Heaven and Hüzün

Photo by v2osk on Unsplash

I've been thinking a lot about what heaven could be.

As someone in the entrepreneurial world launching my own AI startup, where things move and shift so quickly, I sometimes wonder if we might get bored in heaven. What would it be like to be there for all eternity? Do we even have a concept for it?

I spoke to a pastor today who mentioned that it might be something like being in the Garden of Eden before the Fall.

Everything was great. Why did Adam and Eve have to ruin it? Why did they want to be like God and know good and evil?

It's tough being God! Too much work.

But then, what's wrong with wanting to know?

Apparently, it was less about wanting knowledge and more about not trusting God. More about craving power and trying to stand on equal footing with their Creator.

Why didn't they talk to God and ask him questions about not eating the fruit?

Instead, they trusted the serpent and believed words that painted their Creator as cruel, unloving and withholding.

What I love is how God treated them even after the Fall.

When they became aware of their nakedness and felt ashamed, he first sought them out. Then he confronted them directly about what they had done.

And when he sent them from Eden, preventing them from eating from the Tree of Life and living forever in a fractured state, he first made garments of skin and clothed them.

I find that incredibly intimate.

In the ancient Near East, clothing someone could carry meanings of care, honour and provision. And whatever else the passage means, God meets Adam and Eve precisely where their vulnerability has become visible. They are ashamed of their nakedness, and he covers them.

I'd like to sit with that for a moment and imagine what that act meant.

God must have known what they would do. Yet even knowing this, he still sought them out. He still engaged with them. He uncovered their betrayal of his love and generosity, and still found a way forward for them.

Instead of simply snapping his fingers and producing clothing, Genesis says that God made garments for them.

This is the Creator of the universe taking time to make clothing for the very first two human beings he created, who had in essence turned against him.

I imagine the heartbreak in that.

And perhaps also the desire to slow things down. To linger for a moment before the inevitable fracture and rupture of their eviction from Eden.

The tenderness in that is stark.

I'm feeling Hüzün right now just thinking about it.

What is Hüzün, you ask?

Hüzün is a word that helped me conceptualize heaven.

It roughly translates to melancholy, sorrow or profound sadness, but it carries a cultural and emotional weight that makes it difficult to translate neatly into English.

The concept became especially well known through the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk and his memoir Istanbul: Memories and the City.

Hüzün is notoriously hard to describe. It can be deeply personal, but also collective. Orhan Pamuk uses it to describe something like the comforting melancholy that comes from living among the fading ruins of a grand past. There is sadness in what has been lost, but also something beautiful and deeply tender about being surrounded by what remains.

On a more personal level, it might grip you in moments of utter perfection or bliss. You witness your child laughing and feel the simultaneous ache of knowing that they are already becoming someone else.

It's being at a dinner table full of laughing, smiling faces and leaning fully into the moment while also knowing that it is ephemeral.

It's also the quiet sense of awe and expansiveness that fills your heart when you witness a beautiful sunset. You look at the sky and for a moment it feels almost impossible to drink in how beautiful it is. But part of the ache comes from knowing that it won't last. The colours will change, soon the sun will dip behind the horizon, and it will be dark.

Perhaps that is part of what makes it so beautiful.

Every moment of joy or communal union is intermingled with this ineffable sense of its fleeting nature.

It's the aching realization that nothing beautiful or precious or good on this earth will last forever.

As an entrepreneur, I often feel this.

There are deeply abject moments of struggle and overwhelm, but even in those moments I sometimes find myself appreciating how precious this stage is. I am building and shaping something I created, something born out of my lived experience and a gap I noticed in the world.

I realize that one day, when I look back on these moments, I'm going to miss them.

Someone much further along in the entrepreneurial world once told me that the pre-seed stage is like making your own creature. You are forming something that you deeply love.

That's how I feel about Mira and what I'm building.

I am creating a space for people to come back to themselves and reconnect mind and body. And right now, it is still small enough that I can touch almost every part of it.

One day that will change.

Coming back to heaven.

If we can understand Hüzün here on earth, perhaps it can also help us understand heaven.

What if heaven is a state in which we can experience that same depth of beauty, connection and union, but without the knowledge that it has to end?

No approaching goodbye.

No future absence hiding inside the present.

No need to hold something tightly because we know we will eventually lose it.

What would that feel like?

There is research suggesting that bittersweet emotions, the simultaneous experience of joy and sadness, can deepen our sense of meaning and connection. That intuitively makes sense to me.

Hüzün is not necessarily a malfunction. Sometimes it is a sign that you are actually feeling your life rather than merely managing it.

In many cultures, we are taught to fix the sadness inside the joy. To focus on the positive. To stay present without the ache. To be grateful without the grief.

But perhaps the ache is not a failure of gratitude.

Perhaps it is evidence of love.

You cannot feel Hüzün about something that means nothing to you.

The depth of the melancholy tells you something about the depth of the love.

And perhaps Hüzün reminds us of the impermanence of this material life. Even its joys. Even its meaning. Even the things we would desperately like to keep.

And in doing so, perhaps it points toward our longing for eternity.

Ecclesiastes says that God has "set eternity in the human heart."

Our hearts are the seat of our desires, longings and loves.

So perhaps it should not surprise us that we experience something like Hüzün.

We recognize that beauty and joy are good in themselves, yet we also know they cannot last forever. At least not on this side of eternity.

Heaven.

I think I understand it a little better now.

Not simply as an endless state of pleasure, but as an eventual state of connection and union with our loving Creator.

The one who sought out the very people who had betrayed him.

The one who clothed them in their shame.

The one who did not abandon humanity after Eden.

And ultimately, the one who sent his own Son to the cross for the sake of restoring humanity to himself.

Perhaps heaven is what it feels like when the beauty remains,

and the possibility of losing it is finally gone.

Selah.