Does heaven speak?  Many of us are familiar with the New Testament accounts of Jesus' baptism.  After Jesus was baptized and rose from the water, these accounts go, a voice was heard, a voice which seemed to come from heaven, the voice of a person who identified himself as Jesus' heavenly father.  Heaven, those who were there believed, had spoken.
     Of course not everyone believes these accounts.  Not everyone believes that God had a son or that he actually spoke.  Not everyone believes that heaven, whatever and wherever it may be, expressed itself.  Yet if these accounts are true, there is indeed what theologian Karl Barth called a "strange new world" outside or beyond but nonetheless connected to the one we currently inhabit.  And it is a world that communicates with us.  On the other hand, if these accounts are not true and there is neither God nor heaven, much less ones that speak to us, we live in a world that we define solely on the basis of itself.
     Yet as the philosopher Hans Gadamer observed, even if we engage in the things that seem to be "there," we still do not know what is actually there.  We still do not know what "is."  We therefore always need to be open to the possibility that what we think is there may not be everything that actually is, and, more importantly, what we do not think is there may in fact actually be so.
     We won't hear heaven unless we believe we might or, can.  But if heaven is there, it, and its voice will be greater than all of our epistemological limitations.