Opinion | Denise, heaven’s receptionist, is the best thing on TikTok. Discuss.

“Denise” was created by Taryn Delanie Smith, the current Miss New York and media personality and a former receptionist herself. In a white bathrobe standing in for celestial robes, using a pink plastic razor as a headset, she nails the details of office life: the strained politeness on the phone with a difficult client, the sotto voce comments to colleagues, the group coffee order, the faulty printer. Between calls, Denise gossips about Jackie O. bumping into Marilyn Monroe or complains that Paul Revere writes every email in all caps.

Playful as it is, Smith’s vision of heaven conveys serious ethical content, as all visions of heaven do — and have done, from Jesus’ rating a rich man’s likelihood of entering the Kingdom of God as, essentially, “fat chance” (Mark 10:25), to debates over the possibility of moral progress in NBC’s “The Good Place.”

Do good deeds get you in? Do you have to believe certain things? Can you still go if you’ve done something wrong? What even is wrong?

In one of my favorite Denise videos, a woman calls to make sure that her granddaughter won’t be getting into heaven. Denise checks the file: “She’s a mother, she’s done a lot of good deeds. Things are looking good for her.” When the caller explains that her granddaughter has had a child out of wedlock, Denise says, “So … I hope you’re sitting down. Well, we don’t care.”

According to Smith’s ethical worldview, extramarital procreation is not immoral, but unkindness is. Denise denies an Angel Premium Plus upgrade for a woman who rejected her gay son.

“Right, so do you remember, when you said all those things to your son Ricky when he came out to you? Yeah, right. So, we didn’t like that. Yeah. Yeah. You didn’t earn any points up here.”

Also immoral: clerical greed. “So it says here you had a private jet,” Denise says, checking the file of a megachurch preacher who calls to request an upgrade. “That’s fun. Super fun. How’d you pay for the jet? Uh-huh. Okay. Okay. So I feel like … you know what I’m about to say.”

Using the concept of eternal judgment to criticize the clergy is a time-honored strategy. In “The Divine Comedy,” Dante Alighieri consigns to his fictional hell popes who got rich selling church favors and jobs. “Your avarice afflicts the world,” Dante’s pilgrim says, “trampling down the good and raising up the wicked.”

Denise doesn’t make pronouncements like that. She just explains the rules: “We appreciate the fact that you went every Sunday for 20 years. … But you also made … 48 Starbucks baristas cry and that does ding your credit up here.”

Smith’s moral code is refreshingly positive, ecumenical and uncomplicated. When I spoke to her recently, she told me that every religion she studied as a student at St. John’s University is “kind of saying something very similar, which is treat people well in your life. Do as much as you can, do as much good as you can with whatever you have.”

But I don’t think this is the reason Smith’s videos get millions of views. Heaven may be a way to express morality, but even more than that, it’s a way to comfort people in the face of death. As brief and funny as they are, Smith’s videos do that, too.

At some point, TikTok commenters started asking Denise to greet their deceased loved ones. So she sometimes looks up from her monitor, pulls down her headset and turns her brilliant smile on a new guest, offering to show them the salad bar or sending angels to accompany a child to the heavenly meadow where family awaits.

“Could u do one welcoming my baby Olivia?” @ashleynoelle29 asked. “I lost her two years ago but I know she’s with my dad and grandpa but I miss her so much.” So Denise pauses her office chitchat to welcome Olivia — speaking gently, saying “she’s beautiful,” “so small,” “so sweet” — and it’s pitch perfect.

Smith now reads thousands of requests a day and says she is sometimes overwhelmed by the feeling that she’s sharing in her followers’ grief. She wishes she could make videos for everyone.

In a way, though, she does. She has created such a vivid character that I don’t need her to make me a custom video; I can simply imagine how Denise would have greeted my beloved English teacher when she died last month and what heavenly perks might delight Mrs. Stewart. I smile to think of it, even as my eyes well up. And even though I don’t believe in heaven.

After all, most people who do believe in heaven — and that includes nearly 75 percent of American adults — still know that any “heaven” they envision now is made up. They won’t find out what it’s really like until, well, later. But made-up things can comfort us, too. And making up things together (Smith called the videos a collaboration with her viewers) is a certain path to human connection and, therefore, to consolation. Even in the face of death.

I don’t believe in an afterlife, but I believe in the power of art and the collective imagination. I believe in the power of strangers to console one another.