An old story goes something like this:

A (fill in the blank with priest, rabbi, minister, theologian) dies and gets to the gates of heaven. He looks up and in front of him there are two signs. One points down one road and says, "Heaven"; the other points the other way and says, "A Discussion about Heaven." This diligent soul looks for a pad and pencil and heads for the discussion.

I know that sometimes our theological conversations can seem just that way, like we are sitting around just talking and talking, speculating about what seems to be beyond us and what we think we have little chance of understanding. Sometimes it sure seems like we would rather go to the discussion than to heaven, doesn't it?

Even more, in life there often seem to be two distinct camps of people, the ones that want to theorize and investigate, and the ones that want to get going and just do the work. It often seems like these are totally opposing poles like in the story, but do they need to be?

Are these two attitudes --- discussing and doing --- really opposed? Discussion seems to be all about rationality, thinking things out, posing questions, proving them one way or the other. Doing seems to be all about emotion, about deciding and getting one's hands dirty, about sweating it out and making it happen.

It is a separation our culture supports everywhere. We are told that the universities are full of thinkers, and commerce is full of doers. But don't we sometimes see the dire results of doers not thinking (several recent financial scandals come to mind), and thinkers not doing (too many people writing mountains of research about things that are just abstractions)?

If this separation into thinkers and doers is one of our culture's present wounds, one of the symptoms of our fragmentation, doesn't it contribute to the "stuck" quality we often feel? Haven't we seen the results become manifest in all sorts of social problems from atrociously overspent budgets to getting into wars we did not really think through?

Maybe the Catholic imagination, our imagination, has some balm for this wound, some ways to heal it. Catholic tradition has never really separated reason from action. Our faith has not split up thinking from caring, even though other religious traditions and the secular world have. We are a community of both belief and good works and you can see it in our worship; the Mass is a space where this unity becomes visible.

During the celebration of the Mass we do some heavy-duty thinking. We open Scriptures (just as Jesus did in the synagogue in Nazareth), we read words of ancient wisdom, we mull these over in our hearts, and we listen to a sermon which is the fruit of learning and of careful thought. Then we turn around and we do. We break bread, we embrace one another, we sing out in praise, we reach into our purses and give alms, sometimes we laugh and others we cry.

Even more, during our celebration of the Mass we overcome many of the divisions which fragment our lives. During a liturgy we live and breathe beauty, not banish it away in a museum where a $10 ticket will give us a glimpse. During our time together at the Eucharist we experience goodness, not as the opposite of "badness" (as a world based on laws always makes us feel), but as gratuitous kindness, God's love overflowing at the table we share. And if the kiss of peace takes hold of our imagination, we will feel connected to the whole universe.

Finally, at Mass we can experience, think about and uncover truth. Not truth set up against a lie like in a "true and false" test, but truth that embraces us precisely because we recognize the content of our faith, the beliefs that bind us and what they call us to do, as both beautiful and good --- and so we know they are true.

A very famous philosopher some years ago said that he did not understand what all the fuss was about trying to figure out the difference between what was beautiful and what was true (aesthetics and ethics). They are, he said, really the same thing. Perhaps our catholicity gives us this insight as well. Knowledge, wisdom, learning is not contained only in the "discussion room" and doing, transforming and changing is not a straight road to "heaven," but rather these are conjoined attitudes --- like the faces of a coin.

We need to think things through in order to know what it is we should do. This is why we have church councils and parish councils, and our bishops give us the gift of pastoral letters. They have thought things through and they ask us to do the same. Yet we know that we also need to act, that we need to do, that getting out and putting the Gospel into practice is the necessary fruit of all that thinking.

But if we're going about it truthfully, the process will not stop there. The morning spent volunteering at the retirement home, or the sample ballot we just got in the mail will bring new questions. We will take these back with us, to our communities of faith, to Scripture, to tradition and we will think, ponder, discuss again. In this process we will learn, open ourselves up to new "doings" and start the cycle all over again.

So maybe in our version of the story there will not be two signs reading "discussion of heaven" and "heaven." There will be a crowd of faces we love, all those who've gone before us in faith, holding up a big sign that says, "Welcome home!" Then we will surely know we're in heaven.

Cecilia Gonzalez-Andrieu writes from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley.