HEAVEN KNOWS - A Short Story (Heaven's Library)

When I first arrived in Heaven (and it seems like yesterday) I was surprised that there seemed to be so few inhabitants.

Now I had been warned that not everyone goes there after mortality, but it looked to me like a college campus during summer vacation!

After all, I was no angel myself, and if I could make it I just figured that Heaven would be crowded with other "merry makers," too.

When I was settled in, and felt comfortable asking questions about my new surroundings, one of the first things I asked was "Where is everybody?"

My guide and I were just passing the library, and she sort of scrunched up her youthful face in an expression that told me she was giving my question deep thought (we have lots of time for that here) and replied that she thought it had something to do with the library.

Incredulous (a word that hardly gets used here, at least in its second meaning of "disbelief"!) I asked what a library could have to do with the relative scarcity of folks like me.

She answered that the answer might be found in one section of the library devoted exclusively to mortality, and she would show me.

We entered the library, a really massive and well utilized structure, and made our way to the back recesses where she pointed to dusty shelves of what appeared to be a massive collection of what I recognized as probably being shelf after shelf, and floor after floor, of what we used to call videotapes, DVDs, and memory chips.

"What are all these about?" It seemed like a reasonable question.

"These are Heaven's recordings of life in mortality. Specifically, you can check out recordings made by the angels of every day, each day of your life, from the time you first woke up to the time you went to sleep, including your thoughts from that day."

"But why should that be a factor in there being so few inhabitants, relatively speaking?" (Which by the way is a lot of what I hear being discussed here, namely relatives.)

She replied, "Surely I am only speculating, but many arrive here in Heaven excited that they made it, only to be taken here in their orientation, just as I have brought you here, and when they discover that anyone can check out a day in the life of anyone else who ever lived, they suddenly realize that anyone else who ever lived can check out any and every day of their own mortal lives."

Suddenly it dawned on me what the implications of being able to do so might be. I was not at all sure, and on second thought I was a hundred percent sure, that there would be a great many days from my mortal life that I would not want the other inhabitants of Heaven to be able to watch over and over again, ad infinitum. And with the already scary mixed blessing of Perfect Recall, I was already having mental images of the most shameful parts of each day of my mortality, similar to what I then realized I will eventually be faced with on my Judgement Day.

I could see that my guide was assessing my own reaction to this section of the library, and, having done so, se sympathetically added that "There is something we don't always share with every newcomer, but I will share it with you. The reason the shelves are so dusty is because we each have Perfect Recall, so we can recall any day of our own mortal existence by simply thinking about it. For that reason none of us need check out these records of our own life. And what is even more significant, none of us who choose to stay has ever checked out these files on another person's days in mortaility, because we all believe in not judging each other any more than we would want others to judge us."

It was the most precious insight into life in Heaven that I had been given up to that moment. I wondered only briefly why guides for other newcomers might not have given the same insight to those newcomers, many of whom I was told had decided that they would be too eternally embarassed, if they had chosen to remain in Heaven.

That insight planted the final seeds of what my eventual Judgement Day was probably going to cover, and what it might be like.

(c) 2011 Demas W. Jasper All rights reserved.