The Church has just celebrated the Solemnity of the Ascension, recalling that Jesus Christ has ascended into Heaven to prepare a place for us. As Christians, we will naturally struggle to understand what the life of heaven is like, but it seems to me that our conception of heaven is often far too superficial. Drawing on the symbols of Scripture that are echoed in art, we may imagine that heaven is merely pearly gates, fluffy clouds, and angels strumming on harps. Perhaps we instead imagine that heaven will be an opportunity to do all of the things that we love to do without interruption, as if heaven is just an eternal vacation. Over the years I've heard of people being buried with golf clubs, cigars, and even cans of Budweiser, as if those are the kinds of things that will give joy after death.
In reality, the eternal life to which we are called is perfect communion with God, who alone can satisfy us. Any other joy is a cheap imitation of the joy of communion with the God who is perfect goodness, perfect beauty, perfect truth, and perfect love. As Jesus prepared to lay down his life for our sake, he expressed his longing to draw us into this glory, praying, “Now this is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God, and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ” (John 17:3). Pope St. John Paul II put it this way:
[W]e know that the “heaven” or “happiness” in which we will find ourselves is neither a physical abstraction or a place in the clouds, but a living, personal relationship with the Holy Trinity. It is our meeting with the Father that takes place in the risen Christ through the communion of the Holy Spirit.... Today, personal language is better suited to describing the state of happiness and peace we will enjoy in our definitive communion with God. (General Audience, 21 July 1999)
For all of eternity, God has known us and loved us and has longed for us to have the joy of knowing and loving him as his children. This is the very purpose of our existence, but we have rejected this relationship with God in pursuit of lesser things through sin. The Son of God became man, however, to unite us with God, so that we might once again have the hope of eternal life with the God who loves us.
Pope Benedict XVI described eternal life this way:
[E]ternity is not an unending succession of days in the calendar, but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality... It would be like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time—the before and after—no longer exists. We can only attempt to grasp the idea that such a moment is life in the full sense, a plunging ever anew into the vastness of being, in which we are simply overwhelmed with joy. This is how Jesus expresses it in Saint John's Gospel: “I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you” (16:22). We must think along these lines if we want to understand the object of Christian hope, to understand what it is that our faith, our being with Christ, leads us to expect (Spe Salvi 12).
The Solemnity of the Ascension is not a mere going-away- party, but is in a certain sense the culmination of all that Jesus came to do. The Son of God, who has known the infinite joy of communion with the Father for all of eternity, united himself to our human nature by his Incarnation, experienced our human death on the Cross, but then did what no human had ever done: He rose again in a body that was saturated with the glory of the Trinity. After the Resurrection, Christ's human nature no longer belonged here on this un-glorified earth but belonged in the loving embrace of his Father. After forty days of Resurrection appearances, therefore, he ascended to the “Father's house,” body and soul, drawing our full human nature into the indescribable glory of the Father's embrace.
Ultimately, of course, our human language will always fail to capture the mystery of eternal life that Jesus has prepared for us. The Prayer after Communion for the Solemnity of the Ascension expresses well the longing that we ought to cultivate in our hearts for this life:
May the gifts we have received from your altar, Lord, kindle in our hearts a longing for the heavenly homeland and cause us to press forward, following in the Savior’s footsteps, to the place where for our sake he entered before us.