To go before the Lord

We emphatically do NOT become angels. Language matters:

But when those who believe in the Christian view of the world—or any view that involves the survival of the soul—use “departed” and “passed away,” we are using literal language. Death is the end of this bodily life, but it is not the end of our human being. To be “at home in the body” is to be “away from the Lord,” St. Paul wrote to the Corinthian Christians. This is the language of travel, which involves passage from one “place” to another. Like those fifteenth-century English spiritual progeny, he had no intention of rendering what he called “the last enemy” “inoffensive” or “bland.” He too was speaking blunt and literal terms about what death was—a journey whose final destination, he hoped, would end in the place where he considered his full and final citizenship to lie. And yet, as he warned the Corinthians, it was a journey whose penultimate destination was the final day in court: “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive good or evil, according to what he has done in the body.”

We hope to be in communion with the angels, and we pray for the dead in the hope that they will have passed judgment favorably.