Today, we are all well aware that the word “heaven” does not designate a place beyond the stars but something much greater and more difficult to express, namely, that God has a place for us and that God gives us eternity. We have already experienced in our own lives the fact that one who dies continues somehow to live in the memory of those who have known and loved him. They keep a part of him alive. Admittedly, it is only a part, as it were, only a shadow, of him, and one day those who remember him will also die, and that continuance of life that their love was able to give him will come to an end.
But God never passes away, and we all exist because he loves us, because he brought us into existence by his creative act. His love is the foundation of our eternity. One whom God loves never passes away. It is not just a shadow of ourselves that lives on in him, in his thought, and in his love; rather, it is in him, in his creative love, that we are preserved forever immortal in the totality and truth of our being. It is his love that makes us immortal, and this immortality, this abiding love, is what we call “heaven”.
Heaven, then, is none other than the certainty that God is great enough to have room even for us insignificant mortals. Nothing that we treasure or value will be destroyed. As we ponder all this, let us ask the Lord on this day to open our eyes ever more fully to it; to make us not only people of faith but also people of hope, who do not look to the past but rather build for today and tomorrow a world that is open to God. Let us ask him to make us who believe happy individuals who, amid the stress of the daily living, catch a glimpse of the beauty of the world to come and who live, believe, and hope in this certainty.
From: Dogma und Verkundigung, pp. 418ff
