About Heaven

This is a book about Heaven. I know it now. It floats among us like a cloud and is the realest thing we know and the least to be captured, the least to be possessed by anybody for himself…

This is, as I said and believe, a book about Heaven, but I must say too that it has been a close call. For I have wondered sometimes if it would not finally turn out to be a book about Hell — where we fail to love one another, where we hate and destroy one another for reasons abundantly provided or for righteousness' sake or for pleasure, where we destroy the things we need the most, where we see no hope and have no faith, where we are needy and alone, where things that ought to stay together fall apart, where there is such a groaning travail of selfishness in all its forms, where we love one another and die, where we must lose everything to know what we have had.

—Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow (2000)

'a harmony thrust on an imperfect world'

Then I thought of the dead man, and how pale his face would be, and I said into the passing floes of mist:

"I'll say to Christy when next we argue about religion: 'Christy, beauty is all there is. It's the end. It's the only perfect thing there is. It is the perfection of the moon, Christy, a harmony thrust on an imperfect world. Everything comes from it—all our beliefs and faiths—all our dreams of a perfect world hereafter. So that if there were a square moon, Christy, you'd be talking about the corners of heaven. All life! Everything! In the perfect moon!'"

—Seán O'Faoláin, Bird Alone (1936)

I Believe Everything Now

He could not convince himself then, he said, in those days and months after her death, that heaven was any more than a well-intentioned deception meant to ease our own sense of foolishness, to ease pain. Despite his own years of vigilant Catholicism, despite his own mother's deathbed conversion, despite the promises he and my mother had exchanged, he could no longer see death as anything other than the void that met a used-up body, a spent mind. Not a mere moment, over which you could sail, buoyed by love, by faith, but the abyss toward which you stumbled inevitably, part of the crowd. Put out a hand, if you like, to help someone along, surround yourself, if you like, to help someone along, surround yourself, if you like, with people who love you, who owe you, whose lives you've changed, but don't expect it to make a difference. It will make no difference; eventually one after the other, every one of you will fall. 

"And now?" I asked him, both of us standing, not sitting, aware that there had been enough talking today. "Do you still feel that way now?" Aware, too, that we were edging close to it, to that embarrassing profundity he and Dan had feared, to that point at which too much had been said, but amazed, I suppose much as my father had once been amazed when his mother told him to get Billy to go out there, he's avoided it for too long--amazed at this kind of conversation at this stage of the game. A conversation, it occurred to me, that Billy's life had spurred for us as much it had once spurred it for my father and his dying mother. 

My father's eyes were a deep brown. He smiled a little, shaking his head. "Oh no," he said. "Not now." 

How lonely they all seemed to me that night, my father's family and friends, lonely souls every one of them, despite husbands and children and cousins and friends, all their hopes, in the end, their pairings and procreation and their keeping in touch, keeping track, futile in the end, failing in the end of keep them from seeing that nothing they felt, in the end, has made any difference. 

"It was only a brief loss of faith," he said. "It happens. They say it's not uncommon." And then he turned to climb the stairs on the night of the day Billy Lynch was placed in his grave. "I believe everything now," he said, his back to me. "Again." 

Of course there was no way of telling if he lied.

--Alice McDermott, Charming Billy (1998)

Friendship and Eschatology

This is that extraordinary and great happiness which we await, with God himself acting and diffusing…among the individual souls whom he has chosen, so much friendship and charity, that thus each loves another as he does himself; and that, by this means, just as each one rejoices in his own, so does he rejoice in the good fortune of another, and thus the happiness of each one individually is the happiness of all, and the universality of all happiness is the possession of each individual….This is true and eternal friendship, which begins in this life and is perfected in the next…

—Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship 3.79, 1160.