Getting to the Point: eschatology

Showing posts with label eschatology. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Refreshment, Light, Peace

I am writing and posting my Thursday blog post the evening before, as I will be en route early tomorrow morning to the annual March for Life in Ottawa. I hope I see some of you there.

In our journey through the Mass we are coming to the end of the Eucharistic Prayer, and have reached the following:

Remember also, Lord, your servants N. and N., who have gone before us with the sign of faith and rest in the sleep of peace. Grant them, O Lord, we pray, and all who sleep in Christ, a place of refreshment, light, and peace.

We pray for the dead in every Mass. Every time we come before the throne of God to lift up our hearts in worship, adoration, and intercession, we mention those who have died, that God may show them mercy. What is that about?

Well, we pray for the dead because they need our prayers. Not the deceased who have entered the realm of heaven—we need their prayers. Not the deceased (please God, in Your Mercy, be they few in number) who are in eternal damnation of Hell—our prayers are futile for them.

But for the dead who are undergoing their final purification, the last cleansing of God’s merciful love for them necessary before they can enter the kingdom of light and love. Anything in us—no matter how small and trivial—that partakes of darkness and selfishness must be purged from our souls. And so, Purgatory, the great gift of God’s mercy to humanity.

It is a work of mercy par excellence to pray for the souls of the faithful departed. And at every Mass we remember them in particular. In part this is because the Mass is the greatest offering of prayer there is, where the Church unites itself to Christ’s own intercession for humanity before the Father.

It is also because the Mass is, essentially, the worship of Heaven come down to earth. The saints in heaven—the Church Triumphant—are gathered around the Lamb as He offers to His Father the sacrifice He made (cf. Rev 5). We on earth—the Church Militant—are gathered around the altar of God as Christ in the person of the priest makes this same offering to God and extends to us its fruits in the gift of Holy Communion.

But there is a part of the Church who cannot participate in this Mass, this offering, this worship—the Church Suffering, the souls in Purgatory. Perhaps that alone is the great suffering of Purgatory—who knows? So we remember them in our prayers and ask God to quickly restore them to the fullness of communion that we enjoy at the liturgy.

At any rate, the simple fact that virtually every Mass includes prayers for these people should signal to us that the Church considers praying for them among the most important duties of love a person can do. And so let’s be careful not to forget this, not to fall into the easy attitude of assuming that everyone who dies slides right into Heaven with no problem—an odd idea that has no basis whatsoever in Catholic theology or doctrine.

No, the dead need our prayers. We will soon enough be among them ourselves and so we better promote praying for the dead for reasons of naked self-interest if no other. And above all, let us pray that every human being comes to death in a state of grace, with final perseverance and final repentance, so that all of us can happily gather around the banquet of the Lamb at last in a joyful feast that has no end.

Thursday, February 4, 2016

The Necessary Price Of Freedom

Our Thursday trip through the Mass has brought us now to this part of the Eucharistic Prayer:

Therefore, Lord, we pray: graciously accept this oblation of our service, that of your whole family; order our days in your peace, and command that we be delivered from eternal damnation and counted among the flock of those you have chosen.

I will pass over the part of the prayer asking that our oblation be accepted—this theme has come up repeatedly in the Mass and I have covered it more than once already in this commentary.

This prayer brings in a dimension of our faith that I don’t think I have written about much at all, but which perhaps I should, at least from time to time. It is not the central focus of our faith, but it is part of our spiritual and moral landscape, and we are foolish to ignore it.

That is the whole matter of ‘eternal damnation’. Hell, to be blunt. That there is such a thing, that we can go there, and that in fact we need God’s mercy and grace if we do not wish to go there for all eternity—this is our Catholic faith, the faith of the Bible, the faith of all the fathers and doctors and saints of the Church.

Hell is not, and cannot be, a comfortable subject to think about. I don’t really think it is meant to be. Uncomfortable to think about, and less comfortable by far to end up there, no? But we have to think about it some time.

It is true that in an earlier era there was far too much preaching about Hell, to the point that it really does look like fear mongering. As one of our wise (and funny) MH elders says of his childhood, “It wasn’t so much a matter of going to heaven, as of backing away from Hell, and at some point the pearly gates would slam shut with us on the right side of them.”

Well, that’s not right. Our eyes, our minds, our hearts are to be fixed on the Lord Jesus and His tender, merciful love. The whole attention of our faith is to be on the Gospel, the Good News of salvation, and the path of life and goodness it opens for us. The positive aspect of our religion—healing, forgiveness, salvation, hope—is far bigger and far more central than the negative—sin, brokenness, damnation.

But… these are real things. And we cannot (and if we understand them rightly, should not) wish them away. The reality of Hell is a necessary corollary to the reality of human freedom. God made us to be free. God made us to be creatures capable of knowing and loving Him, and entering into an eternal communion with Him. But knowledge and love cannot, by their very nature, be forced. Love that is forced is not love at all; it is rape.

But if love and knowledge must be freely given and received by us human beings, this means we can, indeed, refuse them. And this is the sum total of what Hell is, what eternal damnation is—we can refuse the gift of God, refuse to enter the eternal communion of love that is the whole substance of our created being, that for which we are made. Hell is a place of eternal frustration, eternal thwarting of the divine purpose in making us.

Now, where we do have to ponder deeply and think of things that make us rather uncomfortable is that our Catholic understanding is that we can say ‘no’ to God under our own freedom and power, but we cannot say ‘yes’ to Him without His grace to assist us. In other words, we can fall (like any dull heavy body) by the power of gravity and our own innate leadenness, but we cannot fly unless our Father in heaven picks us up and tosses us up, up, and away into the celestial heights.

So we not only need to know that there is indeed a Hell and that we can, indeed, go there if such is our choice in life,[1] but that in fact we need to humbly beseech the grace of God, as we do in this prayer, to be spared such a disastrous consummation of our earthly affairs. The good news of course is that Our Father in Heaven loves us very much, wants with His whole divine wanting to deliver us from this sad fate, and in fact sent His Son to die for us so as to make this grace available to all mortal flesh.

So that’s what I have to say on what I admit is a topic I have neglected and probably won’t frequently return to on this blog. I have now, officially, given you all Hell; let us turn our eyes and minds and hearts to heaven and to the mercy and love that streams forth continually from that happy place.

[1] Now, this is a mere single blog post, so I am not going into all the reality of what that choice is, and exactly how to get to Hell and how to avoid it. I recommend reading The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, if you want a clear and concise elaboration, highly readable and (best yet!) brief, on that point.

Monday, October 12, 2015

Laughing At Evildoers

Why do you boast, O mighty one,

of mischief done against the godly?

All day long you are plotting destruction.

Your tongue is like a sharp razor, you worker of treachery.

You love evil more than good,

and lying more than speaking the truth.

You love all words that devour,

O deceitful tongue.

But God will break you down forever;

he will snatch and tear you from your tent;

he will uproot you from the land of the living.

The righteous will see, and fear,

and will laugh at the evildoer, saying,

“See the one who would not take refuge in God,

but trusted in abundant riches, and sought refuge in wealth!”

But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God.

I trust in the steadfast love of God forever and ever.

I will thank you forever, because of what you have done.

In the presence of the faithful

I will proclaim your name, for it is good.

Psalm 52

Reflection – Well, our Monday trek through the Book of Psalms has taken us to this little gem, a rare example in the psalter of the psalmist denouncing an individual. This psalm presents its difficulties for personal prayer, and is downright embarrassing for communal prayer—what are we supposed to do in that context? Look at each other and sweetly chant ‘You love evil more than good…’?

This may well be a psalm that remains in the psalter unprayed more often than not, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. Psalms of praise and thanksgiving, psalms of penitence and sorrow, psalms of entreaty and supplication all will have more to say to us at any given moment than a psalm of denunciation and invection.

Nonetheless, it is Scripture, and so we much look for the divine truth and purpose in it. And in fact there is a lot going on here. Too often we can reduce religion to something less than real, something that can only exist by carefully editing reality of the parts that don’t fit into it. We can do this in many ways, turning a blind eye to all manner of human experience and ‘inconvenient truths’ about life.

One way we do this, for which this psalm is a good corrective, is to make religion something ‘nice’. Something that nice people do with other nice people that is about nice things and has all sorts of nice feelings associated with it, and aren’t we all so very, very NICE about it all, all the time.

Well, the world is not always so nice. People are not always so nice. I am a firm believer in human goodness, both the actual presence of real goodness in a very great number of people and the potential for true goodness in all people. But let’s be real about it—there is also real nastiness in the world, real deceit, real selfishness, real meanness, real cruelty. And it is no part of a authentic and healthy religion to turn a blind eye to that very real, very awful, and deeply damaging aspect of

human life. Not everyone is well meaning. Not everyone is really a nice guy, but just misunderstood.

There are villains, there are evil-doers. It is sad that this is so, but it is so, and this psalm gives us good advice for what to do in the face of human villainy, human perfidy when we encounter it personally, up close, in our own lives.

Namely, we shouldn’t take it too seriously. We should ‘laugh at the evildoer’, not because the evil they do is uproariously funny and ineffectual. Uh, no. But because they are indeed doomed to failure in the long run, are playing on the wrong team, and in the end will be defeated (unless there is a happier ending yet, and they repent and convert to the winning side!).

In other words, when we are confronting real injustice, cruelty, wickedness—not just human weakness and foibles, but the real thing—we are inevitably disturbed and distressed by it, since it is an ugly, ugly thing. But we should not be devastated by it, should not be cast down, disheartened, discouraged, embittered by it. In the end, even if evil has its innings and seems to get the upper hand from time to time, good is stronger. God is stronger. Our life is to stay good, to seek the good, to do what is good, and to place all oru hope in the God who is Goodness Himself, and who is bringing the world to a good end and overthrowing utterly all evil in the process.

So cheer up! Laugh at the evildoer and strive to be that growing olive tree proclaiming the name of the Lord for it is good and He is faithful, and all shall be well in the end, even if the way there is pretty darned rocky and there are bad guys en route. They don’t matter, in the end. God does, and those who are striving to follow Him in all things.

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Forgetting Ourselves

[The foolish rich man of Luke 12: 16-23] strikes me as a very exact picture of our average modern attitude. Our technical and economic capabilities have grown to an extent that could not have been imagined earlier. The precision of our calculations is worthy of admiration.

Despite all the ghastly things that have happened in this age of ours the opinion is continually becoming stronger among many people that we are now close to the point of bringing about the greatest happiness of the greatest number and finally ushering in a new phase of history… but precisely when we seem to be coming close to humankind’s redemption of itself, frightening explosions erupt from the depths of the unsatisfied and oppressed human soul to tell us: ‘Fool , you have forgotten yourself…’

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, To Look on Christ: Exercises in Faith, Hope, and Love

Reflection – This book was published in 1991, compiled from previously given talks and homilies. I think the heady optimism Ratzinger refers to here has become a little threadbare in the ensuing decades and particularly in the past ten years. The 1980s are a long time ago, and not just in terms of big hair and leggings. From financial meltdowns to Ebola outbreaks, a resurgent Russia and the steady growth of the most radical and violent forms of Islam, it would take a most determinedly optimistic sort to believe that ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ is just around the corner. Any day now! Eschatology now! Well, if not now, then… uhh…. tomorrow! Or not…

That being said, the fundamental attitude still is in place, namely that there is no happiness possible except that which we attain by our own efforts. If it cannot be a happiness for the whole of humanity, the kingdom of heaven on earth, then I will just grab as big a piece of the pie as I can get away with and make off with it.

This returns us to the precise position of the rich fool of Luke’s Gospel – once my barns are full, I can sit back and relax and let the rest of the world burn. Whether we are ‘social justice warriors’ determined to bring the final state of human happiness to pass by some type of political action or big greedy pigs concerned only for our own happiness, the same mistake is made, that happiness lies within human power of action, and that in fact there is no other happiness to be had except what we can fashion for ourselves in this world.

Of course my sympathies are more with the SJW types (I wouldn’t very well have joined Madonna House otherwise), but nonetheless it is a terrible trap, one that many decent and caring people have fallen into. We are supposed to care, deeply and passionately, about the sufferings of all humanity, and strive to do our bit, anyhow, to alleviate this suffering.

But if there is no God, no hope for redemption beyond this world and beyond our own choices and acts, if there is in fact no kingdom of heaven, then our care for humanity will either burn itself out and we will collapse into indifference, cynicism, and selfishness, or we will be prey to more and more extreme ideologies which comes at a very high price to our humanity.

Communism, fascism, and indeed radical Islam are all examples of ideological projects to create the kingdom of heaven on earth which inevitably entail killing everyone who seems to be getting in the way: the infidels, the subsersives, the Jews—whoever.

And we are not immune to this in our North American world. The ideology of the day on our continent seems to be that of gender libertarianism—if only everyone gets to express his or her (or whatever pronouns we come up with) gender identity and sexual preference without censure in absolute freedom, then we will all be happy. But to achieve that eschatological state of bliss, those religions that hold to a sexual ethos rooted in the complementariness of the genders and the sanctity of marriage must be silenced on this matter, must themselves be censured and censored by state fiat if necessary. And this is a growing sentiment in Canada and the United States.

All of this is based on this terrible loss of our true selves and the truth of human happiness, the summa bonum, the true greatest good of man and woman in God. Deprived of this, we are forced into desperate straits, into a frantic and futile quest for beatitude in this life, doomed to failure and yielding misery, despondency and rage.

Fortunately, the way back is always available to us, and the true kingdom of heaven, the redemption given by God in Christ Jesus is always ours for the asking, ours not for the taking but for the receiving as a gracious gift of God’s mercy and love, and so we are free and need not fall into the terrible traps of selfish greed, cynical apathy, or ideological extremism. The beatitude of God is as near to us as the choice to love and serve, pray and believe, in this present moment, and that is the great redemption from human folly and failure in this world.