When It Comes to Heaven, Seeing Is Believing

If you’ve seen heaven, does that mean it exists?

This question is more than a mind-bender. For thousands of years, certain people have claimed to have actually visited the place that, St. Paul promised, “no eye has seen . . . and no human mind has conceived,” and their stories very often follow the same narrative arc. A skeptic, a rogue, or an innocent suffers hardship or injury: he is hit on the head, he suffers a stroke, he sustains damage in a car crash or on the operating table. A feeling of disconnection comes over him, a sense of being “outside” himself. Perhaps he encounters an opening: a gate, a door, a tunnel. And then, all at once, he is being guided through other worlds which look and feel to him more “real” than the world in which he once existed. These realms are both familiar and strange, containing music that doesn’t sound like music and light brighter than any light and creatures that may or may not be angels and the familiar faces of loved ones lost as well as figures from history and sometimes — depending on the narrator — even Jesus himself.