Continuing my recent foraging through the dusty recesses of my personal library, I pulled from the shelf Frank Sheed’s Theology & Sanity. Browsing through its pages I was reminded once again of the richness and vigour of Sheed’s apologetics and the way it epitomized the vibrant Catholic evangelism of the pre-Vatican II Church. Sheed is particularly strong in his imaginative use of analogy to make complex theological points. Here is but one example of many in this wonderful book:

But great soul or small, we shall all be filled. In our total contact with God we shall be wholly happy, and imperishably happy. There are two possibilities of misunderstanding here. One may feel that some more substantial sort of happiness than knowledge and love of God would suit us better; or one may feel that eternity is too long for us, anyhow.

The first feeling is commoner: as we think upon the things we have enjoyed in this life, the joys of heaven seem noble, of course, but definitely thin: with a slight sinking in the pit of the heart, we find ourselves hoping that it may turn out better than it sounds. This is an amiable weakness, much as if a small child, learning that adults enjoy poetry or science or mathematics, should feel how ill such things compare with tin soldiers and the rocking-horse and the plum tarts of his own ecstasy …

The second feeling was expressed by Karl Marx’s friend Engels in his jibe at “the tedium of personal immortality”. The error arises from a profound sense of the emptiness of life upon earth, combined with a notion of eternity as time that does not end – Macbeth’s tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeping on their petty pace from day to day. But the “pace” of heaven is not petty. And there is no succession of tomorrows. In heaven we shall not be in eternity, the changeless Now of God; but we shall be out of the ceaseless flow of change that time measures.