“I don’t really want eternal life and eternal happiness. I’m just an earthly creature with earthly joys – what would I even do in Heaven? Sit forever on a cloud with a harp and wings? I’d die of boredom. Better go to hell then: worse climate, but at least the company is better. And what even is eternal happiness? An unceasing narcotic daze? No thanks.”

I have heard such reasoning many times from people skeptical of Christianity and its worldview. Some of them were secular, others nominally Christian but non-practicing. Most likely you have encountered similar arguments yourself once or twice, or perhaps you have even thought along these lines.

Let us examine this position.

Sound Intuition

Indeed, if we imagine Paradise as some very proper and respectable sanatorium, it feels dreary and does not inspire much desire to strive for it.

Add that this goes on for an infinite length of time, and it becomes something that resembles torture rather than bliss.

It becomes suspicious why all this supposedly comes with eternal happiness. Surely they must disperse some chemical agent in the air so that everyone wanders around happily and mindlessly. The image of Heaven completely turns into a dystopia.

A Problem

If the Christian afterlife looks unclear and unattractive, it creates a serious problem for the faith.

We humans, by our nature, are beings moved by the will. All that we do, we do in pursuit of some goal.

Why do we believe at all? Often it happens that we simply adopt our faith from our parents and live in it by inertia. However, if we want our faith to be conscious and lucid, we need to have a goal, a motivation for it.

The desire to reach Heaven can become a powerful fuel for our will. It transforms our life from a meaningless mess to a piercing story of a weary wanderer who returns home from a foreign land.

It is there, in Paradise, that our unknown yet true home awaits – the home to which all the signs we encountered in our life were pointing. There, and only there, can we regain everything and everyone precious to us that we lost on this long and winding road.

It is much better and healthier than believing out of fear of hell – a fear that was somewhat overemphasized in the past.

It appears that Heaven is not a dull sanatorium and not a narcotic dystopia after all. What, then, is it really like?

To Start With

There is a simple logical fallacy in this popular view.

People say: “Heaven will be boring for me.” However, Heaven by definition is a place without any evil. Yet boredom itself is also a form of evil.

Hence, if Paradise exists at all, it cannot possibly be boring.

How can this be?

Boredom arises only when the object of your interest is exhaustible. Yet in Heaven we will live with God and contemplate Him face to face. God is infinite, so this contemplation can never be exhausted.

Moreover, this contemplation will not be a form of passive stagnation, like “lying on the couch and watching God,” but rather an active engagement.

Renewal of the Cosmos

We have to make an effort and get rid of the image of Paradise as “harps and clouds.” This image is a caricature, similar to picturing God as a stern old man with a beard.

Christianity does not promise us some elevated existence in a vague spiritual form. It promises resurrection.

Paradise will not be a bodiless experience. It will arise on a transfigured Earth, where we will live again in renewed and perfected material bodies.

My personal conviction is that plants and animals will be there too. To learn more about animals in Heaven, read this article.

It will be an active, dynamic, creative life in a physical universe. It will be filled with communication with God, with each other, and with the whole Creation.

However, all evil will cease to exist, while all good will become even better. Everything will be permeated with truth and with God.

No matter how hard we try, at present we cannot picture Paradise well enough, because evil and imperfection are, regrettably, everywhere.

Still, if you want to try: imagine everything good and beautiful that exists now; everything good and interesting that has happened in your life; all possible dreams fulfilled – but a thousandfold, and without any accompanying evil.

This still will not be very close, but it will be much closer than “sitting with harps on the clouds.”

Clarifying Terms

I believe we should retire the phrase “eternal happiness” from common use.

According to St. Thomas, happiness (felicitas) is a positive emotion, brief and very strong, which somewhat impedes the flow of thought. It is part of our nature that happiness comes in spikes and should not last long.

There is a more perfect emotion, joy (gaudium) – a deep and constant feeling that comes from firmly embracing a certain good without fear of losing it. Joy does not impede the mind, but rather helps it.

When people say that “eternal happiness is an eternal high,” they intuitively grasp a flaw, even without having read Aquinas: if happiness is eternal, it becomes eternal mindlessness.

Therefore, it would be better to say “eternal joy.” This is what awaits us in Heaven. Happiness will also be there, but harmoniously integrated.

Heaven or Paradise?

These two terms are interchangeable. We have no right to abolish either of them, because Jesus Christ Himself used both.

Yet we should exercise some caution with the word “Heaven.” It sounds poetic, but it can easily give rise to incorrect images of “sitting on clouds.” In questions of faith, heaven should always mean the spiritual realm, not the Earth’s atmosphere.

Moreover, Paradise will not be merely spiritual but a synergy of spirit and matter.

Eternity

The hardest concept about Heaven to grasp is infinity. Here again common sense seems to be right: even a good life, if prolonged for millions of years, would become torture, for absolutely everything would grow tiresome. If interested, you can read more about this phenomenon in this article.

However, in Paradise we will live in eternity, not in infinite time. Eternity is an entirely new mode of existence, not merely millions of years.

Time – this cruelest of thieves, robbing us of life and slowly eroding everything – will cease to be, at least in its present form. Eternity is, so to say, not an infinitely long line but rather a boundless ocean.

We currently lack the faculties to imagine such a thing, yet even now we can somehow anticipate it.

Conclusion

We live in a world burdened with evil. Admiring the beauty of the sky while drowning in a quagmire seems useless. Similarly, musing about Paradise now may appear an empty fancy, or at best an impossible dream.

On the other hand, Paradise can be the only goal worth striving for. Everything that happens now is important, yes, but only there will our story truly begin.

Do not be afraid of eternity, be afraid of missing it. Let us trust God. The One who created sunsets, music, and love surely knows how to prepare eternity for us.

May the Lord Jesus Christ help us reach Heaven, teach us to perceive it more correctly, and share this knowledge with others, so that they too may follow Him and attain salvation. Amen.

1400 words – a medium-length article. Approximately 6-7 minutes at an average reading speed.

For a broad audience.

Heaven will not be boring, because God is inexhaustible.