but it’s a help.”

Besides heaven and hell, Neely believes in a purgatory, a place where those who are not evil enough to deserve damnation, yet not pure enough to behold God, go to expiate their sins. This is why he prays for the dead “on a regular basis. Since we are united by the embrace of the Holy Spirit, we are in communion with each other. That’s why my works of charity for them touch their condition.”

My final question to Neely concerns the carrying over of the beautiful things of this world — art and music in particular. “We have art because we [need] these prisms through which we can see the unseeable. But when we see the unseeable face to face, we won’t need art.”

At first, he gives the same treatment to music, but then he wavers. “Music, like any other art form, is a springboard to the beauty which can’t be seen. Will there be music in heaven? It’s hard to think of having a good time without singing. And we will have voices. According to Scripture,” he says, warming, “God rejoices in His creation. So I guess we can rejoice in the finite while we’re in the infinite. Okay, I will allow music.”

Before I leave him, Neely gives me a poem, one of those prisms he mentioned.

• “In Manchester Square
• In Memoriam T.H.”
• By Alice Meynell

• The paralytic man has dropped in death
• The crossing sweeper’s brush to which he clung,
• One-handed, twisted, dwarfed, scanted of breath,
• Although his hair was young.
• I saw this year the winter vines of France,
• Dwarfed, twisted goblins in the frosty drouth —
• Gnarled, crippled, blackened little stems askance
• On long hills to the South.
• Great green and golden hands of leaves ere long
• Shall proffer clusters in that vineyard wide,
• And O his might, his sweet, his wine, his song
• His stature, since he died!

Fr. Neely mentioned the joy of homecoming as a Scriptural analogy to heaven. To Hare Krishna Dravida Dasa, homecoming is not an analogy; it’s a literal account. Dravida is a teacher and book editor for the Hare Krishnas, a branch of Hinduism devoted to the worship of Krishna, here in San Diego. He is tall, stretched out over his frame, in the manner of a man who is not intimate with the pleasures of the world. He speaks with rapid precision, making connections and clarifications as he goes.

When I ask, “What is man?” he responds, “We would say that human beings are one of millions of species of life. We are very special in that we have this superior intelligence by which we can inquire into what we call the absolute truth for the purpose of attaining liberation. We are made in the image of God, and we’re given that gift of intelligence by which we can perfect our life, get liberation, and go back to the Kingdom of God.

“As living entities, our role is to engage in this loving exchange with Krishna. We have forgotten that. What was the original sin? Why are we here instead of there? Somehow or other, we turned away from God — we wanted to be the center of attraction ourselves.

“Therefore, we were put into this material world and this material body in order to try to enact this charade of being the lord and master. We can’t do that, because that’s not our real position, and so we constantly fail and we die and we have to go through all of this suffering until we get some knowledge about how we can retrace our steps and go back to the Kingdom of God. The universe is like a reformatory.”

Liberation from the reformatory means liberation from the body and all the desires associated with this material, self-centered world. “Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita that kama is our main enemy in the world. You may have heard of The Kama Sutra. Kama means more than lust in the English sense. It means the whole panoply of material desire, of which sex desire is the chief. Kama covers our original knowledge of who we are and what our relationship with God is.”

This is because “sex is always mediated through the material body, and it brings us into the awareness of this body as our self. This is just the opposite of what we try to cultivate. The first thing you learn when you walk into a Hare Krishna temple as a student is, ‘You’re not that body.’ At death, that body, the gross body, is left behind. But we have another body, what we call a subtle body, within.”

The subtle body is composed of “mind and intelligence — intelligence is the cognitive, memory, discriminative function, and mind is more or less the guider of sense — rejecting unfavorable things, accepting pleasurable things. Mind and intelligence and also ego, they stay with the soul. The soul is like a little quantum of consciousness, which is indestructible energy.”

But when the soul leaves the gross body, it often bears a burden: a collection of impressions — thoughts, feelings, perceptions, desires. If a soul still retains attachments to selfish or material desires, to anything other than a desire to please Krishna, it does not attain liberation. Rather, it serves as a template for a new gross body, and the journey begins again.

If a soul is especially selfish, “you may even lose the human form.” You may end up a tree. “But then in that tree body, there’s no question of violating any of Krishna’s laws. You simply act according to your nature, and you automatically evolve through different bodies, up through animal bodies, and eventually you come to the human form again.”

Among human bodies and conditions, there is near-infinite variety, but it is generally true to say that the good things with which you find yourself blessed are the fruit of “some pious or worthy activity you performed” in a past life. Conversely, the curses laid upon you are the result of selfish activity. “If someone is deformed, diseased, or they’re born in a very poor country, we know there’s something they did in a previous life to give them this destiny.”

The blend can be complicated — people can be beautiful yet dumb. “There are four basic categories: if someone is beautiful and healthy, if they’re learned, if they’re wealthy, and if they’re born in a good family or a good environment.” The complexity can arise not only from the blend of good and evil that usually makes up any human life, but also because your soul bears the weight of any number of past lives.

The gross body we receive at the beginning of a life “is a hindrance to the soul when there is no conception of how to purify it, how to use it properly for the uplifting of the soul. We [Hare Krishnas] connect ourselves with God, with supreme absolute truth, through the workings of the body. It’s what we have to work with.”

This means more than doing good deeds. “When we chant Hare Krishna, we’re using the tongue, the ear, and the voice. Sound is a key element, transcendental and purifying.” Further, the ornately decorated temple Dravida visits daily is full of images, “deity forms meant to awaken and engage the senses. But not in something selfish, so that we become attached. Simply to fill our minds and hearts with affection and love and devotion to God.” Purity in that devotion is the route to liberation.

Dravida takes care to distinguish his idea of liberation, the Kingdom of God, from two other perceptions of heaven. First, “there are all kinds of planes of existence we can’t see, just like there are radio and television waves we can’t see, because we don’t have the senses. Heaven is a place where you can enjoy wonderful material pleasures — a long life with a young, beautiful body in a very wonderful environment. But it’s still temporary. It’s still within the material world. When it’s finished, you’ve got to come back down here,” and what’s more, you’ve been using up the good you’ve accomplished in past lives while you lived it up in heaven.

“We don’t want to go to heaven. It may be a refined self-centeredness, but it’s still self-centered.” And “there’s still anxiety, because we know it’s going to end eventually.” He opposes heaven to the eternal Kingdom, because there, our delight comes not from pleasing ourselves, but from pleasing Krishna. “It’s not that we are desireless; it’s that we sublimate all of our selfish desires into a desire for expressing this love for Krishna. That keeps it very fresh and new.”

This brings us to the second distinction. For some, liberation comes at the expense of nearly everything, including God and personal form. “We understand that to be insufficient. As living beings, we have desires: we want activity, and we want relationship and love. If we don’t have that, we feel frustrated. Just to be free of pain is not enough.”

According to Dravida, relationship and love abound in the Kingdom of God. “Even in this world, we can see that some of the most exciting and fulfilling things we do are those in which we are able to express love for somebody and see a reciprocation. Whether it’s a mother’s love for a child when she sees the child smile, or whatever, there are infinite ways in which that can happen.” So it is with Krishna. “It’s all this flow of loving exchange; because you feel it coming back from Him, also. This is the variety that keeps it interesting. It’s that kind of desire that we can unlimitedly fulfill and aspire to fulfill.”

Descending to particulars, Dravida lays out some of the details of life in the Kingdom. “There’s no old age. There’s no death.” We retain our form, the template upon which the gross form was built, and so we will have “interaction and tasting and smelling and seeing and touching. But here, you can only do those things for so long before you burn out. If you try to taste too much, there’s a negative reaction. The senses here have their limitations, but there, it can go on unlimitedly.” Again, with the difference that our delight will not be selfish.

What will we do? “If you read some of Krishna’s pastimes, you say, ‘Oh, this is ideal.’ He has His friends, and they’re playing, and they range from 6 years old to 15 years old. And it’s not just the human forms there. A tree is fully conscious that it’s in that particular role at that particular time to fulfill some function, whether it’s shade or flowers or fruits or whatever it may be. Everything is fully conscious, setting the scene, creating the atmosphere for these loving exchanges. We’ll have our role, and it will be an idyllic one, just suited to our eternal temperament and desire for service.”

Eternity as a tree, even a conscious tree, may seem less than thrilling, but the Hare Krishna antidote for eternal boredom lies not in becoming any one thing. It lies in becoming many things. “What is it that keeps us interested in anything? It’s variety, newness. Varieties of relationships with people. This is precisely what we find in the descriptions of the Kingdom of God. Krishna is there, but He’s doing unlimited things and He has unlimited relations.”

In one scenario, “He’s a cowherd, and He has these very sylvan pastimes.” If you think such a place would be paradise, “He’s having all these adventures there, playing and so forth. If that’s not to your taste, there’s another relationship He can have. He has a place in that spiritual world where He is a king and it’s a very wonderful city life. There are infinite relationships and activities and adventures to be experienced in the spiritual world.”

Those relationships will not include marriage and sex, however, and not just because sex tends to make us identify with the body. “The original reason why we are here is that we want to compete with Krishna in that original loving relationship He has with His wives and girlfriends in the spiritual world.”

Krishna’s main girlfriend, Radharani, “is not like us. She is a personified energy of Krishna. We understand God as a person who has expansions of Himself as well as an unlimited variety of energies.” In the case of Radharani, “Krishna expands a pleasure energy, so that He can enjoy relationship, loving exchange, with Radharani.

“Now, Radharani also expands. She has her friends and she has her helpers, and there are male friends and female helpers of Krishna also. He also has personal energies that expand into entities who take the role of His mother and father.”

We, the conditioned, liberated souls, “will experience loving relations with Krishna, but we won’t have our own separate relationship in which we are the supreme enjoyer. That is reserved for God.” Instead, we can experience Krishna’s love for His wives and girlfriends vicariously, through being part of the scenario in which Krishna acts. Dravida compares it to watching a movie, delighting in the delight of another.

The Lutheran, the Catholic, and the Hare Krishna all talked about the longing in the human heart for love and relationship with God. The Catholic looked for the fulfillment of this longing in union; the Hare Krishna, in service. Swedenborgian Minister Eldon Smith, a former carpenter and member of the Merchant Marine who bases his views on the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, contends that we will not see God in heaven — “not as we’re seeing each other,” nor will we be united with Him. We will be of service, but instead of creating scenarios in which the Lord can enjoy Himself, we will serve God by serving one another. This is the activity of heaven, the alternative to what Smith sees as a kind of eternal stagnation.

“Can you imagine an eternity of doing nothing?” he asks. “I mean, eternity is for a long time! If we say, ‘When I get to heaven, I’m gonna put on my shoes and walk all over God’s heaven, like the song says,’ it seems to me you’re going to get awful tired of walking after a couple of jillion years, even if you’re a spirit.

“I asked somebody the other day, ‘What do you want to do when you get to heaven?’ She said, ‘Walk around and smell the flowers.’ I said, ‘You want to walk for the rest of eternity, smelling flowers?’ She said, ‘Well, no.’ See, this is [many people’s] concept: ‘We don’t do anything in heaven.’

“Well, heaven is a life just like it is here. You don’t make any big changes. Heaven is a world of use. The number-one thing is to serve the Lord. The Lord says, ‘You shall love your neighbor,’ so serving God would be serving the neighbor and helping. Just sitting around in a circle and saying, ‘Hallelujah, praise the Lord!’ for the rest of eternity doesn’t make sense to me. People that are of use and are doing things all the time are the happiest.” The most misunderstood thing about heaven “is that it’s a land of uselessness.”

Further, Smith doesn’t think that people really want uselessness. “I imagine that every single human being has some kind of secret desire for something that they would like to do. I think it would be almost impossible for anyone to go through his entire life and not have some desire for something that he would like to do that would be of use to other people in some form. I can’t imagine anybody wanting to be absolutely useless and not perform some kind of job.”

If such a person did exist, he would run the risk of hell. I asked Smith my question about seeing the damned in hell and rejoicing, citing the story of Lazarus and the rich man as evidence that contact between the two realms is possible. He disagreed, saying that it was merely a parable, but he brought the story up again later, to address this point.

“The rich man was a useless person. He spent his whole life being surrounded with luxury and, evidently, according to the parable, he never did anything to help anybody. They both died, and here’s the rich man, who had been in sumptuous, wonderful surroundings, and he finds himself down in the hot spot. This poor man is in the bosom of Abraham, and Abraham says, ‘Well, you know, you had it made when you were here on earth, and this guy, he didn’t have a chance to do anything. He was too poor. [It is worth noting here that Smith believes that God makes allowances for circumstance.] You made your bed, now you’re going to lie in it.’ ”

Work-shirker that he is, he might be happier that way. “I don’t think the Lord would keep anybody out of heaven. I don’t think they want to be there.” Smith explains: “I use the analogy of the alcoholic. An alcoholic wants to go where there’s alcohol. He wants to be around people that drink, that get drunk, that raise Cain and have fun being drunk. He’s not going to want to go to a tea party, where there’s no alcohol to drink.

“To me, heaven and hell are the same thing. The person that’s tried to live a righteous life wants to be around people that are basically the same as him or her, and the evil person is not going to want to be around people that are saying, ‘Thank you, Lord, I had a wonderful day.’ ” Presumably, that wonderful day would be full of use, a hateful thing to the useless man.

“You know, in kind of a funny way, I would say that hell is heaven to people that are there, because that’s where they’re happiest. I think that if really evil people were in heaven, that would be hell to them.” You mean they’d be happier in hell? “Yeah, it’s like a bunch of drunken sailors. I used to be a drunken sailor, and let me tell you, you’re the happiest when you’re in a bar and you’re raising heck, and you’re half-crocked and you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s where you’re happy. You put them in a different atmosphere, they’re not going to be happy at all. If you call that other atmosphere heaven, that’s not going to be heaven to them. I think they would be far unhappier in heaven than they would be in hell.”

But if that’s the case, what’s the hellish aspect of hell? Why try to avoid it? “Because they’re not allowed to carry out their desires. Their desires are to hurt people, and the other occupants of that region don’t allow them to hurt people, so that would be their unhappiness. But still, I think that the pain of being around the righteous would be far greater than the pain that they would go through being with people of their own kind.”

Our usefulness is not the only criterion for entering heaven, but it is a crucial one. Smith says that “if you live a life according to the commandments to the best of your ability, then you will have a place in heaven. Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment of all, and He said ‘to love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind.’ The second commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. This is what our lives are supposed to be — being of use. If we live our lives trying to be useful to society in general, to something, to our church, to our families, then this is what creates our soul. This is what makes us into what we will be for the rest of eternity.”

There remains the question of what there is for the useful soul to do in the afterlife. If heaven is paradise, what work could possibly remain unfinished, what end not yet achieved? Wouldn’t such a thing make paradise not paradise, but a work in progress?

In a way, yes. When we die, we “wake up in a spiritual body, which is far more real than what we have here.” It is also whole, youthful, and beautiful, growing more so the longer we stay in heaven. But we don’t wake up in heaven or hell. We will be “in the in-between world. In my opinion, very few people go right to heaven. Everybody has a little bit of bad ideas or bad concepts. Those ideas have to be discarded.

“Once they’re discarded, we start elevating toward heaven. Or if we don’t want to give those ideas up, the other way round.” The chance to discard bad ideas is offered to everyone and is especially helpful to “people who have lived in difficult circumstances and have not led very good lives. Here, those circumstances will not be held against them, and they will be able to choose freely.”

To help us lose our bad ideas, we will have angels to guide us, to point out where we err. “Angels are real people. We don’t believe that angels are a special breed that God created before man. We believe God created human beings so He could have a heaven full of angels. Everybody is a potential angel, depending on how much they really love God.”

Angels are souls that have made it to heaven and are now turning their attention to what Smith believes is the never-ending supply of souls entering the middle world. Smith’s wife Annella is present during our conversation, and she offers this description of their activity: “What angels do is basically what you have been trained to enjoy here now. Our daughter is a preschool teacher. She loves children, so when she gets over to the other side, she could be of use by helping children, little ones who have died early in life. They’ll be trained by angels in heaven, and that will probably be Carol’s use. Because that’s what she did here.”

So is an angel’s chief function to teach? Eldon Smith responds, “I would say that what their ruling love was on earth would be their ruling love in heaven, as long as it serves God. If you love to do something, that’s what you will probably continue doing in the spirit world. Some similar thing.”

This claim interests me, because it seems to me that a lot of human endeavor is an attempt to correct some evil. Will there be disease, necessitating doctors? Fires, necessitating firemen? War, necessitating soldiers? “There would probably be diseases of the mind. Diseases that we think we have, which are very real as long as we think we have them. If I think my arm is paralyzed, that arm is going to be paralyzed. There have been a lot of case histories” of such people. “The mind is what directs things, and these are things that doctors can do — convince people that maybe they’ve healed them or something.

“I don’t know if there would be firemen putting out fires, except maybe in some corresponding manner.” Annella points out that firemen “help people, rescue them, and take care of them and nurture them. That could carry over into the other world.”

As for soldiers, Eldon responds that “he’s serving his country, so there would be something that he could serve. Maybe he’d be protecting heaven against hell. I should imagine that hell would be full of people who would really like to get up there and destroy some people. Everything has a corresponding meaning. Until we find our eventual eternal home, there’s going to be a lot of work for people to do.”

Annella thinks “that you continue to grow” in heaven. “If you’re interested in growing, you will be given those opportunities. It’s not a stagnant thing where you’re here, this is where you’re going to stay for the rest of eternity. You have an opportunity to progress.”

Though he believes that people do make a choice while in the middle ground and gradually work out their salvation or condemnation, Eldon does not pray that God will help those people make the right choice. “I don’t think [it] is going to do any good. They are what they’re going to be, determined by themselves, depending on their ruling love, their desires.” Here he differs from the Catholic praying for the soul in purgatory.

He also differs from the Catholic, and the Hare Krishna, in that he believes that we will be married in the afterlife, though not necessarily to anyone we were married to in this life. “We have a little lady in our church who has had five husbands. She asked me which one she would be with in heaven. I said, ‘Well, darling, you may not have any of them. Each one served a purpose in your life. Each one was for a use. Each one brought a certain amount of happiness.

“ ‘But maybe the two of you didn’t bond with your souls. Maybe they were marriages of convenience, marriages of the time. What mate you have in heaven depends on the joining of souls. You can have lots of husbands or wives here, you can love each one with all your heart, and each one will be a good experience, but maybe your eternal husband or wife won’t be any of them.’ Or say that I’m married to five wives and Annella’s my last one, and she’s the one I really love. Then I may decide to go live with each one of them and decide which one I really do love. But I think the one I would end up with would be the one I had bonded with heart and soul.”

Annella comments, “Swedenborg tells us that the man and the woman are a couple. One is the love and one is the wisdom. That way, it’s a whole. He writes [in one place] that when he saw a couple coming, it was as one, and then when they got closer, he realized that it was the man and the woman. She represented the love, and the man, the wisdom.” The whole they form is the analogue of a child, the fruit of physical union. It is because the man and woman complement each other and form this whole that “Swedenborg says that you will be provided with an eternal mate,” even if you were single in this life.

Eldon’s belief that men become angels when they enter the spirit realm allows him to answer the Scripture passage in which Jesus says that “when they rise from the dead, they shall neither marry nor be given in marriage, but are like the angels which are in heaven.” The phrase “neither marry nor be given in marriage” he reads as referring to marriages which are not based on love, which are arranged or required by law.

As he said, Eldon believes that an eternity of work will not be a source of misery or drudgery, but rather, of the happiness and love that come from being useful. Nor does he suppose that the work is never suspended. When, in response to his question about what I would like to do, I tell him that I would like to make wine, he smiles. “According to Swedenborg, there’s entertainment, and there are parties, and things that people enjoy. Maybe you’ll be a little old winemaker in heaven, and I’ll sit at the table and enjoy some of your wine.”

The activity of the Swedenborgian middle world — angels guiding souls as they trek toward either heaven or hell — seems to depend on an endless influx of souls. This in turn seems to depend on an eternal earthly world to act as a source for those souls. Smith doesn’t quite grant this, but he does say that Swedenborgians don’t believe “that God is going to cause the world to come to an end,” or even that God is going to “destroy all evil,” raise the dead, and allow them to live for the rest of eternity on earth.

This last is precisely the reward Mormon Stake President M. Steven Andersen, a big, gracious, comfortable man, believes awaits the most blessed souls in the company of heaven. “Heaven will actually be right here on earth for those who go into the Celestial Kingdom — the earth having been cleansed and purified. This is where we’ll be, good old Mother Earth.” The cleansing and purifying he refers to will occur “when the Lord comes again, [and] He will reign on this earth in righteousness for a thousand years.”

The Swedenborgian and the Mormon both envision our heavenly activity to be guiding the pilgrim soul. The Mormon places the drama back on earth, though it may not be this particular earth. After the establishment of the Lord’s reign, there will still be “other creations our heavenly Father has, and others yet to be created. His work is one of creation, and it goes on.”

The Blessed in heaven will not be “subject to disease and temptation and sorrow.” They “will have a very great sense of concern and caring about others of our heavenly Father’s children who are still in an environment where that’s going on. We’ll be expending our energies in terms of trying to help these folks work out their salvation and their growth. I believe the struggle between good and evil is eternal. We may ourselves reach a point of resting and refuge, [but] we will still have a concern for others of our Father’s children.”

Andersen believes that such concern is being felt for him even now, that those already in heaven are “concerned with our welfare and are permitted in some cases to be aware of what’s going on with us, and so on.”

Mormon references to “our heavenly Father’s children” and “heavenly parents” give some indication of the nature of the Mormon paradise. “The concerns that we have now in our families are the welfare of our children and their progress, their happiness. I believe our concerns in the next life will continue to be with our families.”

Indeed, the reunion with God that occurs in heaven sounds like a perfection of family life, taking up residence with the first, best relatives. “God is a glorified man. God, like the resurrected Christ, has a body of flesh and bone. He looks like a man. In fact, He and His Son are so similar in appearance that Jesus was able to say, ‘If you’ve seen Me, you’ve seen the Father.’ Our Father will be a real person. He will speak to us; we will have interaction with Him. We will relate to Him as our Father. To live with Him is to live in a family environment.”

And not just Him. “Mankind is literally the spiritual offspring of heavenly parents. We have a heavenly Father and a heavenly Mother. Just as we have never yet seen anybody born into this world that didn’t have a Father and a Mother, at least biologically, so the creation of spirits requires a heavenly Father and a heavenly Mother.” (“But,” he concedes, “we have zero information about who our heavenly Mother is.”)

As children, we will participate in the work of our parents. Besides the concern for those not yet in heaven mentioned earlier, “I believe that as God’s children, we will study what He does. What we think He does is create spirit children and worlds for them to live on and obtain bodies. I think we will be involved in creative work and not idle, sitting around playing harps. I think it will be an active, busy, fulfilling environment and not a time of stagnation and just a stultifying absence of things.” Rather than having a union of spirits that yields spiritual fruit, we will receive bodies of flesh and bone and continue with our earthly mate in the production of children.

Unless, that is, “people have lived and died and [not had] an opportunity to receive a marriage sanctioned by a priested authority.” Marriage is “an earthly ordinance — it has to be performed here on earth.” If your marriage is not sanctioned by the proper authority, by someone “who can legitimately trace their ordination back to the authority that ultimately derives from our Lord Jesus Christ,” it will not endure in the next life.

But “in God’s economy, none are to be deprived any blessing or opportunity simply because of the happenstance of their birth in a period or a location where not all of the gospel ordinances were known.” The remedy for this is accomplished through a bond that goes beyond the Catholic’s belief that his works of charity may “touch their condition.” The unity of mankind is so powerful that an ordinance like marriage “can be performed vicariously. A man and a woman, on behalf of those who had departed, speak marital vows that are sanctioned for that purpose. Then, those people for whom the work is done have the choice of accepting it or rejecting it. It’s not forced upon them, but at least they have that opportunity.”

The “vicarious ordinance” doctrine also applies to baptism, an answer to the dilemma raised by baptism’s being necessary for salvation, the fact that not everyone has a chance to be baptized, and the belief that God wishes the salvation of all. “Look in your Bible. You’ll find a reference where Paul wrote in Corinthians, ‘What shall they do which are baptized for the dead if the dead rise not at all? Why are they then baptized for the dead?’ Nobody else in modern Christianity seems to know what this is about, or has any practice that relates back to that doctrine. But in our church, we do.”

Though Andersen does not venture to guess whether vicarious baptism is sufficient to free someone from hell or “the kingdom of no glory,” he does say that the ordinance of vicarious marriage might be sufficient to raise a couple into the Celestial Kingdom, the heaven on earth to which he alluded.

Raised from where? “The Lord said, ‘In my Father’s house there are many mansions,’ which conveys to us the sense that there are a variety of circumstances that will be available to our heavenly Father’s children. They won’t all be divided by a bright line into either heaven or hell. Just as here, you see an almost infinite spectrum of people in terms of their ability to lead good lives, moral lives; there needs to be a [parallel] variety of circumstances in the hereafter. To lump everybody together and say it’s an all-or-nothing proposition…that to me is a misunderstanding of what the next life is going to be about.”

Shades of the circles of hell and levels of heaven in Dante’s Divine Comedy. “You’ll see some threads of this among thoughtful people’s writings,” agrees Andersen. “You’ll also see some hints of it in the New Testament. St. Paul refers to ‘bodies celestial and bodies terrestrial,’ which are some of the words I use to describe these different degrees of heaven.”

For further description, Andersen refers me to a Mormon book of Scripture, The Doctrine and Covenants, “which consists of revelations to the prophet Joseph Smith. [They] have been accepted by the Church and canonized.” Section 76 describes three realms distinguished by the glory and the fullness of God’s presence received by the residents of each realm. The celestial residents receive “of the fulness of the Father”; their glory is as the sun. The terrestrial, “they who died without law…receive of the presence of the Son,” and their glory differs from the glory of the celestial as “the moon differs from the sun.” The telestial, “who received not the Gospel of Christ,” receive “of the Holy Spirit.” Their glory is compared to that of the stars.

It is from these kingdoms, the terrestrial and the telestial, that the beneficiaries of the marriage ordinance might be raised to the realm of highest glory, the celestial. In this celestial realm, there is a kind of completion of being — receiving the “fullness of the Father,” living in His presence and in the life of the family.

All privations pass away. To Andersen, “glory” means “an absence of disease, an absence of war, an absence of the earth’s present tendency to grow weeds and thistles, and instead to produce fruits and beneficial plants spontaneously. It would be a place of habitation in a family environment, where I can be with those I care most about in the world. A place where I can praise and honor my God endlessly, without disruption or interference from outside sources. Those are some of the things that occur to me.”

All the visions of heaven thus far have involved some spiritual dimension, some place that is free from the weight of the material world (though the Catholic and the Mormon did profess belief in the eventual return of a body of flesh and blood). This is also true for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, except that they believe that only 144,000 people will reside in this spiritual realm. The rest of the righteous sleep in the earth, waiting to repopulate this planet after the war of Armageddon.

I learn this from John Ferris and Paul Hunterdmark, two Jehovah’s Witnesses who met with me in the Kingdom Hall on Adams Avenue. Ferris is contained, sequential, with a line from Scripture to back up nearly everything he says. Hunterdmark is more talkative and off-the-cuff, more prone to laughter.

Hunterdmark begins. “God’s original purpose was to fill this earth with a righteous race of people. Just because an angel turned wicked and thwarted that arrangement does not mean that God is going to forget about it. Man was made for the earth. Adam and Eve weren’t told, ‘Now, you’re going to live for 70 years, and then I’m going to take your life and you’re going to go to heaven.’ If Adam and Eve had remained obedient, if they had not eaten of the fruit God told them not to eat, where do you think they would be today? Still in Eden.

“They would have filled the earth, expanded the boundaries of the garden of Eden, and eventually filled the earth with a perfect race of people, living forever.” When Adam and Eve had multiplied to the extent that the earth was full, reproduction would have ceased. “Just as God started the creation process, He can stop it. When you put a glass of water under a tap, you fill it, you don’t keep letting it overflow.”

But Adam and Eve were not obedient; they ate of the fruit. They became subject to death and passed that condition on to their offspring — the human race. And unlike most other religious folk, Jehovah’s Witnesses do not believe that death is the separation of body and soul. Rather, it is the death of the soul, the passing into sleep until the resurrection. If the soul is immortal, argues Hunterdmark, there can be no resurrection, since “immortal” means “deathless.” “Resurrection is a bringing back to life. But how can we bring something back to life that never died?”

The two cite a barrage of Scriptures as evidence for their claim that the soul dies. Job’s plea that God would hide him in the grave, “then you would remember me and bring me back.” The Lord’s promise in Ezekiel that “the soul that is sinning, it itself will die.” Psalm 146: “…he goes back into the ground, and in that day, his thoughts perish.” Ecclesiastes 9: “…but as for the dead, they are conscious of nothing at all.”

Finally, Hunterdmark recalls the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. Speaking about Lazarus’s death, Jesus tells His apostles that Lazarus “has gone to sleep, and I am going to go and waken him.” “What did Jesus use as an illustration of death? Sleep.” Then, after Lazarus is raised, “did he say to Jesus, ‘Oh, man, why did you bring me back? There were pearly gates and golden streets. I was enjoying myself’? No, because, just as Jesus said, he was resting, sleeping.”

They then point to Scriptures such as “the meek shall inherit the earth” to argue that the afterlife will mean residence on earth for the righteous, while the unrighteous will simply remain forever in unconscious sleep. And, says Hunterdmark, human nature proves their point. “No one really wants to go to heaven and find out what’s there. You might say, ‘I believe in heaven and I’m going to go up there.’ But if someone puts a gun to your head and says, ‘I’ll send you there,’ you’ll say, ‘No, no, I want to stay right where I am,’ because man was made for the earth. We’re material things, and we were made for the earth, and that’s where we will be resurrected to, this earth.”

The restoration of Eden, which is what Hunterdmark and Ferris propose, would be almost by definition the restoration of paradise, but I’m curious about its specific appeal. Hunterdmark has this to offer: “Why do we like to go to the mountains? Why do we like to get away from it all and get up with the birds and the animals? Picture a paradise where animals are at union with man and man is in union with the animals, in union with God, in union with one another. A world where there is no more fighting. Isaiah said, ‘They will learn war no more.’

“Can you imagine a world where you don’t have to have locks on the door, where you don’t have to worry about doctors, or undertakers? Just think, a peaceful scene with animals. ‘The young ones will play with the asp, and none shall make them afraid.’ ”

But wouldn’t a peaceful scene with animals get boring after a while? And while I might enjoy a week in the mountains, away from it all, I would eventually miss it all and head back. “You may think that way,” answers Hunterdmark, “and I’ve heard many people say it, but well, really, if it doesn’t interest you, then you won’t be there. I think I could enjoy it.”

One source of enjoyment will be the opportunity for learning. “Let’s say you had a desire to study insects. There are millions and millions of species of insects. You could spend a million years studying insects.” Adds Ferris, “We will never know everything that Jehovah knows. He will always be teaching us new things. Every day, we can learn new things and do new things that we have never done before. Hunterdmark referred to an article about a man who studied one species of fish for 40 years. Now you take all the fish, all the birds, all the animals…”

The subjects of our learning will include one another. Says Ferris, “There will be a time — because once the earth is filled, there will be no more reproduction — when you know the name and the personality and the likes and the dislikes of every individual on earth. How long do you think that would take you? What a project! There will be no boredom in the new world; we’ll always be learning.”

We’ll also be working. “Man was created for work,” claims Hunterdmark. Ferris elaborates. “There’s only going to be a few that will survive this coming war of Armageddon, according to Scripture. Now you take that few, let’s say, five, ten million people, and you spread those out throughout the whole earth. Then, each would have the opportunity to cultivate a plot of ground.” He refers me to a picture in a pamphlet, showing a pastoral scene with a house in the background. “See that nice little house? And you’ve got all this property.

“Now you do that with the whole earth — you talk about work! The whole earth is going to be cultivated and made into a paradise. Those that survive, and their children, and those that come back in the resurrection will have the opportunity to beautify the whole earth. It’s not just going to be in one locale.” The work originally intended for Adam and Eve and their progeny will finally be accomplished.

Though Hunterdmark mentioned being “in union with God,” he contends that we will not see God. When I mention the quote, “We shall see Him as He is,” he replies, “You have to balance that with the other Scripture that says, ‘No man can see God and live.’ Humans will never see God. He’s too glorious.”

Rather, our relationship with God will be an improved version of the one we have during this life. “We as Jehovah’s Witnesses like to view God as a personality, as a person that we can get close to. We talk to Him in prayer, and those who live on earth will continue to be able to talk to Him in prayer. Books could be written, so there may be educational programs. Certainly, we’ll come closer and closer to Him as the days go by. Just like a friend. The more we associate with a friend, the better we know him. Pretty soon, before your friend says anything, you know what he’s thinking. We hope that we can come to that closeness with God.”

The exception to all this are the 144,000 elect who will rule with Jehovah in heaven. Ferris compares these elect to the members of the Senate, the House, and the president’s cabinet — God’s aides in helping to govern paradise. “Happiness is not just no control,” opines Ferris. “People today think the ultimate in life is to have no one telling you what to do. [But] there will have to be guides. There have to be certain systems set up.”

Hunterdmark takes over. “Scriptures tell us that God is a God of order, so it will be organized. For that thousand years [after Armageddon], there will be work to do — beautifying the earth. In order to get work done, you have to have some kind of organization.” Ferris points to the setup of the old nation of Israel, with God as king and men as judges “to administer the regulations that He gave them. We would expect a similar situation, but it won’t be anything like the despots that we’re used to on earth today.” He also cites Revelation, in which John writes, “I saw thrones and there were those that sat down on them, and power of judging was given them. And they ruled as kings with Christ for a thousand years.”

These 144,000 were not predestined. Rather, says Hunterdmark, “The number was predestined.” Christ, “the firstborn of the dead, was the first one resurrected to heavenly glory.” Since then, certain of the faithful have been taken up upon their death, so that now, according to the Witnesses, only a few thousand are needed to complete the number.

This small group will be “spirits, because flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.” As evidence, Ferris cites 1 Corinthians 15: “It is sown a physical body, and it is raised up a spiritual body.” As spirits, they will be able to see spiritual things — like God.

When I told my mother I was writing this story, she told me a story of her own. She knew the story because a friend of hers, once a Catholic, had married into a family that lacked faith. Her friend eventually abandoned the practice of her own faith, but she and Mom remained friends.

Mom’s friend’s brother-in-law developed cancer, though still a young man. His wife and best friend, who joined in the family’s dismissal of religion and the afterlife, urged him to do everything possible to cling to life — every treatment, every drug — no matter how torturous. Mom said that, according to the nurses in the ward, it got to be pretty ugly, because he was so miserable, and yet his wife and friend kept imploring him to fight.

Even after his wife gave in to the inevitable and was considering sending him to a hospice so he could die in peace, the friend argued that they should take him to Mexico, where they were experimenting with some new drug. His wife had to convince his friend to let him die.

Eventually, he did die. At the funeral, while giving a eulogy the man’s friend said, “I know he’s still alive somewhere, and I’m going to see him again.” Mom was at the funeral, and his conviction, the intensity with which he believed his words, surprised and impressed her. Some might see his turnaround as a sign of weakness, the inability to acknowledge a loved one’s passing. Mom saw it as a sign that every man knows, in his heart of hearts, that this is not all there is. That there is something more.

I mention this story because someone might see the visions of heaven presented in this story, with their common themes and questions, their agreements in the midst of contradictions, as an indication of some collective mythological unconscious. They might see them as the manufactured explanation of some common interior yearning in which all people share. I join with Mom in suggesting that the commonality indicates the apprehension of some universal truth, even if it is seen, for now, “through a glass darkly.”