Getting into Heaven - and Out Again

You can enter heaven any time you like. I don’t mean that in the clichéd psychological sense; I’m not going to tell you that “heaven is your inner joy.” No, I mean the real heaven, the one your grandparents talked about and wanted to go to, the one the slaves in the cotton fields dreamed about when they sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” They were imagining a heavenly place where you do indeed feel better, where you get a new pair of shoes and jump for joy. A place where you can finally laugh at yourself again, where all wrongs are righted, and your hunger and thirst for justice is finally satisfied.

I mean the heaven where holiness and lust for life aren’t mutually exclusive; where there’s singing, talking, and planning; where life is finally full and complete.

I do not mean that boring old place where you have to sit on a cloud all day long singing hallelujah with no beer in sight.

Here’s the good news: You can enter this real heaven any time. You don’t need to be a Christian, a Buddhist, a Jew, a Muslim, or a member of some far-out cult.

Just tell the angel who is guiding you into the otherworld from the hospital where you just died, “I want to go to heaven.”

And he’ll respond, “Sure, you can go any time you like. I’ll accompany you for a while.”

At this point, you might be saying to yourself, “Hey, why is this so easy? Why did people on earth make such a fuss about it? Going to churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, or the gym, wrestling with moral issues and commandments and prohibitions and all those deep questions—and now this nice angel is saying, ‘Just go right in?’”

“Yes,” the angel says, hearing your thoughts as loudly as if you were screaming. “God isn’t the killjoy you always thought he was. He doesn’t deny anyone access to heaven. Here’s the entrance. After you!”