I have always wondered where heaven is. Since Jesus and Mary are in heaven in their bodies, surely we should be able to locate heaven somewhere in space with respect to earth. Can you answer this for me?
You present a conundrum with which many people have wrestled. As you imply in your question, the location of any material body in the universe can be defined with respect to any other location, including planet earth. We can know how far away it is and in which direction. If we had a means of transport that went at the speed of light we could conceivably travel there, although it might take billions of years! After all, there are galaxies which are billions of light years away from earth. And we could go to heaven even while we were still alive.
Obviously we can’t do that. What is more, the bodies of Jesus and Mary are not physical bodies like ours. They are spiritual bodies, with spiritual properties.
So then, where is heaven? A good starting point is that heaven is where God is. As the Catechism says, “This perfect life with the Most Holy Trinity—this communion of life and love with the Trinity, with the Virgin Mary, the angels and all the blessed—is called ‘heaven’” (CCC 1024). In heaven we will be with God, with the Blessed Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as well as with Our Lady, the angels and all the saints, including our loved ones.
But where is God? When we ask a question that begins with “where,” we immediately think in terms of position in space. We can’t help that. That is the way we think. Following this human way of thinking, the answer will be that this being of which we inquire is somewhere on earth, or in the solar system, in our galaxy or in some other galaxy.
The Catechism explains this difficulty in talking about any aspect of God, including where he is: “Since our knowledge of God is limited, our language about him is equally so. We can name God only by taking creatures as our starting point, and in accordance with our limited human ways of knowing and thinking” (CCC 40).
Since we creatures exist in time and space, we tend to think that God must be in time and space too. But obviously he is not. He is not in time, where there is a before and after, but rather in eternity, where everything is present to him at once. This is a difficult concept to grasp, but it is the reality.
Similarly, he is not in space. He is outside of space as we know it. God, being spiritual, is in another, spiritual, realm of existence. When we ask the question “Where is God?” in children’s catechisms, we answer that God is everywhere. But this “everywhere” does not mean everywhere in space as we know it. God’s “space” is spiritual. Therefore, God cannot be located in terms of physical bodies in our own universe. This is a mystery, but it is something we must simply accept because it is a reality.
Since heaven is spiritual, we cannot go there by physical means, whether by spaceship or any other means of transport. We can go to heaven only by spiritual means. That is, we must live a good life, be sorry for all our sins, make up for those sins either on earth or in purgatory, and then God will take us to heaven.
There we will experience the indescribable joy of being with God, Our Lady, the angels and all the saints, overwhelmed by God’s love, with our desire for happiness completely satisfied. As the Catechism puts it, “Heaven is the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness” (CCC 1024).
Heaven is real. We know this, among other reasons, by the accounts of the thousands of people who have had near-death experiences, where their soul went to heaven and experienced God’s immense love, and then came back to earth to tell us about it. One day we can be in heaven too. It is where God is, not in physical space, but in a spiritual realm.