Charles Brammall
My opening to a work I submitted at Bible college on “Heaven”, was the lyric from a David Byrne (Talking Heads) song, “Heaven”:
“Everyone is trying to get to the bar
The name of the bar, the bar is called Heaven
The band in Heaven, they play my favorite song
Play it one more time, play it all night long
Oh, Heaven
Heaven is the place
A place where nothing
Nothing ever happens…
There is a party, everyone is there
Everyone will leave at exactly the same time
When this party’s over, it will start again
Will not be any different, will be exactly the same…
When this kiss is over, it will start again
Will not be any different, will be exactly the same
It’s hard to imagine that nothing at all
Could be so exciting, could be this much fun”
Suffice to say, the Principal (my lecturer) was unimpressed.
Actress Diane Keaton who died this week, wrote, directed and narrated a 1987 lyrical documentary film “Heaven”, about which she said:
“I created it as I was still that child who wanted to go to heaven.”
It is Diane’s theology- on celluloid, about what normal people believe happens to them after death.
The film’s collage of ordinary interviewees includes people from many traditions, including Christian believers whose words are tender and Biblically saturated, including:
“Heaven’s where I’ll see my mother again. It’s not clouds— it’s home.”
“If I can just see Jesus smile once, I don’t need to ask Him anything else.”
“We’ll know fully, even as we are fully known.” (citing 1 Cor 13:12)
These are not polished theologians, but everyonewomen/men whose trust and longing give the film its heart. Keaton does not mock or edit them to irony; she permits their humanity to speak for itself.
She closes the film not with conclusiveness, but with humility:
“Maybe heaven is the love you give away, that somehow comes back.
This gentle but sorrowful uncertainty (not quite unbelief, but longing), mirrors her own adult stance: agnostic in intellect, but reverent in tone.
(“Agnostic” refers to those who believe it is impossible for us to know whether or not there is a God.)
And Evangelical Christians’ reviews of Heaven have often responded with empathy and compassion rather than defensiveness.
The late John Stott (in The Contemporary Christian) once said:
“Our curiosity about heaven must be governed by revelation, but our yearning for it is part of the image of God in us.”
Vale Diane.
She died at 79 years old this week from Pneumonia. She was in LA where she was born, bred, and lived. Her family initially declined to disclose a cause for her death, but she had suffered months of declining health and weight loss.
Tributes from across Hollywood filled the media, from Al Pacino to Meryl Streep, and younger actors who called her “a north star for intelligent women in comedy”.
Mum, Dorothy Keaton Hall, a devout Free Methodist, was an amateur photographer.
Dad Jack was a civil engineer with Irish Catholic ancestry.
So Diane was raised in a religiously blended family, and absorbed Mum’s mix of moral earnestness and creative imagination.
The actress had three siblings, Randy, Robin, and Dorrie (Dorothy), in a childhood marked by storytelling and churchgoing.
Also by a fascination with the “grand themes” of heaven, love, death, and the fear of missing out on the latter two.
She studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse, and her Broadway and 1970 film debut in Hair; and Lovers and Other Strangers; led to her creative partnership with Woody Allen.
She acted for and with him in ‘72’s Play It Again, Sam; Sleeper (‘73), and 75’s Love and Death.
This trajectory culminated in the luminent and quaint Annie Hall (‘77), for which she won the Best Actress Oscar, her only one.
(She was however nominated for several other flicks.)
Diane later said about “Annie”,
“I was a nervous wreck, but Woody saw something in that nervousness, and it became my style.”
As Kay Adams (Don Corleone’s daughter in law in The Godfather trilogy (‘72–‘90), she portrayed a fragile but insistent moral outsider within a violent system.
In a famous scene after Kay’s husband Michael Corleone’s (the Mafia boss’s son) fall from grace, she reminded him that he himself had said he’d never become like his murderous father.
Michael replied,
“My father is no different than any powerful man, any man with power, like a president or senator.
Kay: “Do you know how naive you sound, Michael? Presidents and senators don’t have men killed.”
Michael: “Oh. Who’s being naive, Kay?”
Although Keaton never spoke publicly about the ethics of the real life Mob, her role embodied the conscience of a story obsessed with sin and touching but sinister familial loyalty. And these themes subtly but clearly paralleled her own fascination with moral ambiguity. And with the grand themes of love, death, separation and heaven.
Christian author Tim Keller, in The Reason for God, spoke of heaven not as “a vague reward for the good,” but “the restoration of all things; the joy of God’s presence where love is no longer fragile.”
Keaton’s film “Heaven”, though not doctrinal, shares that yearning for restoration. The documentary’s uncomplicated interviewed believers (a widower, a nurse, a child…) express what evangelicals would call eschatological hope– the iron-clad watertight foolproof expectation that suffering and loneliness will not have the final word.
N.T. Wright, a more recent conservative Anglican voice, once wrote (in Surprised by Hope):
“The Christian belief in the resurrection is not escapism; it’s the ultimate affirmation that matter, bodies, and love will be renewed.”
That line, had Keaton heard it, might have satisfied her more than any Hollywood sermon.
In her fifties Diane adopted two boys, Dexter (in mid-90s) and Duke (early 2000s).
She called motherhood her “late miracle.”
Dexter became a television producer, and Duke has worked in music and digital media.
Diane often said, “They saved me from my own preoccupations.”
She remained close to her siblings, and paid tribute to her mother in her 2011 memoir Then Again, written as a dialogue with Mum Dorothy’s diaries— a tender act of filial faith.
Diane was candid about her struggles with bulimia in youth, and with skin cancer later on.
She advocated sun protection and a balanced view of beauty.
Her outlook on aging was disarmingly refreshing:
“The dimmer switch is your friend,” she quipped.
“Life looks better with soft light and a sense of humor.”
Diane never married, explaining,
“I wasn’t made for it.”
And in later interviews:
“I don’t date. It’s highly unlikely. But I’m not lonely. I have my children, my dog, and a good dinner every night.”
Keaton consistently defended Woody Allen through his controversies, calling him “my friend” and “the man who gave me my start.” She maintained, “I believe him,” provoking criticism during the MeToo movement.
She supported accountability for abuse but lamented what she called “victim culture.” This phrase drew backlash, though some defended her intentions as generationally naïve rather than malicious.
Though one of her later films (Hampstead, 2017) was distributed by The Weinstein Company, she never publicly commented on Harvey’s crimes.
Through it all the actor’s humour remained intact— ironic, self-effacing, and appropriate. In her late seventies she continued acting, restoring houses, and photographing architecture. Friends say she had grown physically frail, but was still mentally sharp.
Looking back, Diane’s documentary Heaven remains her truest self-portrait. Her wit, doubt, and reverence meet here.
It is a work of general revelation— a mind reaching toward the divine. It shows what C.S. Lewis called sehnsucht— “the inconsolable longing” for a homeland not yet seen.
It also respects faith’s sincerity, without presuming to settle it. As one of the film’s wise interviewees said, looking straight into Keaton’s camera: “Maybe God doesn’t want us to be sure— maybe He wants us to trust.” This line, humble, relational, and unscripted, could arguable be one of several fitting epitaphs for Diane.
The film is often remembered for its eccentric montage- Las Vegas footage, ordinary people talking about eternity, flashes of laughter and sincerity. But what lingers is not the oddity, but the ache: a woman trying to believe in goodness beyond decay.
It’s that pain that resonates most deeply with relationally generous Evangelical voices with “tone” (viz Justin Moffat, Snr Pastor, St Phillip’s Church Hill, Sydney).
Another Christian author, and preacher, the late John Stott, describes Heaven in terms of the destiny of love:
“Heaven is not a dreamworld of escape; it is the society of perfect love. All that is evil will be purged; all that is good will be fulfilled.”– (The Contemporary Christian, 1992)
Stott’s humility mirrors Keaton’s tone. Both almost speak from longing, rather than certainty. For Stott, heaven is not a sentimental wish, but the completion of love- exactly the note on which Keaton ended her film: “Maybe heaven is the love you give away that somehow comes back.”
C.S. Lewis spoke of Heaven in terms of joy and “Sehnsucht” (German- yearning and deep longing for something- usually a home- that we have never seen: which is ideal, distant, or unattainable, and which can be both painful and positive):
“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” (Mere Christianity, 1952)
Clive Staples’ concept of sehnsucht is what Keaton dramatised in Heaven. Cab drivers, nurses, widows, atheists, all straining toward something beyond the visible. Her agnosticism and Lewis’s orthodoxy start worlds apart, but they meet in their shared honesty about yearning.
Tim Keller has another different nuance on Heaven: restoration, not escape:
“The Christian hope is not to become ethereal spirits in some other realm, but to have our bodies renewed, the world healed, and all relationships finally made whole.
(The Reason for God, 2008)
Keller’s tone is sober and urban, yet gentle— as if explaining to a friend over coffee that the Bible’s heaven is not fantasy but recreation.
Keaton’s film, shot through a soft lens and full of ordinary faces, seems instinctively to grasp this: that heaven, if it exists, is personal and embodied. The widow waiting to see her mother again would have nodded at Keller’s line: relationships finally made whole.
N.T. Wright expresses heaven as resurrection and new creation: “Heaven is important, but it’s not the end of the world.”
(Surprised by Hope, 2007)
Wright insists that Biblical hope is not floating away, but the renewal of creation, through resurrection.
Keaton’s Heaven never reaches that doctrinal precision, but its imagery- light, laughter, forgiveness— gropes toward the same instinct: that love and matter belong together.
Edith Schaeffer (whose husband was Francis) sees heaven as compassionate witness:
“We do not comfort people by explaining heaven as geography, but by showing that the God who made them still loves them. (Affliction, 1978)
Schaeffer’s counsel could have been addressed to Keaton herself. Her Heaven succeeds not as theology but as empathy. It comforts by listening, not lecturing— a virtue that to my shame I am sometimes tempted to forget, but which the best of Evangelical Christians prize.
Diane’s quest through a Biblical Christian lense? My reading is that Augustine would see the film as fides quaerens intellectum— faith seeking understanding, or at least yearning for it.
It does not preach, but it wonders.
And evangelicals can meet Keaton there, not to correct her, but to say:
“The longing you filmed is the same longing the Bible names— ‘He has set eternity in the human heart’” (Ecc 3:11).
Keaton’s grace lay in her honesty: she didn’t pretend to know. Evangelical grace lies in assurance:
not that we know everything, but that we know Someone.
As Keller wrote, “The reason you can face death unafraid is not that you understand heaven, but that you trust the One who went there first.”
That, in the end, might be the most compassionate bridge between Diane Keaton’s wistful curiosity, and evangelical conviction: she kept asking; and the gospel keeps answering— softly, never triumphantly, always relationally.
Image: diane Keaton in 2012. Image Credit Ruven Afanador / Wikimedia