The church my family attended was very old, at least by American standards, with numerous gravestones of Revolutionary War veterans in the churchyard.

Inside it, as was common in Northeastern churches built at a time before central heating existed, it had hip-high wooden doors on the pews, to retain heat in the winter from the hot stones that parishioners brought with them from home. 

At the front of the church, the area that held the altar, pulpit, and lectern was shaped like a giant oil drum sawed in half vertically, with half a dome at its top.

Directly above the altar, just below where the vertical walls met the domed ceiling, was a round stained-glass window of a white dove soaring among purplish clouds, which had parted somewhat to allow a few golden beams of sunlight through.  On either side was gilt lettering (rendered in the ancient Roman style, where all the “U”s look like “V”s): 

THIS IS NONE OTHER THAN THE HOVSE OF THE LORD, (window), AND THIS IS THE GATE OF HEAVEN

I was still a pretty young kid at this point, but I could read.  And from the visual imagery at the front of the church, plus the stuff the minister typically said from up there (which I only partway paid attention to), I got the idea that when you died, they laid you out on the altar, and then somehow beamed you up into heaven through that stained-glass window.

One Sunday morning when our family was represented by just my brother and me (a pattern that had become increasingly common, which I only later realized probably had something to do with my parents wanting a little “grownup time” together), I got the notion in the absence of their dull, constraining parental supervision to do something really cool: I was going to see heaven!

After the church service let out, ignoring a reminder from my older brother that Dad got mad if we weren’t among the first people to emerge from the doors and then scamper directly to where he sat parked at the curb in the family Buick, I slipped quickly out of sight behind some adults, then made another quick turn when I reached the side of the church.

As I passed by all the familiar stained-glass windows and saw what they looked like from the outside, my heart pumped with excitement.  I didn’t care if I got a spanking—I wanted to see heaven!

As I rounded the corner indicating that I had reached the front of the church, I gazed up, squinted, and beheld the wondrous circular gateway.
 
I was surprised to find that there wasn’t some sort of tube or ramp or whatever to bring you the rest of the way into heaven.  Wouldn’t you just fall out of the window?

And what would you fall into, anyway?  As I turned my eyes to what lay beyond, I found that it wasn’t heaven at all.  It was the Town of Hempstead Municipal Parking Lot.

Like most kids, I was resilient, so I got over my disappointment fairly quickly. And I learned a valuable lesson:  that some of the things that were talked about in the Bible and church were not meant to be taken too literally.
 
As I grew older and learned the word “metaphor,” I began to get a sense that they had to be treated as truths of a different kind.