Heaven is much greater than you can imagine
Thomas Aquinas' experience will give you an example

Before I can tell you what we can learn about Heaven from Thomas Aquinas, we have to talk about why we care what Thomas Aquinas experienced. Was he an important person in Church History? If you are Protestant, then no. If you are Catholic, then, oh yeah, he is extremely important.

Aquinas (c. 1225 - 1274) was a Dominican friar and priest. [A friar is a special kind of monk. Some Catholic monastic orders require vows of poverty. Monks from those monastic orders are known as “friars.”]. His father was a knight and his older brothers became knights, but Aquinas wanted to become a Dominican friar. His family even went so far as to kidnap him and imprisoned him in their castle for a year, but he would not give up on his dream. Eventually, his mother allowed him to escape, and he traveled to Rome and joined the Dominicans.

One unique characteristic of Aquinas was that he did not speak much, leading some people to think that he was ignorant. But his brilliance came out in his writings. The greatest of those was his Summa Theologica, translated as Summmary of Theology. Now, you might think that is an arrogant title that only an arrogant author would use, that his books are the summary of theology, and you would be right, except in the case of Aquinas.

While he was man of few spoken words, his writings astounded all, this book plus other books he wrote. So much so that he was canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church only 50 years after he died. As the Protestant Reformation grew in Europe in the 1500s, the Catholic Church called a council that tried to counter the reform movement. The altar at the church where the council was held had a Bible, letters that popes had written, and Summa Theologica. Pope Leo XIII stated in an encyclical (letter from the pope) in 1879 that Aquinas’ theology was the definitive explanation of Catholic doctrine. His theology is so prominent that it has a name: Thomist theology. In 1880, Aquinas was named the patron saint of all Catholic schools. In 1907, Pope Pius X declared that all professors had to teach from Aquinas’ books.

In 1965, Pope Paul IV declared that Aquinas’ writings are the core of theological studies for all Catholic priests.

OK, so he is very important to Catholics, but what does that have to do with Heaven? Only this, it is obvious that Aquinas knew the Bible quite well. It is also obvious that Aquinas prayed often and that he thought much about the spiritual world and the afterlife, which he wrote about.

But then we have this, which is the point of this article: One day Aquinas was celebrating mass [taking Communion at a worship service] when he received a vision from God. It was so powerful and dramatic, that he stopped writing his last book. His secretary, Brother Reginald, asked Aquinas why he stopped writing. Aquinas replied, “The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that been revealed to me.” Soon afterwards, Brother Reginald encouraged him to continue writing, and Aquinas replied, “I can write no more. I have seen things that make my writings like straw.”

Aquinas died three months later, not having written or described his spiritual experience, so we have no idea what he witnessed.

But his experience can give us comfort that heaven is so much more vastly wonderful than anything we can imagine. Here with Aquinas, we have a person who thought more deeply than the rest of us about God and Christian matters, yet, when God allowed him a vision of the spiritual realm, all he could say was, everything I have thought and wrote about is absolutely nothing compared to the actual wonders of heaven. Basically, all Aquinas could say after getting a glimpse of “the other side” was, it is so fantastic that I just have to shut up, there is nothing I can say or write that would come close to describing it. And this from a man who knew how to write well!

What a great comfort for us in our future, since we will one day be there. What a great comfort as we think about our Christian friends and family members who have died and are now with God and get to experience a joy that even Thomas found surpassed anything he could write about.