A Communion of Saints

Q:What is your vision of heaven? What images - from Scripture, tradition, culture or your personal experience - best describe heaven for you?

A few years back three of the most important people in my life died within about 18 months of each other. First it was my Italian grandmother, who had lived with my family and down the hall from me throughout my childhood and until I moved out as an adult. Then my academic mentor, my dissertation director, and a beloved teacher, Msgr. Stephen Happel, who died quickly and unexpectedly and at a relatively young age. Finally, my mother succumbed to cancer after we thought she'd finally beat it.

It was a lot of death and all at once so perhaps it was inevitable that I began to think about heaven during this time period and ever since. When I was a child I had a very childlike understanding of heaven that was high up in the distant sky and included a throne on which God sat. Then when I got older that version of heaven was dismissed as pure fiction and wasn't replaced by anything at all. I stopped believing in a heaven as teenagers and college students who feel rather invincible are wont to do. I could not have cared less. Heaven sounded like an idea only crazy people would go for.

But now. Now I think of heaven as a place that's all around us, that might even include my kitchen, where a slight tear in the fabric of the universe--in the vein of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials--might allow me to step through and find that my mother and grandmother await there, standing in almost the very same spot on my wooden floor. It's just that they stand in my kitchen in a kind of parallel world only a slight shift away. The strength of my memories of them, the way they call out more strongly in certain spots and places, is what my sense of heaven has become. The fact that when I am driving on a particularly clear day when the sky is a robin's egg blue and find that I want to talk to Dr. Happel--and sometimes I do--because if anyone is up in the sky it's him, is all the proof I need that the dead are still with us somehow. And I am so grateful for this.

By Donna Freitas | March 21, 2010; 11:15 AM ET Save & Share:
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