How do you envision Heaven?

I for one would like to see more statues of Mary without her looking so dour.

Great point. I would imagine that Mary, good Jewish mom that she was, followed Jesus on most of his treks through Israel and now and then after a particularly nifty miracle she might poke those near her and proudly announce “That’s my boy!”

Similarly she would have grinned and nodded approvingly upon hearing a profound parable or commandment, particularly at the Sermon on the Mount, thinking to herself, “I taught Him that when we were reading the Torah together.”

One of the older devotions is “the Seven Joys of Mary”. There’s a chaplet for meditation.

http://www.shrinesf.org/rosary.htm#joys

There’s also a good number of folksongs about this devotion. Needless to say, the folksong list can be somewhat different than the chaplet list. 🙂

http://www.hymnsandcarolsofchristmas.com/Hymns_and_Carols/seven_joys_of_mary.htm

I find the fact it’s an _English_ folksong kinda touching, as it shows how these popular devotions survived in even the most trying situations.

I used to think about heaven in a similar way as you have outlined, but now I have changed my mind over the past few years.

We have bodies. Heaven for a real human being is to be experienced by the body – our mode of being. Too often our culture accents the “spiritual” [I am on a crusade to get rid of this most understood word from contemporary Catholic culture]. “Spiritual” makes heaven no more than a vague ghostly albeit loving experiences.

Let’s get back to considering heaven as enjoying the ecstatic beatific vision of God with our bodies in a new creation with bodies! That being so, there is every reason to believe that we would experience the soaring flights and unimaginable power of, dare I say, The Incredibles, but with a bodily joy and bodily experienced love beyond our understanding.

These ideas will of course be considered “childish”, but then so is Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. Beware of the prevailing culture of “spirituality” which fundamentally denies the realities of being bodies needing redemption.

I realize that using reason to deduce things about heaven is as futile as using ears to see but there seems to be much theological and biblical evidence for the following…

1. In heaven we will have bodies
2. It is because of sin that we need to wear clothes to conceal our nudity in this fallen world
3. In heaven there will be no sin
4. It is love and not lust that allows men to appreciate the beauty of a naked woman’s body (lust prevents him from appreciating and serving the beauty and dignity of the whole person)

Does this mean that when a young man manifests an attraction for pornography, we should be telling him not to waste himself on such a shallow beauty because a much deeper and more exciting beauty awaits in heaven?