Are We Beautiful in Heaven?

People wonder whether heaven is beautiful. Almost no one wonders whether WE are, once we get there.

And of course we are. We have to be. That much feels obvious, though it's worth asking why.
We spend our mortal lives optimizing for length, for health, for the hope of belonging to something eternal afterward. So what kind of beauty are we bringing with us? Not the physical kind, surely. That fades long before most of us die, and we've already decided, as a culture, that it belongs to the young. It can't be the currency of eternity if it doesn't even last a lifetime.

It must be something else, then. Something accumulated. A beauty that develops over the years, survives the body, ages well, the kind we mean when we say someone grew beautiful, rather than was.

But then what about a child? A child who never had the years. Never developed anything. Are they beautiful in heaven just the same? If yes, beauty must be automatic at birth, which collapses the whole accumulated-over-a-lifetime theory. If no, we've said something we don't want to have said.

Maybe beauty simply isn't the right word for whatever happens there. And if beauty isn't, then joy probably isn't either. Nor smiles, nor recognition, nor any of the things we keep quietly packing for the trip. We are so tethered to these concepts that we can't picture an eternity without them, which is the problem: every image we have of heaven is an image of here, lightly edited.

An ant has no model of what a human thinks. Not a wrong one. None. The gap isn't in the details; it's in the kind of thing thinking is for an ant versus a human. We might be the ant in this metaphor, reaching for words like beauty because they are the only words we have, and mistaking the reach for an answer.

So then the most likely option is to trust supernatural forces in defining and controlling what they call beautiful, because of course we are beautiful in heaven.