Imagine describing what music is like to someone who has never heard a sound. How would you do it? It would be so far from the realm of their experience that you would have nothing to go on really. That's like describing heaven to someone who has only known life here on earth.

Now, we know that not one of us has ever been there. But suppose a few of us could pay a visit to heaven just to check it out and come back and tell the rest of us about what it's like. I suspect that it's so foreign to anything that we've ever experienced here on earth that there's no way they'd be able to describe it to us.

Most of the time, when we think about heaven, we have to resort to imagery to which we can relate. We'll talk about pearly gates or streets paved with gold. We'll describe it as a place where …