Heaven Over Tea
Alan Watts once told a joke about an English vicar whose housekeeper had died. I heard the story only once, so the details might have shifted, but the core is the same.
After the funeral, the mourners gathered for tea. It was all very proper. Club sandwiches, polite talk, the faint clatter of silver spoons. They spoke of how good she had been, how devoted, and how surely she was now with God.
The vicar nodded solemnly and said, “Yes, she has gone to be with the Lord in heaven, and one day we shall all be reunited.”
“But now let us talk about something more cheerful.”
The conversation drifted back to the weather and cookie recipes.
Watts told it as a joke, but it is one of those jokes that leaves a theological echo. The kind that makes you wonder what people, even church people, really believe.
Because if heaven is so wonderful, why is everyone terrified of it?
It is strange. We speak of eternal life as if it was a depressing topic. Perhaps that is what it has become: a nice story we repeat, not a truth we want to test. We hope for paradise, yet cling to every breath that keeps us here.
But if heaven is real, if there is truly a place of peace beyond this, then why do we fight so hard to stay alive? Why do we mourn the dead instead of envying them? I do not mean that as a provocation. It is simply the logical conclusion of what we claim to believe.
I think the answer is very simple.
Maybe it is because we do not believe heaven is real, or we sense that an eternity spent there, stripped of all the beautiful, cruel craziness we live through on earth, might not be bliss at all, but Sunday school forever.
And so here we are.
We keep sipping tea. We pretend that living forever would be beautiful, while knowing somewhere in the back of our heads that what gives real meaning to our life is that it ends.