Lean not on your own understanding

Cognitive humility is again in order when we try to think about what happens after death, and how. All our thinking is limited by time and space, but God is not so limited. We think of heaven and hell as "places" because to our limited minds everything has a "hereness" and a "thereness," but it is not so with God. - Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Death on a Friday Afternoon


And so we think "in heaven with you" or "in hell without you."  In your presence or apart from you. 


Maybe it's nothing more than eternally together or eternally alone.

Maybe the decision of eternity is whether we shall spend eternal timelessness in fellowship with God and all of creation, including all other intelligence, for which we are created, versus the isolated contemplation every thought on which our own mind is capable of focusing without the company of others. I can see how the latter could be hell.

Therefore it is rightly said that all theology is finally doxology.  That is to say, all analysis and explanation finally dissolves into wonder and praise. - ibid.


I would add an intermediate step of "relationship" before "wonder and praise." For all that we seek to know about God, to gain an understanding in our minds of all that God is, we will ever be unable to.  Ultimately, we either give ourselves to him or we don't.  When we finally do entrust our heart to the One who is love, we discover so much more about him that we could never grasp with our mind alone, and wonder and praise are the inevitable result!