The consummation of life on earth is not just individual union with God, but the culmination of history and the coming of the kingdom. In other words, there is a cosmic and not just individual dimension to all earthly existence.

Looking at life from this perspective makes a big difference, as opposed to seeing it as book-ended by two areas of darkness, before birth and after death. Life receives a weight and value not to be had otherwise.

It means that heaven as our destiny irradiates its influence even now. It says that forms of earthly fulfilment do not exhaust our possibilities as creatures. We are more than we seem, and are meant for more than we dream.

There are conventional ideas of heaven, however, that are easy to poke fun at – as Rupert Brooke has fish do in his poem Heaven:
But somewhere, beyond Space and Time/ Is wetter water, slimier slime…/And in that heaven of all their wish/ There shall be no more land, say fish.

There’s little doubt that some images of heaven justify the parody. But there is a purer stream in the tradition, and St Augustine’s famous sentence is a fine example:
There we shall rest, and we shall see; we shall see, and we shall love; we shall love and we shall praise. 

The sentence in fact echoes one of the New Testament’s central messages, which is that to praise God is to exist according to his will. Endless praise is thus not endless flattery, but completely loving adjustment to God, whose will is done perfectly.

There’s no trace of boredom or idleness in this prospect, as there is in all the usual harp-playing imagery. There is no tedium either in the beatific vision (we shall rest, and we shall see), if we remember that it means more than passive inactivity. Eternal life is not eternal star-gazing.

All knowledge and communion on earth is dynamic; it occurs through interaction with reality and with others. It would be strange if the highest communion possible for humans – which is what the beatific vision implies - would lack this interactive dynamic and entail just a passive immobility.

Heaven thus needs to be corrected of unhelpful imagery – corrected, too, of sentimental hopes. For instance, there is no New Testament evidence of reunion of families and friends. Jesus himself taught that “when they rise from the dead, men and women do not marry .,. they are like the angels in heaven.”

This seems a hard saying for widows and widowers. The contrast, however, is not between marriage here and no marriage there. It is between relationships and fulfilment here and fulfilment under completely different conditions there.

Eternal life has no room for exclusivity.What husband and wife experience in their marriage at its best, - oneness, fulfilment, contentment, joy - will be the common experience of all, since all will be united with God, the source of all fulfilment.

We shall no doubt recognise our loved ones, but there will be no reason for some of the imperatives and conditions proper to relationships here – mutuality, covenanting, possession.

The vision of Isaiah, reported in the Book of Isaiah, chapter 6, contains an instructive insight relevant to this matter.

The angels in the vision are saying not to the Lord, but to one another, “Holy, holy, holy, is Yahweh Sabaoth”. CS Lewis, commenting on this text, says that what each of the blessed communicates to each is the joy and ecstasy of fulfilment. All claims of particularity (I and my) or exclusivity (ours not yours) have completely disappeared.

The end of life as the final coming of the Kingdom has its own issues about continuity.  Biblical scholars affirm – and no one today disputes it – that the Kingdom of God was the heart and soul, the main thrust of Jesus’ preaching.

From the record of the gospels the kingdom was both something present (in Jesus himself and in the new values and possibilities he inaugurated) and simultaneously something to be fully realised with the final establishment of God’s rule over creation.

As often happens in Christian history, you find advocates who emphasise one or other aspect of the reality. Those who stress the present reality hold that the values we bring into existence through our service of the Kingdom will in some way be taken up in the age to come.

They will not simply disappear or be destroyed. Those who emphasise the future stress discontinuity. Earthly and heavenly realities do not belong to the same order.

The issue was addressed during the course of Vatican II. In its pastoral Decree on The Church, the Council finally settled on a position which came down on neither side: “[W]hile earthly progress must be carefully distinguished from the growth of Christ's kingdom, to the extent that the former can contribute to the better ordering of human society, it is of vital concern to the Kingdom of God” (Gaudium et Spes, chapter 3, par. 39).

And that is where the matter still substantially stands. The other issue that has come to the fore in the more recent times is that of the time of the Lord’s Second Coming. This has never quite been a matter of urgency for Catholics as it has been for other Christians, though the issue touches upon matters of importance and merit.

As everyone knows, the early Christians longed for a relatively quick return of the Lord after the resurrection. They expected him soon. But time passed, and gradually accommodations had to be made. Soon became the prophetic at any time, you don’t know when.

More than others, Catholics emphasise the scriptural text, Mk 13:32: But as for that day and hour, nobody knows it, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son; no one but the Father.

It’s one thing, however, to say, that no one knows the day or the hour. It’s another thing to rule out surmise, or seeing events and signs as anticipations of the day. In fact, the history of “end times” reflection is a history of such surmise.

It is also a history of continued disconfirmation. Paradoxically, however, the failure of prophecy only serves to make convictions stronger and harder to dislodge. The reason finally is that the predictive sources are not some rational perspective but a fundamental vision of hope.

The motivating factor is a desire for a different world, without the tragic disfigurements of this one. All such predictions thus underline our wayfaring status.

They also remind us that what we hunger for is what we nowhere see - a world transformed and a life of completion beyond all human imagination.