What heaven is like, according to St. Catherine of Sienna

For the last five years, we've volunteered as catechists preparing fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds for the Sacrament of Confirmation,  old enough for real conversation, when they're in the mood for it. Before that, we spent about fifteen years with seven and eight-year-olds preparing for First Communion. Their questions were simpler, but one came up again and again: "What is heaven like? What do people do there?" They'd usually heard that, when an older relative died, he'd gone to heaven to be with the angels, and they'd seen the puffy-cloud drawings in their picture books to match.

St. Catherine of Siena had the same question as the young children. In the deepest hours of her prayer, she asked God directly what awaited the soul who loved him, and what she received back has shaped the Church's imagination of heaven for over six hundred years.

Who Was St. Catherine of Siena?

Catherine was born in Siena, Italy, in 1347, one of twenty-five children in a wool dyer's home. Even as a small girl, her intense prayer life unsettled her family. At six, she saw a vision of Christ over a church and, by seven, had committed her life to him. At fifteen, she cut her hair and resisted her parents' plans to marry her off.

At eighteen, she joined the Mantellate, a community of Dominican laywomen who wore the habit and took vows but lived in their own homes rather than behind cloister walls. She spent three years in near silence, in a small room in her parents' house, immersed in prayer, and there reached what is called a "spiritual marriage" to the Lord, a near-perfect union with God.

When she did step out, she did so boldly: nursing plague victims when others fled, healing the sick, and writing fearless letters to popes and princes. She's remembered for persuading Pope Gregory XI to return the papacy to Rome from Avignon, and for spending her final months ministering to the pope and cardinals there. She became known as a pure channel of God, a mystic unafraid to speak her mind to the Church's own leadership.

She died in 1380, at only 33. In 1970, the Church declared her a Doctor of the Church, one of only a handful of women ever given that title.

Her great spiritual work came out of her deepest prayer. In a state of mystical absorption, she dictated to her secretaries what she believed were God's words, speaking directly to her heart. That book is called The Dialogue of Divine Providence.

The Church has never asked us to treat Catherine's visions the way we treat Scripture. Private revelation, even from a canonized Doctor of the Church, doesn't bind our faith the way the Creed does. But the Church has recognized something worth our attention in Catherine's writing: a vision of heaven and hell that rings true with Scripture and the Catechism.

Christ the Bridge: Three Stairs Toward Heaven

In the Dialogue, God tells Catherine that the road to heaven was broken by Adam's sin. Not detoured. Broken. Humanity was left on one side of a gorge, with heaven on the other, no way across.

So God tells her he made a bridge of his Son.

I think that's a beautiful image: not a door we knock on, or a ladder we climb by our own strength, but a bridge built from a holy body, stretched from earth into heaven, so nothing of our humanity gets left behind in the crossing.

Catherine saw that this bridge had three stairs built right into it.

The first stair is at Christ's feet, where the soul strips herself of sin. This is the hard part: admitting what we need to let go of, the vices and attachments we've been dragging around like bags we never meant to pack.

The second stair rises to his side, to his heart, where the soul fills herself with love and virtue, as a cup fills once there's finally room after detachment from sin.

The third stair reaches Christ's mouth. And there, Catherine says, the soul tastes peace.

What an interesting choice of words: not experiences peace, tastes it. As if heaven, even in this life, is something we're meant to savor slowly, like something you waited a long time for. Like our daughter's pecan pie.

Heaven as Union: "Like a Fish in the Sea"

What waits at the top of the bridge isn't a building or a throne room, despite the images in Revelation. It's perfect union.

Catherine describes the soul united to God this way: the soul is in God, and God is in the soul, as a fish is in the sea and the sea is in the fish.

Think about this. The fish doesn't admire the ocean from the shore; it's completely immersed in it, and the ocean moves through its gills, sustaining its whole life. Neither one disappears. That complete immersion is what awaits us in heaven: the love of God.

That's Catherine's vision of heaven. Not observing God from a respectful distance. Being so immersed in him that his life becomes the very air we breathe, while we remain completely and gloriously ourselves.

St. Paul says something close to this: "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face" (1 Corinthians 13:12). St. John says it too: "We shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is" (1 John 3:2). And the Catechism puts the Church's teaching simply: heaven is "this perfect life with the Most Holy Trinity — this communion of life and love with the Trinity... the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness" (CCC 1024), since those who reach it "see the divine essence... face to face, without the mediation of any creature" (CCC 1023). Please see the article "How would we change in heaven?"

St. Catherine even has God tell her that she is "she who is not," and he is "He who is." It sounds severe out of context, but I hear it as the deepest consolation. Our whole identity, our whole capacity to love and be loved forever, isn't something we manufacture. We receive it through grace, the way the fish receives the sea around it, simply by being held in the life of the One who is.

How beautiful. 

Reunited: What Happens to Our Relationships in Heaven

I love a detail in Catherine's vision.

God tells Catherine that reality runs deeper in both directions than we tend to assume. Sin and evil are uglier and more destructive than we can picture. But heaven's beauty and goodness are just as far beyond our imagination.

That unimaginable beauty touches something close to home: our relationship. I often get this question: would we even recognize our loved ones? God tells Catherine that the friendships and marriages we built "in the Lord" here on earth don't fade in heaven, or get filed away as memories. They grow. Jesus taught that we won't be married there, but we will know and love the people we loved on earth even more fully than we ever managed here.

That includes the people already there, watching for us. St. Catherine learns that souls in heaven haven't stopped loving those still making their way toward them. Their whole desire is to see God honored in us, so they keep interceding for us before him. We are not alone down here. We are known. We are loved, even now, which is why we ask the saints to pray for us.

Catherine is told that our very bodies will be glorified, made like Christ's own risen body. This confirms what we say every time we recite the Creed: "I believe in the resurrection of the body." The Catechism teaches that Christ "will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body" (CCC 999). Catherine's vision makes that line vivid.

And none of it, she learns, is ever boring. The souls in heaven are described as hungry for God's love and satisfied at once: endlessly filled, yet still reaching. It's less like a meal that eventually ends, and more like a conversation with someone you love deeply, one that keeps opening into fascinating new rooms the longer it goes on.

Heaven, according to Catherine, isn't a place where a deceased Grandpa sits around waiting for us with nothing to do. He's been drawn so completely into God's love that every leftover restlessness, every old grief, every unanswered why, is finally, fully at peace. He tastes peace.

Grandpa hasn't stopped loving his children, either. If that love was built in the Lord, Catherine would tell us it hasn't faded into memory; it's grown. Some of his prayers tonight may well be for them.

And the stairs she describes aren't only for the next life. They're for this one too. Every time we let go of something small and sinful, we're on the first stair. Every time we choose love over self-interest, even in something as unremarkable as doing the dishes without being asked, we're on the second. And every so often, in a quiet moment of prayer, we get a taste — just a taste — of the third.

In other words, heaven has already begun. We just haven't fully crossed yet. Unfortunately for some, hell has also already begun, and we must always pray for the conversion of sinners.

Lord, thank you for the bridge you built from your own body, so nothing in us would have to be left behind. Give us the courage to climb the first stair today, the grace to fill ourselves with real love on the second, and even just a taste of your peace on the third. Make us, like St. Catherine, so immersed in you that we forget where we end, and you begin. Amen.

If this reflection moved you, you may consider sitting with Catherine's own words in The Dialogue of Divine Providence. What do you think of the heaven she describes and our relationship with loved ones? I'd love to hear in the comments.

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May God bless you and grant you peace