Heaven Is Not a State of Mind

Anthony DeStefano's "A Travel Guide to Heaven" is one of those books that are published without great fanfare, gather momentum by word of mouth, and pop onto the best-seller lists without warning. DeStefano, a Roman Catholic who heads the New York-based pro-life organization Priests for Life, takes scripture and the writings of church fathers as a jumping off point for an emphatically positive tour of heaven. Beliefnet talked to him recently about why he believes the afterlife is a consolation none of us should do without.

I have always been interested in the disparity between the greatness of the Christian teaching on heaven and the low level of enthusiasm for the subject. I mean, everybody's interesting in getting to heaven-76 percent of Americans believe in heaven, says a Newsweek poll-but nobody seems too excited about it.

Two reasons. First, what you hear is so nebulous. How are you going to get excited about a concept that is so lofty and spiritual? We live in a concrete world-we're physical beings. If you posit the existence of a place that's totally spiritual, it's going to be hard to get excited about.

The second thing is, there's so many cartoonish images-heaven as disembodied spirits floating around with halos, playing harps and all that-all those images that come out of Hollywood and poetry. That's not exciting at all.

It is. But then your mom dies. Your uncle dies. Your doctor tells you they've discovered a polyp. And all of a sudden, no matter how secular you've been, all that fortune-cookie spirituality goes out the window and you're back in the traditional places, because only those places have the answers to life after death.

It is easier to live in denial nowadays because of all the luxuries that we have. There's speculation that one of the reasons why my book has done so well and why there's so many books and television shows that focus on life after death, is that when you see 3,000 people die before your eyes, the threat of death thrusts itself back into our pampered lives.

I think the Christian denominations are in agreement on the basics-the resurrection of the body, that heaven is going to be partly physical, all of that: New heaven, new Earth, worship of God, God being the highlight of the trip, seeing our relatives again. Within those parameters, Christianity, and particularly Catholicism, allows quite a bit of leeway.

The trick is, you have to stick to those parameters. New Age people or television psychics can say anything, based on their personal revelation. But if you stick within the parameters, you can use a certain amount of imagination and speculation. For instance, I firmly believe that if heaven is physical than it's going to be colorful as well. That's common sense. It doesn't say anywhere in the Gospel, really, that heaven is full of different colors but I think this is well within the parameters of Christianity, no matter the denomination.

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