Undying love and redemptive sacrifice set within a spiritual world. What are we to make of these films? In City of Angels, Nicholas Cage plays the angel who chooses to fall into the arms of Meg Ryan, a mortal who has captured his heart. In What Dreams May Come, Robin Williams stars as the husband who would rather descend to hell than be separated from his precious wife. Students with whom I’ve discussed these films tend to dismiss both as more Hollywood heresy, or find themselves deeply moved by their celebration of love and sacrifice. Somehow, both critiques miss the mark. I find that these films are telling us something important, something we must know about ourselves and our faith as we plunge into the postmodern era.

Our dilemma is this: where will we find what our hearts most deeply yearn for?

First, the films have it right when it comes to the deepest longings of the human soul. We long for life. All of us. It’s not just happiness we’re after. We long for something more, something we can barely put into words. We long to be alive, to be in love, to live an adventure of intimacy that will never end. Our dilemma — the dilemma of every person that has ever lived — is this: where will we find what our hearts most deeply yearn for? It’s the deepest question of the human heart and therefore the central theme of most novels, films, songs and poetry.

Is this all there is? This life we share on earth — what Shakespeare called a “mere breath, a scene” — is this our only shot at the life we prize? The human dilemma is made more or less desperate depending on your answer. If death is not the end, if there is a world beyond, the possibility of finding what our hearts are seeking is suddenly increased, dramatically. This is why I found Angels and Dreams so surprising, so profound; parables of our soul’s journey from the Modern to the Postmodern era.

The scriptwriters have lifted the horizons of our search. By allowing for a life to continue after death, they’ve placed our soul’s quest for life within a spiritual, eternal world. Remarkable. Throughout the modern era, you’ll remember, we were told that since there is no afterlife, this life here and now is our only shot at happiness. As Carl Sagan chanted week after week, the cosmos is all that is, or was or ever will be. It was devastating to the human spirit. There has got to be more.

And so we watch with hope and yearning as Cage rescues Ryan from her scientific framework. A physician, Ryan is the champion of modernism. Science and technology are what’s important. There is nothing more. In Tolstoy’s memorable phrase, we are only about “particles and progress.” She tells Cage that she is only the cells she views in her microscope. We know better, and so we cheer as the angel pulls her heart out of the prison of modernism.

In a similar manner, Williams comes to learn that he, too, is more than particles and progress. He dies, yet he lives. A friend in heaven asks him, “Did you think you were your body?” Williams says no, but perhaps my brain. “Your brain is only meat.” An astounding comment, given the worship of the mind in the modern era. How happy we are to see these mortals come to realize that we are all eternal beings, we have souls. The options for our happiness have just opened up in a remarkable way. Maybe what we long for is heaven. As C.S. Lewis wrote, “If I find in myself desires which nothing on earth can satisfy, the only reasonable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

And here is where both films turn on us. There is an afterlife, and it’s really something, only ... it’s not nearly as impressive as this life. The angels in Angels are hardly joyful beings. They wear black. They have no sense experience and no direct contact with God. They spend their days hanging around the library (not exactly a place of intimacy and adventure). In Dreams, we do see Williams ushered into a sort of paradise, and while it is beautiful, it is also lonely. He misses his wife. Rather than “wiping every tear from his eye,” death increases his pain. He once had love, but now he doesn’t and never will again.

Have the scriptwriters deliberately diminished paradise in order to further their dramatic ends — or are they telling us something about our own conceptions of what’s next? I’ve spoken to hundreds of Christians about their views of heaven, and I find the films are pretty much on target, if not better. Most people don’t even think about heaven. Most churches don’t preach about it, except to warn you about making sure you get there. But what is “there,” and how does it relate to our search for life? Those believers who have given a thought associate heaven with some sort of religious experience. “We shall worship God for ever and ever,” is the typical reply.

And something in my heart says, “That’s it? Heaven is an unending church service? That sounds like hell to me.” I mean, church is fine, but it doesn’t exactly take your breath away. Ecstasy. Intimacy. Adventure. Those aren’t words most of us associate with what we experience on Sunday mornings.

Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft writes,

Our pictures of heaven simply do not move us; they are not moving pictures. It is this aesthetic failure rather than intellectual or moral failures in our pictures of heaven and of God that threatens faith most potently today. Our pictures of heaven are dull, platitudinous and syrupy; therefore, so is our faith, our hope and our love of heaven ... It doesn’t matter whether it’s a dull lie or a dull truth. Dullness, not doubt, is the strongest enemy of faith.

In other words, you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you ... bored. Before the Modern Era turned Christian faith into a program of tips and techniques (three steps for a good quiet time; four ways to better share your faith), the soul’s journey into the heart of God was thought to be the greatest romance of all. God’s invitation to us through Christ is not primarily an invitation to become a moral person, but an invitation to intimacy, an invitation into the heart of things, a sacred romance that culminates in the beauty, mystery, adventure and love of heaven.

Our most urgent question is not “how can I be a better person,” but “will I find love and will it last?” Somehow as Christians we’ve forgotten that and traded the thirst of our souls for a program of duty and morality. But as Chesterton said, “Romance is the deepest thing in life; it is deeper even than reality.”

The God portrayed in both films isn’t much different than the God of Christianity during the modern era. He is sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient ... and distant. God may be the source of absolute truth and moral law ... but not the lover of your soul. And while we may fear and worship such a God, we do not fall in love with Him, we don’t see Him as the essence of our heart’s desires. As Melville said,

The reason that most men fear God and at bottom dislike Him is that they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain, like a watch.

Who wants to spend eternity with a watch? And so with sympathy we see the heroes turn away from God, from heaven, for life that is more real, more satisfying. Can we blame them? The message of the films is made all the more diabolical by the truth on which they rest. But perhaps it will force us to dive more deeply into the imagery of the Gospel as a Sacred Romance, where God is our heart’s true lover and heaven the culmination of the affair.

We will worship God in heaven, but not as the church service with no end. Long ago, wedding vows used to contain this phrase: “With my body, I thee worship.” Sexual intimacy was considered the closest parallel to actual worship. Wow. The intimacy the soul experiences with God in heaven is not sing-a-long, but something closer to sexual union — a vulnerability, an unreserved giving and receiving, a knowing of each other. And the intimacy that begins with God flows outward to all the partakers of the Grand Affair. Scottish poet George MacDonald wrote that “I think then we shall be able to pass into and through each other’s very souls as we please, knowing each other’s thought and being ... and so being like God.” The intimacy that we long for, the connection that eludes us here even in the best relationships, it will be ours in heaven.

But there is more. We long for adventure as well. And we will not be disappointed. In the parables of the minas and the talents, Jesus alludes to a day where the gifts He has been developing in us will be given full expression in the kingdom of God. He calls it “entering into the joy of your master.” What is that joy? The creative exhilaration that God enjoys every day as He unfolds the universe. Remember, we will “reign with Him,” meaning we will share in His creative work as glorified men and women. Heaven is not the end of the action, it is the beginning of real life.

As Lewis says in the last words of the last book in the Chronicles of Narnia series, The Last Battle,

But the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us, this is the end of all the stories and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page; now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read; which goes on forever; in which every chapter is better than the one before.