Q. If we won’t have our deceased bodies until the Final Judgment, how will we recognize one another?
A. Ask the average person what Heaven is like and you will probably get variations on the same basic idea: it’s a place where everyone I love who has died gets to hang out and you can do whatever you want without limit. You want to race monkeys in go-carts? You can do it. You want to have a drink with J.R.R. Tolkien and St. Thomas Aquinas? They are there for it. Heaven is a place where your dreams come true. While that might sound fun – it’s wrong.
Ask the average Mass-going Catholic and you probably get variations on the same general idea of Heaven being where we are united with God and the saints and angels. If you press a bit further on what “united” means, the answers might get a bit more vague. You might even get: “I have no idea, that’s just what I was taught to believe.”
If that is how we answer the question, then good for us, because the simple reality is we don’t really know everything about what Heaven is like. We know what it is not like, and we know some things about what it is like, and we can theologically speculate on what it is probably like, but we do not have definitive answers to all of the questions about Heaven.
So what do we know? Heaven is an eternal existence united (there is that word again) to the Father and the Communion of Saints in love. While the idea of eternity can seem scary, we have to try to keep in mind that we are talking about an eternity, not just a really, really, really long time. Pope Benedict XVI described Heaven as an eternal moment, with no beginning or end. Time isn’t passing and we aren’t aware of a before or an after because there is no before or after. There just is. We won’t get bored because we only experience the now.
While that sounds (and kind of is) trippy, we get glimpses of this in our lives. Many of us have had experiences where we lose all sense of time. A common example is a parent holding their child, gazing down upon them with love and losing all sense of time passing. Sometimes we have a really engaging conversation where afterwards you remark “Wow, time just flew by.” A particularly powerful experience of prayer can have the same effect, where we lose all track of time and we just are. When we experience a profound level of communion with another it can happen that, even if just for a moment, we experience the smallest glimpse of the eternal moment of Heaven.
What else do we know? Our souls will exist apart from our bodies until the Final Resurrection. What will that be like? I have no idea. Neither does the Church. This is one of those times that we can honestly say it is a mystery of our Faith.
Having said that, to try to offer some answer to the question, any knowledge that we have prior to the Resurrection of the Body will be reliant upon God. This is analogous to the angelic mode of coming to know. All angels, including the fallen ones, rely on God for their understanding. This is part of the torment of the demons, that even in their rebellion they rely on God and do not have free reign. Similarly, God will, in some way, act as the “intermediary” for us prior to the Resurrection of the Dead, enabling us to communicate with one another and come to know.
That might not be a satisfying answer, but it is the best I can do. The Church in Her humility recognizes that She does not have all the answers to every question we might ask. It would be easy to make up answers rather than appear to be lacking knowledge, but She doesn’t do that. As Catholics we believe God is the author of all Truth and Reality, not the Church, so the Church cannot give answers she doesn’t have. To do otherwise would be to betray Her role as transmitter of the Faith and to make Herself God.
There is no harm in speculating about Heaven and trying to puzzle out answers to these kinds of questions (within the boundaries of our Faith), but like anything, we can get too stuck on some of these things, and they can distract us from the more important part of Heaven, which is choosing it. Every time we sin, we choose Hell over Heaven, ourselves over God, slavery over freedom. Our attention and focus should be mostly on cooperating with God’s grace so that we choose Him over sin and therefore Heaven over Hell.
This question was answered by Father Caleb La Rue, chancellor of the Diocese of Lincoln. Write to Ask the Register using our online form, or write to 3700 Sheridan Blvd., Suite 10, Lincoln NE 68506-6100. All questions are subject to editing. Editors decide which questions to publish. Personal questions cannot be answered. People with such questions are urged to take them to their nearest Catholic priest.
