When I was little, I read the story of The Littlest Angel which told the story of a little boy who lived in heaven, a place of white fluffy clouds and gold streets. After my husband’s grandmother died, we laughed and said thunder was Nanny rearranging the furniture in heaven. And if I sing along with the song that describes rain as teardrops from heaven, the words still catch in my throat.
All of these memories point to a heaven somewhere up there. Is heaven the celestial heavens? Is it some place in another dimension beyond the stratosphere, beyond the planets and our known universe? And who gets to be there? Good people, bad people, babies, violent criminals, domestic animals, vermin, gnats?
Is heaven only a place we talk about when we suffer loss? When I was working as a hospital chaplain, a nurse caught me in the hall and asked me whether our pets go to heaven. She’d heard a story about a place called Rainbow Bridge where pets go and wait for their companions. Again and again grieving families ask for reassurance that heaven will reunite us with everyone we have loved and lost.
My granddaddy died some years ago with no great convictions about God. I don’t think he was an avowed atheist, just disinterested. If heaven only admits believers, he won’t be there. Many families have similar stories and the fear is overwhelming when a loved one is dying. “Chaplain, you have to help us get Jane saved before she dies.” I wanted to tell them that Jesus’ words to the dying weren’t to pray the sinner’s prayer.
Over the past several years, I have had less confidence in an other-worldly place where St. Peter sits at the gates or where we come before God’s judgment. Perhaps heaven is a metaphor. “Our Father who art in heaven…thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven…” Is heaven actually here on earth? Is it where we find ourselves when we live in relationship with one another as God’s creation and live out God’s vision for God’s kingdom? Or is it something else? And who is there – only humanity? all creation? Does it transcend anything we can understand or express?
These questions resurface each time I brush near death and while I have too many reminders of just how finite our human lives are today, it isn’t only the loss of human lives that make me ask the questions.
The week before Easter my family volunteered to be a foster family for a family of kittens. It’s kitten season and shelters are overrun with babies. At last count, one shelter had more than seventy kittens to care for. We took in a mama and an unknown number of kittens. We set them up with food, water and litter and kept our distance so mama wouldn’t stop producing milk. And then we watched them die one by one. All together, we took four tiny bodies to the cemetery. Then, blessedly, the mama settled into nursing the remaining two kittens and now they are five weeks old. But facing the first four kittens’ deaths and struggling to understand why the mama rejected them meant facing questions about created life and death up close.
In an absurd twist on the same afternoon that the fourth baby kitten died, our beloved chocolate lab Heidi chased a ball too far and ran into our quiet street where she was clipped by a truck that was passing through. She lost a lot of blood and had a broken femur and pelvis. As I sat with her in the veterinary office, I just marveled at how she was wagging her tail, full of herself and happy to be held and cherished, despite immense pain. I joked with her and the technician that Heidi is a believer in the axiom that life is meant for chasing lacrosse balls, and surely everyone’s good and right purpose is to play catch. Are there fenced yards or dog parks in heaven? Luckily, Heidi’s leg could be rebuilt and she is now four weeks into her recovery. She’s a little puzzled at the disappearance of the more than thirty tennis and lacrosse balls we hid away before her homecoming from the veterinary hospital, but she is happy and whole and here on earth and our questions can wait a little longer.
