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Question 71.

Answer to Question 71.

As someone else stated the soul is ageless and heaven exists in a different time zone from this world. I sure we will all recognize our family members but that doesn't mean that we will all be together in the same place. We don't know much about the afterlife so we will just have to wait until we get there. As for souvla maybe you should arrange to take a fougou with you or maybe you can cook your meat on the coals of hell fire. As an after thought your body will be decaying in the ground so you might not have any teeth to eat souvla. Now that would be hell, to see a well cooked souvla that you can't eat.

Same member

How do you know Heaven exists and how do u know its in a different timezone? Serious note

Answer

In Genesis, we read that the heavens and the earth were created ‘in the beginning’. Time therefore began from the onset of creation, but there is an earthly time and a heavenly time, a temporal and a non-temporal. Earthly time is measured by change and motion. Its nature is to begin, to endure and to have an end. Heaven and the angels, exist outside of earthly time. They are not eternal, for they have a beginning, but have their existence ‘in the age’ [aeon, αιώνι], which according to St. Maximus is motionless time, for it remains without any change. God Himself, being uncreated, exists outside of time as we know it and outside of the aeon, for God has no beginning or end, but is eternal.

We should not think of Paradise and Hell as physical places but rather as a state of the soul. We use the terms Paradise and Hades to indicate a particular way of life, since the righteous partake of the glory of God, while the sinners receive the caustic energy of God. In the patristic tradition it is clear that there are not two ways, but God Himself is Paradise for the saints and God Himself is Hades for the sinners. God sends His grace to all men, since “He makes His sun rise on the just and the unjust and sends His rain on the evil and the good”. If God gives us a command to love all people, even our enemies, He does the same Himself. It is impossible for him not to love sinners as well. But each person feels God's love differently, according to his spiritual condition. God is light and light has two properties, illuminating and caustic. If one person has good vision, he benefits from the illuminating property of the sun, and he enjoys the whole creation. But if another person is deprived of his eye, if he is without sight, then he feels the caustic property of light. This is how it will be also for the life of the soul after it leaves the body. God will also love the sinners, but they will be unable to perceive this love as light. They will perceive it as fire, since they will not have a spiritual eye and spiritual vision. Therefore the same love of God, the same energy will fall upon all men, but it will work differently. Therefore Paradise and Hell exist not in the form of a threat and a punishment on the part of God, but in the form of an illness and a cure. Those who are cured and those who are purified experience the illuminating energy of divine grace, while the uncured and ill experience the caustic energy of God.

A question people ask concerning death is “When we die will we be with our loved ones?”  We do not know enough about life after death to give definite answers. Death is a mystery and what we know of the afterlife is only what Christ has told us in Holy Scripture and certain accounts given us by the saints who had visions or after death experiences. Certainly we want to believe that we will continue our afterlife with the people we love and in some ways this is possible, but depends again on our spiritual eyesight.  We will certainly be able to see our loved ones but for us to be with them it means that our spiritual eyes see the divine light at the same level as them. To understand this better we need to see the example of the eyesight theory with the parable of “Lazarus and the rich man”. When both died the beggar Lazarus was carried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom and the rich man went to a place of torment. In other words Lazarus’s spiritual eyes were healthy and this allowed him to participate in the divine light. The rich man on the other hand lived a wicked life and his spiritual eyes were so darkened that he couldn’t participate in that light. He could see Abraham and Lazarus and recognized him as the beggar who was at his door every day, but that was all. He couldn’t go over to where Lazarus was and Lazarus also couldn’t cross over to where the rich man was. The parable therefore tells us that when we die we will recognize and see others we knew in this life, but the spiritual state of each of us determines where we will be.

But let us for arguments sake assume that our loved ones and ourselves are all saved and see the divine light, can we also assume that we will be together? We will be together as far as we will all be in God, but Christ told us something about heaven which we must take into account; he said that “In my Father’s house there are many mansions.” (John 14:2) This we can interpret as meaning many levels of salvation. We can therefore imagine heaven as a pyramid with God at the very top followed by the saints and all those who found deification and as we come down the pyramid there are different levels with people. Each person is assigned to a level according to his spiritual ability to see God. The better eyesight one has the closer to God he is. Thus my parents might be near the top of the pyramid and I might be near the bottom. We all participate in God, but our spiritual health determines how close to God we stand.