When you imagine Heaven – something nearly impossible to rightly imagine – I would wager that what trips you up most and possibly leads you to think that Heaven is boring is the fact that “forever” seems like way too long to do anything, even the best of things. I mean, at some point, won’t forever just get boring?
Well, if time works the same way in Heaven that it does on Earth, the answer to that question would be “Yes.” But God exists in eternity without getting bored and Heaven will not get boring, ever. The problem with our imagination of Heaven lies in our absolute inability to imagine time working in any different way than it does now. We have no context for “eternity” – God’s “eternity.”
In the scriptures, we hear the timelessness of God expressed in different ways – “eternal,” “years and years,” a “day,” etc. We have to use these human time categories to describe it, and that is ok. We don’t have words or concepts for anything else.
St. Augustine speaks about this in his commentary on Psalm 60. He reflects on the use of “day” to refer to God’s time in eternity – God’s “day.”
St. Augustine explains, “The word today indicates a single day; but this is not the kind of day which is squeezed between yesterday and tomorrow; it does not begin where yesterday ended, nor does it end when tomorrow dawns. After all, God’s time is also referred to as “years” in another psalm…. So years, and days, and a single day, all mean the same thing. You can use whichever phrase you like about eternity. And the reason why you can choose freely which way to express it is that whatever you say will fall short of the reality. Yet you must say something, to give yourself a basis on which to think about what cannot be put into words” (Saint Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms 51–72, Translated by Maria Boulding, 199).
In other words, we have to use our human concepts of time to speak about eternity. At the same time, we have to recognize that our human words fall short, and the reality is and will be so much greater and better. We will never get bored because we will be in the eternal now of God’s day. “Long” and “short” may not even make sense in heaven, but we’ll have to wait until then to find out!
Until that day, we experience a small foretaste of that heavenly now in our prayer, at the Mass, and in beautiful experiences of love. These moments can feel timeless, peaceful, and heavenly. May the Lord teach us through our earthly experiences of eternity to never stop desiring the rest he has in store for us. As St. Augustine also would say, our hearts will be restless until they rest in God. Peace!