Is Stephen Hawking Right?

If you believe that popular depictions of Heaven reflect actual beliefs of Heaven, then Stephen Hawking might have point.

If you ask the average person what Heaven is, will they describe a metaphysical, spiritual state of union with an all-powerful Deity, or will they describe the setting for an ice cream commercial or a backdrop to a Bugs Bunny cartoon?

Because of its transcendent nature, artists must depict Heaven in allegorical, analogous, or fanciful imagery. Pop culture Heaven generally consists of people walking on clouds, a throwback to an earlier literary tradition of Heaven literally being in the sky. But if we start taking that imagery literally ourselves, then maybe we do risk buying into a fairy tale.

Our imagery of Heaven is supposed to represent an ethereal, lofty state of being. Clouds can signify majesty, beauty, and even a numinous fear. They look cool in certain lights. And, frankly, they are probably the most effective expression of bigness and enormity we can imagine. Sure, the sun and moon are big...but we can't really grasp just how big they are by looking at them...especially since they are so easily obscured by that massive thunderhead that rolled in and swallowed up the sky.

So it's not hard to imagine why early poets chose the heavens to represent something as enormously huge as God's glory.

It's also hard for us to imagine precisely what we'll be doing in Heaven. We know it will be glorifying God, so we come up with images of praise--like singing in choir robes. We have to imagine something, after all.

But, again, if we get wrapped up in our pet theories, or buy too much into the external signifiers and forget the spiritual concepts they are supposed to signify, then, maybe we have gone too far astray into our own myths and forgotten the Truth.

And maybe we, like Stephen Hawking, get so distracted by the clouds that we aren't seeing the exponentially larger Sun that exists behind them.