Father Dave answers questions about heaven sent in from kids on Facebook (to watch the Facebook Live broadcast in its entirety, click here).
Father Dave answers a question from a 4-year-old about where heaven is located. “The answer to our heaven questions is that we really don’t know for sure a lot of the specifics of what heaven will be like. I can say in terms of the location that while we usually sort of look to the sky and say heaven is above, and we also know scientifically now more than they did back in the day of the Bible and our earliest ancestors that were first believing in God. We know that when we look up there are actually things up there like planets and stars and other galaxies. They didn’t know that, we do. That doesn’t mean that there’s no heaven, but it definitely reassures us that heaven is not a geographical place that we can point to or find. Sometimes, even in ancient cultures, they would talk about heaven being some sort of a place here on earth, like the most beautiful place or the most beautiful garden. We think heaven probably can’t be found on a map. So therefore it can’t be found in between the planets or above or below the planets. Heaven is totally other.”
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A 6-year-old boy named Charlie asks what kind of food we will eat in heaven. “We don’t know, but we know that whatever joy and pleasure and even love we have for food or we derived from eating food, certainly heaven will give us a hundred times more than that,” Father Dave says. “So much to the point that we won’t miss things that we enjoy here on earth. Maybe there’s not a sunset in heaven, but what heaven is like is a big eternal sunset that’s 10 times better. So we won’t be in heaven going, ‘I really kinda miss sunsets or I really miss lasagna’ and have that sort of sadness or that missing or that longing or that emptiness. We know we can say that for sure that heaven will be the complete fulfillment of all our hopes and joys and desires and we’ll be together with God.”
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Father Dave also addresses the question of what we will be doing in heaven. “The only thing that we really do know from the Scriptures and from tradition is that what we will be doing more than anything else is praising God. Not because we have to, not because God is needy or is egotistical … But because God is so wonderful, we won’t be able to help but praise God. I imagine meeting a celebrity that you’ve admired for a long time. Even if you plan out what you’re going to say, probably what’s going to come out of your mouth is, ‘Wow, I really liked how well you play basketball or I loved you in that movie. I’m a big fan of yours.’ That’s what people say more often than not when they meet a big celebrity. Now why do we do that? Because we like that person so much that we can’t help but tell them that. So if a basketball player or a movie star can elicit that from us, imagine how much more God will!”