Rod Liddle fears he may be doomed — although the modern Church of Englandis reluctant to admit that anyone at all suffers eternal damnation
Not so long ago, when I was making a film about some aspect of Christianity for Channel 4, I asked a Church of England bishop about the concept of heaven, what it was like up there, whether or not there was a Starbucks, would we all get our own rooms and is there WiFi etc. He looked at me as if I were mad. In fact, the expression on his face was exactly the same as when I put the same question to the science writer and paradoxically committed atheist Richard Dawkins. ‘Oh, good grief… I really wouldn’t bother yourself with any of that nonsense,’ he said, after ascertaining that I had asked my question in all seriousness.
When he expanded a little on this dismissal it was to the effect that we live on in the memories of the people we have known, and through the consequences of our acts. This seemed a markedly less fun and indeed concrete version of heaven than the one I had been brought up with; in fact it seemed closer, ecumenically, to Belinda Carlisle’s exegesis on the subject ‘Heaven is a Place on Earth’, in which she assures her ‘baby’ that we are only beginning to understand the ‘miracle of living’, a theme reprised a decade or so later in similar theological fashion by Ms Britney Spears, in her declamatory anthem ‘Heaven on Earth’. Later I asked the bishop about God and he looked perplexed for a while and waggled his hand from side to side, possibly, possibly not, who the hell knows?
This is an apt time to consider heaven and what it might actually entail.
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