I Will See You in Heaven (Cat Lover's Edition). Jack Wintz

humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth.”

      Finally, in Genesis 1:31, “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.” This “very good” label, which God places upon both human and nonhuman creatures, seems to be an argument for God’s desire to have both classes of creatures share in the original Garden of Paradise, where peace and harmony reigned between God and human beings, upon creature and creature. Certainly, God is not going to create—and then ignore—what he perceives as “very good” creatures!

      God does everything out of love, and this includes the creation of our world. God’s words to the people of Israel in Jeremiah 31:3 also come to mind: “I have loved you with an everlasting love.” The Psalms, too, remind us that God’s “steadfast love endures forever.” In Psalm 136 alone, the refrain “his steadfast love endures forever” is repeated twenty-five times.

      Our God is a God of overflowing love, goodness, and beauty who is ready to give over everything to those he loves. This goodness is reflected in the whole family of creation. When God says of any creature, whether human or nonhuman, that it is “good” or “very good,” it is not simply a matter of moral goodness. The creature also has an inherent goodness and beauty—a beauty that reflects God, who is Beauty itself. Surely the Creator would not suddenly stop loving and caring for the creatures he had put into existence with so much care.

      Moo

      Here’s my baby who passed last year after a year of sickness. Moo was the sweetest thing ever!

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       The Happiness Principle

      In the original picture we have of the Garden of Eden before the fall, Adam and Eve and all the creatures are living together happily in peace and harmony in the presence of a loving God—a wonderful and insightful glimpse of the paradise that is to come.

      It makes sense to me that the same loving Creator who arranged for these animals and other nonhuman creatures to enjoy happiness in the original Garden would not want to exclude them from the final paradise. If they were happy and enjoying God’s presence, according to their abilities, in that first Garden, God would want them to be happy and enjoy the same in the restored garden.

      My friend Jon in Vermont (the one who adopted Katana), recalled recently how he felt when he was a young boy and his cat, Smudge, ran away.

      “I didn’t blame her at all,” Jon explained, “because my brother and I used to chase her a bit and sometimes dress her in our clothes. I’m sure that she didn’t like that, but we didn’t know how to behave the right way around a cat,” he said with a sigh.

      In the days immediately after she was gone Jon remembers wondering to himself, “Will I see Smudge in heaven someday?” Heaven was on his mind a lot, then, he said, because he was learning about it in Sunday school.

      “I hoped so much that I would see her,” he explained to me.

      One Sunday morning, Jon asked his pastor if he would see Smudge in heaven, and the pastor unequivocally replied, “No, only humans,” to the boy’s question. Jon had felt confused and sad about this. But as I said to Jon, I would have said “Yes.” That little boy was so unhappy when his cat was gone, fearing that she might be dead. He didn’t need a lot of theology. He just needed to know that God loves us and God also loves all creatures. Once we pass through this life and on to the next, and we see God face to face, the theological questions will become less important than they seem to be now.

      Just as the original Creation was very good with animals as a part of it, so too, it seems, our future lives will be very good and will include animals. No one should presume to tell you or me that we will never again see our pets that died many years ago.

      I recall learning in my theology classes that in God there is no past, present, or future. There is only an “eternal now.” Who can say, therefore, that the God who created all things does not hold in memory all the creatures God has ever made? They were created as good, all of creation was very good together, and there’s no reason why that should change in the eternal future.

      The creation story in Genesis says nothing about the future, only about those initial moments when all things were made. But we wonder what will happen in the afterlife—in the new heaven and the new earth that is to come. This is a big-time mystery. There are many things about our future paradise that surpass human understanding. We simply do not know what awaits us in heaven. As St. Paul tells the Corinthians, “We teach what scripture calls: the things that no eye has seen and no ear has heard, things beyond the mind of man, all that God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor. 2:9 JB).

      The Garden of Eden is not only a story of the way the world was created; it is also a metaphor for the final paradise that our loving Creator envisioned before time began.