Heaven

I am now reading Ravi Zacharias' Recapture the Wonder. He's got some good intellectual fodder here, and some strong spiritual exhortation. It's far from exquisite literature, but good for contemplation and conversation. He quotes CS Lewis from The Weight of Glory:

In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each of you--The secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence: The secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow akward and affect to laugh at our selves; The secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name.

Now, that is exquisite literature, and exquisite longing.
What is heaven? What is this place or state of being that we long for, and know must be? How could it be that we would pass from this existence to nowhere or nothing, or something as gray and false as Sheol? No, there must be some Other World that our hearts lift up to. There must be, else our whole existence is a mockery, a very small mockery.