A Vision of Heaven

From To Love Again

The bereaved need the ability to distinguish between body and spirit. In this age of materialism most of us have had little practice with it.

One friend, whose husband had died six weeks before, expressed this perfectly. “My biggest need is to believe that Bill is not in that grave. If I could be sure of that, I could stand the personal hurt,” she told me.

I understood her difficulty. The moment I had stepped into Peter’s hospital room after his death, I had known that the man I loved was no longer in the body on the bed. That was a patent, indisputable fact. I had thought I would be able to hold on to that conviction. Yet less than two weeks later, I was having difficulty with it.

One morning about that time I was awakened early by the chirping of birds in the ivy outside my bedroom window. Somewhere in that twilight zone between sleeping and waking it seemed that Peter spoke to me. “Catherine, don’t think of me as dead,” he said clearly.

How could he possibly have known, I wondered, that since the brief committal service I had been unable to think of him except as dead? In imagination I saw his body lying in the receiving vault. This was a temporary arrangement until a final decision about burial could be made.

Was this really Peter speaking to me, or was it some sort of a subconscious suggestion? I did not know. I wanted to believe that my husband was still alive. But my descent to earth after the funeral had been so abrupt that doubts had come crowding in. At any rate, wherever the brief message came from, it was the precise word I needed at the moment. I could neither forget nor ignore it.

In subsequent days I found myself pondering Peter’s statement. If he were still alive, then were was he? What was he doing? With no idea of the answers to those questions, how could I visualize him or think of him as alive?

Every emotion within me cried out to have this question answered: “What is my relationship to my husband now?”

In marriage I had found my identity, my answer to the question, “Who am I?” As a woman, much of my orientation in life had been centered in my relationship to one man. It is this way with most women.

Then when death cleaves the marriage partnership, the woman left alone feels that her whole basis for living has been washed out. She must begin all over again, “Who am I now?”

Words that Mr. Bridge, the associate minister of our church, had spoken at Peter Marshall’s funeral service, kept coming back to me.

This morning … we are endeavoring to establish a new relationship. We have known Peter Marshall in the flesh. From now on we are to endeavor to know him in the spirit. … The fellowship with him will remain unbroken.

Those had been sincere though lofty words. Were they true? For me, the fellowship had certainly been broken.

“Till death do us part,” Peter and I had vowed on our wedding day. The fact was that death had now suddenly and ruthlessly parted us. Across that chasm, Mr. Bridge had said that we were to build a bridge to Peter Marshall’s spirit.

I could not even imagine how to begin. Thus, I found my prayers taking a new turn. In a childlike way I began pleading with God for some glimpse of Peter, for some knowledge of his new setting, of what he was doing.

The response came in a vivid dream. It was a dream with a self-authenticating quality. Now, years later, every detail is still clear. Of no other single dream in my life can I say that. I also learned form it some of the details of the life we are to lead after death that have rung true with the testing of time.

In the dream I was allowed to visit Peter in his new setting. First I searched for him in a large rambling house with maqny rooms and airy porches. There were crowds of people about, but Peter was not among them.

Then I sought him in the yard. Finally, at some distance, I saw him. “I’d recognize that characteristic gesture—that certain toss of the head any time, “ I thought, as I began running toward him. I found myself able to run with a freedom I had not known since childhood. My body was light; my feet were sure. As I drew nearer I saw that Peter was working in a rose garden. He saw me coming and stood leaning on his space, waiting for me.

I rushed into his arms. Laughing, he pulled me close and rubbed his nose on mine.

“I knew it was you by the way you tossed your head. I’ve come home to you,” I said breathlessly.

Then, resting there in his arms, I felt something strange. Mixed with the tenderness of Peter’s love was a certain restraint. He was not holding me as a lover.

My impression was that Peter was bewildered at what had happened, still surprised at his own death. I wondered if the large many-roomed house, the yard, and the rose garden comprised some small part of what the Scriptures call “heaven.” I had always thought that people in heaven would be extremely happy. Peter’s attitude did not quite fit that pattern.

Then I awakened. The feeling of Peter’s strong arms around me lingered, and my cheeks were wet with tears.

Days later I was still pondering this strange dream. Then it began to come clear. Peter had not expected his life to end so suddenly on that gloomy Tuesday morning. He, like me, had confidently anticipated a different outcome to the problem of his damaged heart.

Five minutes after death he was essentially the same person that he had been before death. There had been no dramatic change except that he had shed his physical body as one would take off an overcoat. But the spiritual body in which he found himself—if that’s what one could call it—gave him the same appearance as before.

He was being left alone to work in the rose garden to give him time to recover from his bewilderment, to find himself again. It seemed an especially and loving touch that in the meantime he had been given work of a kind he had especially loved on earth—cultivating roses.

But it was that touch of restraint toward me in Peter’s attitude about which I thought most. I asked God to tell me what that meant.

When the reply came, it was to have a considerable significance for my future. A long time was to pass before I would have the courage to share this bit of insight with other widows, especially when their grief was new. For the dead are so terribly silent. The one whose sorrow is fresh longs for nothing so much as the touch of a vanished hand, the sound of a beloved voice. One in whom the wound of grief is still unhealed yearns for the assurance that, if immortaility means anything at all, it means that one’s love will be untampered with, will be just as it was here on earth.

Yet will the relationship between husband and wife be the same? From Christ’s own lips—as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew—we are given quite another thought about this. He spoke in answer to a sardonic question put to him by a group of Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection of the body. They posed a case about a woman who in this life had had seven husbands, and then asked the pointedly ridiculous question: “Therefore, in the resurrection, whose wife shall she be of the seven, for they all had her?”

And Jesus answered in part: “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels in heaven.” (Matthew 22:30)

In other words, Christ seemed to be saying that after death the woman would not be a wife to any one of her former husbands. That is, there is no marriage in heaven; one’s relationship even to the person one has loved on earth is different then.

Precisely what the new relationship was to be I did not then understand. I did not know what being “like the angels in heaven” would be like, and I was not at all sure I wanted to know. On the whole, I thought it a revolting idea.

Yet I guessed that part of what this meant was that the one who has stepped over into the next life still remembers every tender moment on earth, still cares what happens to those left behind, still wants to help them, still considers this as part of his continuing mission—but that the emotion of his love is intensified and purified. With this purification, as in a refiner’s fire, all selfishness and self-seeking, the usual possessiveness that comes with love, and the fire and excitement of physical love—all this is consumed, gone forever.

I remembered how often Peter had said from his pulpit, “Death has no scissors with which to cut the cords of love.” Of course he had been right. Yet it is difficult for us to imagine love without possessiveness, just as it is hard for us to imagine anything more wonderful than physical love.

And yet we have the apostle Paul, in his famous love poem, 1 Corinthians 13, setting love at the summit of all spiritual gift, describing for us in gladsome detail what it will be like someday. It was on this conception of a new kind of love, on a different kind of relationship with Peter, that I had to fix my mind.

In the days following my dream, it was as if God were saying to me, “Because I want you to get this matter straight from the beginning, I am trusting you now with part of this truth. Some of it you will not understand; some of it will be hard for you to take. But I shall never give you more than you can bear. You must not only trust in the truth of anything that comes directly from My hand, but you can know that what I give will be good.”