Questions: If God doesn’t live in heaven, where does God live? Maybe better formulated is, When does God live? In the past, the present, or the future?
God is everywhere and every when. The great adventure of life is allowing grace to form us into persons who can be united with God forever. Pope Benedict XVI teaches in his magisterial Introduction to Christianity (1968) that heaven “is not to be understood as an everlasting place above the world or simply as a metaphysical region. … Heaven is not a place that, before Christ’s ascension, was barred off by a punitive decree of God’s, to be opened up one day in a positive way. On the contrary, the reality of heaven only comes into existence through the confluence of God and man. Heaven is to be defined as the contact of the being ‘man’ (sic) with the being ‘God’: this confluence of God and man took place once and for all in Christ when he went beyond this bios through death to new life” (p. 313).
Our faith is complex and fascinating. Catholicism isn’t for dummies. Our God is not something among other things. God is the center and ground of reality. “Heaven is accordingly that future of man and of mankind (sic) which the latter cannot give to itself”0 (Pope Benedict, 1968, p 313). So yes, God lives in heaven, but more importantly, God makes it possible for us to live in heaven.