Cultivating Paradise

We Are God’s Gardeners

The intimate and inextricable link between hope and heaven extends beyond hypothetical principle to the realm of concrete action. Heaven and the corresponding cardinal virtue, hope, comprise components of our core identity: to be human is to hope, and heaven is the deep-seated object of that hope, whether we realize it or not. Actively seeking heaven balances and harmonizes our humanity, at once anchoring it to God and elevating our worldly efforts. Heaven fuels our pursuit of goodness, and truth, and beauty. It compels action, demands social justice. Too often do we relegate heaven to the life to come when the reality is more nuanced: indeed, Catholic theology reinforces the need for heaven to begin here and now. When we deconstruct the concept of heaven, this comes into focus. Just as salvation is a process, so too is heaven — or, rather, so too is our entry into and embrace of heaven. Heaven is both the object of our hope and the culmination of a life spent cultivating it, for ourselves and those around us. As members of the Church, cultivating heaven on earth is not only our job but our identity. The world is our field: as God’s gardeners, we must cultivate hope by sowing charity. That is what the kingdom of God is like.

Before we can fully understand the role of heaven, we must reflect on what it means to be human. More specifically, we must ponder what it means to be fully alive. This takes different shapes in secular and religious philosophy, but broadly speaking the question seeks to answer “why?” ... Why are we here? How can we be freed from our sin? Jesus is the embodied answer to those perpetually nagging existential questions. We are here to become fully alive in Christ, to become members of a new family who share a divine origin and end. We are here to become like Christ, not in a superficial sense, but through all-encompassing theosis. It is worth mentioning that the word “virtue” comes from the Latin word “vir”: etymologically speaking, to be virtuous is to be courageous is to be manly. In other words, courageous virtue is part of the core identity of a man (and all humans, of course, more broadly speaking). By definition.

While similarities between heaven and the ideal version of life here abound, an essential difference remains — one that should not be underestimated. The difference is sin. Sin is why heaven is a future reality. Sin is why we need conversion. Despite our loss of original justice and holiness, however, we remain the image-bearers of our Creator and continue to feel an unquenchable yearning which can be satisfied only by God. As St. Augustine reminds us, “The entire life of a good Christian is in fact an exercise of holy desire.” This brings us to one of my favorite arguments for the existence of God: C.S. Lewis’ argument from desire. How does this connect to heaven? For starters, it helps explain our profound capacity for hope and need to work toward realizing it through acts of love, mercy, and justice. It also speaks to the way that God delights in including us in his plans for salvation. He doesn’t need us, but he loves using us. Our divinely placed desire reminds us that we’re meant for so much more than this world. Romero’s concept of integration is key here. We must not try to add or subtract the two lives. We have to integrate.

When we hope, we pay homage to the immeasurable chasm between us and God, this world and the next. We acknowledge that we were created for more — a future reality with present implications. Christian hope is the recognition of our own inability to adequately fulfill our deepest desires without doubting that such fulfillment is possible. This paradox points to the inestimable and ontological divide between us and God while embracing the new humanity brought about by Christ’s blessed Incarnation and glorious Ascension, and as seen on display in Mary’s own Immaculate Conception and Assumption. Indeed, Marian dogmas are crucial to theology, not only for their Christological implications, which are their true foundations, but also for what they indicate about our own eschatological future. Mary serves as the supreme example of what we hope for, of what humanity is meant for, of what God has chosen us for, of what God has chosen for us. She shows that the future we hope for is no mere pipe dream, but something already actualized, even if we do have to wait our turn to participate in that future. Like Mary, though on a less grand scale, we must participate in God’s plan for salvation in this life before tasting its fruit in the next. Heaven harmonizes this life. Indeed, heaven acts as a gilded mirror, showing us the perfected vision of life that we so deeply desire. Heaven harmonizes this life through the Church: God uses his people to bridge the divide. Our goal? To see the realization of heaven here and now. It may not be strictly attainable in this world — at least in the sense of completion, as we find ourselves in a period of waiting — but in a progressive sense it is not only possible but necessary ... and profoundly impactful on the individual and the world.

The eternal tales of Dante and Lewis reinforce this harmony by shining a light on the similarities as well as the difference between what we make of life — and what life should be. While poetic license may be applied, the allegories present in Paradiso and The Great Divorce underscore the essentially real, human nature of heaven. It will be more wonderful than we can imagine, to be sure, but not something that forsakes the best things in life. Rather, it will inject new magic into them. Think of the ways heaven has been brought to earth already, by members of the Church and people of goodwill everywhere. Ponder the moments of technological invention and philosophical revelation, admire the great universities and hospitals, marvel at inventors and medical researchers, honor priests and poets. These are all heavenly pursuits, whether intentionally or incidentally, and we can make — we already have made — heavenly progress in this life. Remember, heaven will not destroy all that we love in this life: it will redeem and perfect it. Perfection and completion are closely connected concepts that speak to the very nature of divine perfection: just as the Catholic Church contains the fullness of truth, so too does our heavenly existence represent the fullness of our humanity. The heavenly pursuits are not relegated to heaven (though they will be refined there), so we must seek to draw ever closer to the ideal that we long for. Lord willing, we’ll enter the pearly gates with theosis already in hand. In any case, we should not make the mistake of waiting to act, lest we find ourselves unprepared at the moment of reckoning. For fear of sounding melodramatic, when it comes to hope and heaven, tremendous danger lies in waiting. This life is not designed for cowardice; it’s meant for charity.18 Courageous virtue!

Perfect doesn’t mean passive, and it certainly doesn’t suggest a stop to human progress. While the details are not yet clearly known, I firmly believe we will continue to learn and grow and explore in heaven, more than ever, forever. Our worthy and virtuous pursuits will continue in heaven as it has on earth — only without all the sin mucking it up. We often focus on moments of conversion while paying too little attention to the broader periods of progress that encompass them. Don’t get me wrong, these moments are crucial, but they must be considered as part of the larger portrait they comprise to avoid being misconstrued as the picture itself. As we see in the works of the Desert Fathers, Dante, and modern Christian writers alike, the afterlife mimics the progressive quality of our life now. The similarities between the two go further. As Lewis so masterfully showcases with his depictions of vibrant trees and shimmering water, heaven is very much real, in every sense of the word. It has forests and mountains and people and animals and all sorts of other lovely products of God’s creation. It is full of life; it is life, fulfilled. Heaven is why we hope and it’s what we hope for. It’s the completion of this life. Perfect in every way.

Central to the active Christian life Christ prescribes is the way the royal priesthood extends beyond ordained priests to all baptized Catholics. Ecclesial hierarchy remains intact, and there are layers of application, to be sure, but we cannot deny the clarity of the teaching. As we seek to answer the call of the Great Commission, we must not only tell others about our reason for hope but tirelessly work to make that future a reality to the greatest extent possible. As we see in Apostolicam Actuositatem, “The whole Church must work vigorously in order that men may become capable of rectifying the distortion of the temporal order and directing it to God through Christ.” This vocation isn’t reserved for the religious. Lay people must leverage their skills for the sake of the kingdom, to the greatest extent possible, as we see throughout Vatican II documents. Catholics must help create heaven on earth. This begins with the self and extends to everything reasonably within our purview. Continual conversion of self and surroundings, now and forever more.

When presenting the Gospel to others, we do a great disservice to both parties if we misrepresent heaven. This misrepresentation can come from our own actions, if they are misaligned with the hope we claim to hold, as well as the portrayal of heaven we provide. As a piece of sad irony, one tendency is to accentuate the potential experience of hell while neglecting to properly elevate heaven. Or, even if properly elevated, it is left in such a vague and muddled state that its abounding joys are easily overlooked. St. Paul encourages us to maintain proper perspective, both to exhort us to persevere in this life and to illustrate the glorious object of our Christian hope. He does this so that we too may be able to say, “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” This is no casual aside but a multilayered eschatological lesson: a perspective that captures the nature of the divide between heaven and here by emphasizing the importance of persistence and patience, and the unimaginable treasures at the end. The best way to present heaven is to display it in our words and deeds.

How should we respond to such hope? As with social justice, action is inseparable from any charitable response. We are not called to passivity; we are commanded to love actively and fervently. Holding unorthodox views of heaven can begin to skew our perception of this life, as well. If we view heaven as a reality that’s not only separate but entirely distinct from our current existence, complacency can become a real temptation. I believe this is what Rahner was warning us about when highlighting that “certain truths of God’s revelation” face the “danger of becoming ‘un-existential.’” That is why social justice, like acts of kindness, cannot be removed from the life of the Catholic. Such pursuits are natural outpourings of the Christian soul. If they are absent, we must consider that our well may be poisoned. In this human juggling act of a life, we see the hypothetical and the heavenly in lockstep with the pragmatic and the personal. It’s as beautiful as it is bewildering. Hope-filled actions ground heaven in the present; the heavenly reward that awaits us elevates our actions and inspires the hope that motivates them. If heaven becomes merely hypothetical, we are to blame, not heaven. In many ways, we attain heaven for ourselves by cultivating it for others.

In all of this, we see that heaven — along with eschatology more broadly speaking — cannot, should not, must not be divorced from this life. Even a cursory study of Catholic eschatology renders even the suggestion of such division ridiculous. Salvation history is not an abstract reality but a real story that we are part of. Similarly, heaven is not an abstract reality but the concrete continuation of our life. Augustine put it best when he personalized the matter: “The name of that reality is God.” Remember, we are God’s gardeners, and we’ve been entrusted with the task of heavenly cultivation. It’s arduous work yet incomparably worthwhile. Catholic teaching on heaven doesn’t just include hope. It demands it. We need hope because we need heaven; the former is a path to the latter. And that hope is not something that appears out of nowhere: like sprouting plants, it springs up only after being watered and tended. Now let’s get back to work.