Eternity: A Meandering
As I continue to work on my novel about a bereaved father who gets a tour of heaven in his dreams, I run into fun and interesting problems. Some of them are intellectual (how to “rationalize” an idea), while others are more practical, physical. One particularly potent problem is: what do people look like in heaven? How do earthly bodies correspond to spiritual / resurrected bodies? Skin color, hair, height, weight, musculature, scars, ability to fly or not, number of limbs or eyes or digits, wings or no wings—how will these manifest in heaven?
In my story, I don’t really want to spend too much time “explaining” why people look the way they do. I’d rather show what people look like and then focus on other things, leaving it to the reader to “rationalize” it. One tricky question I want to explore in this post relates to age. What does age mean in eternity? Which aged body will I inhabit in the new creation? How will people recognize me in heaven?
To explore these questions, I will meander a bit, digress, diverge, wander. I will ruminate on eternity.
Eternity: Time or Space?
Jürgen Moltmann suggests that eternity is less about endless time and more about depth of experience. “Eternity is not endlessness,” he writes (In the End, The Beginning 152).
We are taking a step further if we talk not just about eternal life but also about an eternal livingness, so as to stop thinking of an extension of this life in the sense of longevity, and to think instead of the intensity of experience. … It is not length of life in terms of time which reaches out to the originality which when we think of God we call eternity; it is the depth of experience in the moment. Chronological time has nothing to do with this eternity of God’s. But the fulfilled moment is like an atom of eternity, and its illumination is like a spark of the eternal light (152–153).
In this sense, eternity is less a temporal concept, and more of a spatial concept—an inner space, the inner landscape. Eternal life is not just something waiting for us at the end of earthly life, an extension of our being. Eternal life is something we can experience in the here and now, when we are present to life in its reality, open to God’s Spirit indwelling the moment. “We can imagine eternal life as an inexhaustibly creative livingness,” continues Moltmann (160).
The Eternal Moment
When I come across “eternity” in my reading, it is often described in terms of a moment, an experience. A moment stretches into what seems like eternity. Time slows down. It could be a traumatic moment. It could be a blissful moment. It could be a moment of great clarity. In these cases, eternity is seen in terms of time—though one could argue that “depth of experience” is also at play.
When I was in high school, I had a dream in which someone told me, “Eternity is a moment.” I woke up and immediately started writing a song with that refrain. At the time, I understood the phrase “eternity is a moment” to mean the moment that stretches out endlessly.
Years later, in my early thirties, I was reflecting on the phrase once more and had a new thought. What if instead of a moment that seemed like eternity, we understood eternity itself to be a moment? Instead of a moment being stretched to eternity, eternity is compressed to a singular moment.
Carl Dennis, Gelati
In Carl Dennis’s poem “Gelati,” a man is listening to a baseball game on the radio. At first, the poem follows the stretched-moment view: “Let the moment expand, he says to himself, / Till time is revealed to be delusion.”
Later in the poem, however, the opposite emerges: “Whether the players regard the sport as joy, / Or simply as work, the crowd seems alive / With the wish to compress a lifetime / Down to a single sitting.”
The Aleph
Most literary uses of “the eternal moment” make a moment more expansive. It is rare to find someone compressing eternity into a moment. “The Aleph,” a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, does just that.
In the story, the narrator encounters an “Aleph,” a glowing orb of light which his friend describes as “one of the points in space that contains all points, … the place where, without admixture or confusion, all the places of the world, seen from every angle, coexist.” When the narrator views it for himself, he is overwhelmed by the experience:
In that unbounded moment, I saw millions of delightful and horrible acts; none amazed me so much as the fact that all occupied the same point, without superposition and without transparency. What my eyes saw was simultaneous; what I shall write is successive, because language is successive.
“All occupied the same point, without superposition and without transparency.” In our world, we can’t conceive how this is possible. But in heaven, anything may be possible. Okay, hold this thought for a … moment.
Eternity and Vanity
John Calvin opens his Institutes of the Christian Religion by saying, “Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” Both are required. They are bound together, mutually entangled. You cannot have one without the other.
In Qohelet (what English Bibles call “Ecclesiastes”), the speaker of the discourse—the Teacher (traditionally considered to be Solomon)—says that “God has placed eternity in [our] hearts” (3:11). After describing many things “under the sun,” the Teacher refrains over and over that “all this is vanity.” What is the opposite of eternity? It is vanity. Not vanity as we think of it today as being self-absorbed (although that is part of it), but vanity in the sense of emptiness, vapidity, futility.
If eternity is in my heart, it is the image of God, the sacred semblance of the divine in me. That is what draws me to life, to love. All that the Teacher calls vanity throughout Qohelet is related to outward appearance or achievement. In heaven, what is vain will disappear; what is eternal will remain. What is eternal is the soul, the self—the true self, the deep self, the God-given self, not the selfish self, the ego inflated by outward appearances and accolades.
Part of the spiritual life is coming to terms with myself as I really am. Yet “Be yourself” also means “change yourself.” We are not static creatures, and we shouldn’t aspire to be unchanging. Anyone who thinks themself complete should be wary of falling into pridefulness.
Resurrected Bodies
Part of the challenge of imagining ourselves in heavenly bodies is that we are not static. We are always changing on earth—physically and spiritually—so what would our resurrected selves actually look like?
Some people say our resurrected bodies will be in “the prime age of our youth”, say 25-30 years old. Why? Is this not to make an idol of a certain type of body? Will we all just look like Hollywood movie stars? Will we all conform to the beauty standards of this day and age on earth? Perhaps our resurrected bodies are less about “looking good” and more about acceptance of who we are in our unique physicality.
Jesus’s own bodily resurrection, as narrated in the New Testament, suggests some interesting things. The disciples don’t recognize him until he “opens their eyes.” Thomas even doubts until he can “touch the scars.” There seems to be some continuity (“Ah, yes, that is Jesus.”) and much discontinuity (“they did not recognize him”). The recognition appears to be spiritual more than physical recognition, though the physical does play a role. The scars remain, giving us some interesting food for thought about what “healing” means in heaven (but that’s for another post).
So, there is continuity and discontinuity. There is something eternal that remains, but other things that change. And what is vanity, what feeds our vanity, will be stripped away in heaven. Much that supports our sense of self on earth is vanity and will be stripped away in heaven.
Our Appearance, Our Name
So, here is an idea: in heaven, we won’t look like one thing, one idealized version of ourselves. Instead, we will appear as all our selves at one and the same time. We will each be our own “Aleph,” which contains many points all seen simultaneously by an observer. When you look at me, you will see my baby face, my teenage face, my adult face, and my old man face all at once, “without superposition and without transparency.” I will not appear to be a specific age. I will be all ages at the same time.
Here’s Moltmann again:
We ‘shall be called by our names.’ Our name means our whole person, and our whole biography. Neither a bodiless soul or a soulless body can be called by this name—not even the same person in only one condition or aspect of his or her life. In the moment of eternity, the life in time that we lived in sequence, as our age advanced, will be simultaneous and will thus be transformed into eternal livingness before the face of God. So we shall recognize ourselves entirely when we hear our names. The life we have lived will be absorbed into the eternal livingness and preserved there. … When our temporal life is transformed into eternal livingness, that life won’t disappear; it will be ‘transfigured.’ It will be accepted, put right, reconciled, sanctified, and glorified. But it is still our life, just as we still remain ourselves in that life, and for the first time come properly and fully to ourselves (162).
We will be recognized by our being, both body and name. Not only by a body which contains all moments in life “simultaneously,” but by a name which “means our whole person, our whole biography.” Imagine how long a name that must be!
In Revelation 3:17, John writes to the church in Pergamum: “To everyone who conquers, … I will give a white stone, and on the white stone is written a new name that no one knows except the one who receives it.” Perhaps this name could be understood as self-knowledge, and receiving that stone is the moment we “for the first time come properly and fully to ourselves.” The name we receive reveals us to our ourselves in our fullness.
Perhaps when we see each other, we will not recognize with the eyes, but with the heart, by the speaking of our names. So what if it takes an hour to recite my name? We have eternity to be with one another. By saying our names, we tell our stories. By sharing our stories, we reveal ourselves to each other. Imagine, a whole life compressed to the single moment of a name.
But of course, there is more to be written. In heaven, we will not be done growing or changing. We will not be static beings, but will continue to grow into our own selves, our names, our stories, our imago Dei. Those who died young will grow to maturity. Those who died old will grow to maturity. We will continue to learn about ourselves, to learn about God. We will deepen our knowledge, our knowledge led and framed by love.
My story about the bereaved father visiting heaven touches on the ideas presented above. But I also “get around” them somewhat. Since the father is not dead, but still alive, he cannot see heaven as it is, but must wear special goggles. Through these goggles, he sees people as beings of light—he cannot tell their age, their skin color, their gender, their body type. He sees them not with the eyes, but with the heart, through the sharing of names. In my story, I’m not writing about heaven “as it is,” as if we can have definitive knowledge of the experience before we get there. I’m writing about heaven from the perspective of this particular character, and thus everything he sees is translated through his own understanding and experience.
Perhaps that is what heaven / God’s new creation (heavens and earth) will be like for us. We will not only be recognized by the particularity of our being, but we will perceive everything through that particularity as well, not afraid or ashamed of our limitations, but rejoicing in them, for our limitations are part of the image of God in us.