Getting to the Point: heaven

Showing posts with label heaven. Show all posts

Friday, May 27, 2016

Living Peacefully in a Kakocracy

Truly God is good to the upright, to those who are pure in heart.

But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled; my steps had nearly slipped.

For I was envious of the arrogant; I saw the prosperity of the wicked.

For they have no pain; their bodies are sound and sleek.

They are not in trouble as others are; they are not plagued like other people.

Therefore pride is their necklace; violence covers them like a garment.

Their eyes swell out with fatness; their hearts overflow with follies…

Such are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches.

All in vain I have kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence.

For all day long I have been plagued, and am punished every morning.

If I had said, “I will talk on in this way,”

I would have been untrue to the circle of your children.

But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task,

until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I perceived their end.

Truly you set them in slippery places; you make them fall to ruin.

How they are destroyed in a moment, swept away utterly by terrors!

They are like a dream when one awakes; on awaking you despise their phantoms.

When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart,

I was stupid and ignorant; I was like a brute beast toward you.

Nevertheless I am continually with you; you hold my right hand.

You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me with honor.

Whom have I in heaven but you?

And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you.

My flesh and my heart may fail,

but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

Indeed, those who are far from you will perish;

you put an end to those who are false to you.

But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord God my refuge,

to tell of all your works.

Psalm 73

Reflection – We have a great love for this psalm in Madonna House. The latter verses of it were set to music by one of our talented members, and we customarily use that piece on June 8, our Promises Day, the sentiments therein being so fitting for that occasion: ‘What else have I in heaven but you – apart from you I want nothing on earth, my body and my heart faint, but God is my possession forever…’

It is significant, though, that all of this rapturous acclamation of faith comes after a fairly grim depiction of life in this world. This is a psalm about things being as they should not be, a world that is unjust. The wicked prosper and grow fat; the righteous languish and die. Innocents suffer (although unlike the psalmist we may hesitate to glibly count ourselves among those innocent), while the arrogant and proud, the evildoers go their seemingly merry way unpunished.

And the psalmist is utterly perplexed at this. As are we, aren’t we? The world has not changed all that much in the past 2500 years or so since this psalm got written. Surveying the landscape of political and economic life in the year 2016, it is hard to avoid the impression that we are living more and more in a kakocracy (that’s fancy Greek talk for ‘rule by the worst’).

Psalm 73 calls us to make a deep act of faith in the face of such realities. When the world goes awry, as it is wont to do, when all the tings that should not happen, happen, and what really should happen never does, it is meant to be a powerful reminder to us, a goad to our hearts and minds, that in fact we are not meant for this world.

We are made for God, and the happiness of the human person does not lie in riches and power, in pleasures and vanities, but rather, ‘for me it is good to be near God.’ We leave the rich and the powerful, those who do evil in high places, to the judgment of God. I for one hope that He judges them with mercy, and that all of us can find our true home in the kingdom of heaven together.

For us who have faith now, though, we have to be utterly clear about it—happiness is found not in the goods of the world, but in the goodness of God and our intimacy with Him. That is the final answer to injustice and, shall we say, ‘income disparity’ in this world. Yes, we should work for a socially just order if and as we can, but let’s not get confused about this. We’re not trying to build the kingdom of heaven on earth. We’re trying to make a world, as Dorothy Day put it, in which it is easier for people to be good.

But this goodness, this beatitude that is our true goal, is not found in any economic calculus—everyone getting exactly the piece of the pie they deserve. It is found in the embrace of God and the intimate communion we have with Him, which far exceeds anything the psalmist could have imagined. It is our sharing in the very life of the Trinity, made possible for us in Jesus Christ, that is the portion and inheritance of all who believe in Him and who seek refuge in Him. And that must always be our perspective and our purpose as we move through this unjust and at time crazily confused world.

Thursday, May 19, 2016

Nothing Else Matters In the End

This weekly commentary on the Mass is winding down to the end of the Eucharistic Prayer, and so we now come to the following prayer:

To us, also, your servants, who, though sinners, hope in your abundant mercies, graciously grant some share and fellowship with your holy Apostles and Martyrs: with John the Baptist, Stephen, Matthias, Barnabas, (Ignatius, Alexander, Marcellinus, Peter, Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia) and all your Saints: admit us, we beseech you, into their company, not weighing our merits, but granting us your pardon, through Christ our Lord.

Last week I wrote about the previous part of the Eucharistic Prayer, where we pray for all the faithful departed, and I wrote about the reality of Purgatory and the duty of love to pray for the dead who languish there. This week I want to write about the reality of heaven, and the importance of heaven in our daily life here on earth.

This is something we never talk about these days, and that is a big problem. For the last 50 years, motivated by a certain sense of prioritizing of social justice and mission in the world, the Church at large has chosen to neglect to the point of vanishing the theme of eternal life and heaven, to the point where (I know this to be the case) more than a few good church-going Catholics no longer believe in it or consider it a necessary part of the faith.

This is absurd, of course. Our life on this earth is a hundred years, maximum, and for most people considerably less. The fact is, there is a life after death, and it is eternal. We are creatures made to survive death; the human soul is immaterial by nature, and hence immortal. These are facts, not nice if rather odd ideas.

We can spend the endless duration of life that follows our mortal death in the presence of God, and hence in a state of light, joy, peace, and beauty. Or we can spend the endless duration of life after death in the absence of God, and hence devoid of light, joy, peace, and beauty. The one state we call heaven, the other hell.

Once we accept the above paragraph as true, one conclusion inescapably emerges: the only thing that really matters in this life is to live our life in such a way that we go to heaven when we die. It is a matter, if you will, of sheer economics—one hundred years maximum of this mode of living vs. an eternity of utter bliss or utter misery.

The idea that this focus on heaven and living life in such a way as to get to heaven when we die would make us indifferent to the things of earth and to pursuing justice and charity on earth is such a stupid idea that it could only possibly have arisen in the 1960s, the decade when so many stupid ideas were conceived.

At any rate, it’s dumb and so let’s be done with it. Life is hard, but it’s harder when you’re stupid. The simple fact is, we live our life in such a way as to be suited for heaven if and only if we live our lives poured out in love of God and love of neighbor. The God we believe in is a God who passionately loves every human being He created. Our loving Him back necessarily means loving everyone and working for the good of all according to the wisdom and strength we are given by God. It is ludicrous—patently, obviously ludicrous—to say that a concern for heaven makes us indifferent to the sufferings and injustice of life on earth.

It is not the remembrance of God and what He desires of us that makes us selfish and malicious and unjust; it is forgetting Him that does that. And this is more and more the case these days; either we forget God in despair that there is such a person, and so the only good in life is to grab as much of this world as we can, or we forget God in presumption, blithely assuming that we all just automatically go to heaven when we die, so it doesn’t much matter what we do to each other on earth.

The Mass here really does establish us on the right path. ‘We your servants, though sinners, hope in your abundant mercies’ – this is truth. And we ask Him for a share and a fellowship with the saints in heaven, for it is ultimately His gift to us that we can even hope to get there at all.

But let’s be clear about it—nothing else matters in the end. There is no earthly good, no earthly pleasure, no other happiness we can attain in this life that can outweigh the question of where we are going to spend eternity. And every decision we make this day and every day should ultimately be decided on the basis of one thing and one thing alone: is this going to move me closer to God and to the heaven where He dwells, or is it going to move me further from Him? In other words, am I choosing love and goodness here, or something else? Because in the end, that is what it is all about.

Thursday, May 5, 2016

The Great Prison Break

For the first few days of our annual directors’ meetings here in Combermere the local directors of our various mission houses give their reports about the life and work of their houses. We get something of a birds’ eye view of the apostolate from these reports, which aids our subsequent meetings.

Yesterday one of the directors, describing the very secular milieu in which they are operating and the people they minister to, used a telling phrase. She said “It is as if we are all prisoners of the horizontal.” Even in the local church scene, so often the sole focus would be on social justice or building community or things of that nature; outside of the church milieu the exclusive ‘spiritual’ concern was with nature and the environment.

‘Prisoners of the horizontal’ – that is a nifty turn of phrase. There is nothing wrong the horizontal. God made nature! God desires community! God most certainly wants us to act justly and create a just world. But all of this without God is shallow, drained of the depth, richness, fullness of life and meaning it truly bears.

And that brings us to the next part of the Eucharistic Prayer in our running Thursday commentary on the Mass, in which we pray:

In humble prayer we ask you, almighty God: command that these gifts be borne by the hands of your holy Angel to your altar on high in the sight of your divine majesty, so that all of us who through this participation at the altar receive the most holy Body and Blood of your Son may be filled with every grace and heavenly blessing.

The horizontal is always meant to burst forth from its bonds, its flat experience of reality as it is, here and now, to reality as it really is, imbued with the light and love of the eternal and the divine. At the Eucharist we are indeed in the community of believers, celebrating in unity and being strengthened (please God, if we are doing it right) in the bond of charity, empowered for the work of building the kingdom of God on earth.

Yes, indeed, all of that is so, or it should be. But this is only so, can only be so, if we are borne up from the horizontal in a wholly vertical direction, carried up to heaven mystically, in the Holy Spirit, and enfolded in our horizontal and earthly worship into the worship being done at the ‘altar on high’, from which all these graces and heavenly blessings flow.

The Mass is the great prison break of humanity. We’re going over the wall, folks, and woe be to the guard who gets in our way! ‘You’ll never take me alive, coppers!’ We are not created to be prisoners of the horizontal; the horizontal itself – the world and all that fills it – is not meant to be a prison for humanity. The horizontal in truth lives in a perpetual embrace of love with the vertical, earth with heaven, God with man.

And in that, the horizontal, life as it is, the world as it is, receives it true meaning, its deeper beauty. And in that reception of meaning and beauty, it receives a greater gift yet, and that is the gift of hope. Because the horizontal—nature, or good human relationships, or a just society—well, all of that stuff eventually wears out. The flowers die. The relationships fail us one way or another. The United States elects Trump or Clinton to the presidency. Everything fails, in other words. The horizontal needs the vertical particularly to embrace it at the moment of failure and to redeem it from that failure. ‘Creation is subject to futility’, but God is not.

And the really beautiful thing is that we truly do not have to rack our poor little brains to figure out how to break out from the horizontal prison to the vertical transcendence. God has come to us, and the way out and through, up and over, inward and deep, is as near as the nearest altar where bread and wine—the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands—are taken up into the very heights of heaven so that heaven can enter the very depths of the human heart and penetrate the created order with the light of eternity.

Thursday, December 10, 2015

Flashes of Light and Beauty

We have been going through the liturgy of the Mass on this blog, piece by piece, showing how each small part of it informs the whole of our Christian life. Last week I wrote about how the preface grounds us in sacred time, in the precise point of our annual pilgrimage around the sun we are on. Both the temporality of it and its sacred meaning, the openness of time to eternity, earth to heaven, man to God.

The preface, then, always concludes with a reference to the angelic choirs singing the praises of God and our uniting our prayers with theirs, at which point the whole congregation bursts into song: Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts, heaven and earth are full of your glory, hosanna in the highest. Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.

The movement from the preface to the Sanctus is a precise encapsulation of the whole movement of the liturgy from earth to heaven, from one mode of existence and its exigencies, conditions, limits, to another mode of existence with a whole other set of these. This movement occurs over and over again in the liturgy and is the wide arching structure of the entirety of it, but here we see it in miniature.

Heaven has not been a popular subject in recent decades. In the mid to late 20^th century our betters informed us that focusing on heaven led our ancestors to neglect the earth, and that it is preferable to forget about life after death and the eternal kingdom and just get on with building a just society here.

My fingers frankly had a hard time typing the previous sentence, rebelling against consigning such stupidity to print, even to critique it. For one thing, our ancestors who were so enamored of heaven and eternity did not exactly neglect the affairs of this earth.

They even built this little thing called Western Civilization, which for all its flaws has had a few good points to it, you know. A truly extraordinary flowering of art, music, literature, architecture, the discovery of the scientific method, the burgeoning of philosophy, the discovery of the concept of universal human rights (rightly credited to 16^th century Dominicans)—all flowed from men and women who were quite taken up with the reality of the heavenly realm and its priority over earth.

Not to mention the works of mercy done by countless men and women on earth out of love for heaven, out of a desire to bring the ethos of heaven down to earth for the poor. The secularist approach to reality has not yet shown itself capable of doing any of that, and in fact all signs point to the opposite—a hardening, coarsening, flattening of earthly life has followed upon the banishment of heaven to an artifact of the past.

And of course similar flowerings of civilization and truly rich human life have occurred in other parts of the world where, while not Christian, men and women have been alive to the transcendent, the sacred, the mystical. The great civilizations of Asia all bear witness to this.

It is a simple fact known to everyone who knows anything of history, anything of the world beyond their own fingertips, that human life becomes more human, becomes richer, kinder, sweeter, more beautiful, when there is a lively awareness of the eternal dimension, of the heavenly realm, of that sweet music coming from afar, that Other Place which is at once so wrapped in mystery for us and yet which sends us such tantalizing messages, such flashes of light and beauty.

Humanity only remains human when it is open to the divine. Time only runs in its course rightly, that is, towards love and life, when it is continually circling around eternity, around that still point which seems at first and superficial glance to have little to do with the earthly round of things, and yet which fixes that earthly realm in order, peace, security.

All of which is contained in the daily liturgical chanting of the Sanctus, that moment when earth unites to heaven and is lifted up to the throne of God to sing there the song of the angels in glory. Let us sing that song today, and from that draw the wisdom and love to choose rightly our earthly course of action.