Getting to the Point: hope

Showing posts with label hope. Show all posts

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.

Saturday, May 14, 2016

A Psalm Against Euthanasia

In you, O Lord, I take refuge; let me never be put to shame.

In your righteousness deliver me and rescue me;

Incline your ear to me and save me…

For you, O Lord, are my hope, my trust, O Lord, from my youth.

Upon you I have leaned from my birth;

It was you who took me from my mother’s womb.

My praise is continually of you…

So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me,

until I proclaim your might to all the generations to come.

Your power and your righteousness, O God, reach the high heavens.

You who have done great things, O God, who is like you?

You who have made me see many troubles and calamities

will revive me again; from the depths of the earth you will bring me up again.

You will increase my honor, and comfort me once again.

I will also praise you with the harp for your faithfulness, O my God;

I will sing praises to you with the lyre, O Holy One of Israel…

Psalm 71

Reflection – This is really less than half of Psalm 71, as you can see from all the ellipses (…). The parts I omitted are beautiful, actually, but are typical psalm sentiments that we have covered in this series many times—cries for help in distress and acclamations of praise and trust in God.

What is unique in this psalm is the reference to old age and gray hairs, and it is this I would like to reflect on. In psalters and breviaries this psalm is often giving the title ‘a psalm for old age’, and so it is. It is a grand teaching on how to grow old and what spiritual attitudes to bring into the latter years of life.

The key attitude here is, simply, steadfastness. The psalmist has known and served the Lord since his youth; he intends to continue to serve the Lord until his death. God has been his sure help since birth; he trusts that this will be the case until the end.

And even beyond death. This reference to the depths of the earth and being brought up again is quite telling. It could be a metaphorical reference to being raised up from the lowest position possible—when we say we are down in the dumps we do not literally mean that we are hanging out at a landfill site, right?

But this ‘depths of the earth’ is, literally, a reference to Sheol, to the place of the dead. And this psalm could reflect an early dawning awareness in Judaism that even death is not the end of YHWH’s fidelity to them, nor to the power of his steadfast love, his hesed for his people.

At any rate, whether in its original Jewish context it was metaphorical or literal, Jesus Christ has taught us to pray this psalm literally, for He Himself came back from the depths of the earth and in Him we all have the hope of being raised up even from death.

And this is the core attitude that we are meant to carry into old age and the decline of the body, the gradual diminishing and ending of all our earthly hopes and dreams. As the curtain slowly comes down on all these things—hopes of health, well being, the vigor and energy of youth that at least seems to make all things possible—we are meant to have a flourishing of theological hope, hope in God, hope that even as our humanity is exhausted the divine is anything but.

In our current Canadian climate of euthanasia, where the best thing we can seemingly think to offer an elderly and sick person is a lethal injection, this psalm and the spiritual attitudes within it take on deeper importance yet. It is so crucial for the elderly that as they experience the breakdown of their bodies and all that goes with that—chronic pain, weakness, and the emotional distress that naturally accompanies all of this—that they do not allow our increasingly cold, utilitarian, heartless society to rob them of the faith, hope, and love that will carry them over the threshold of death into the arms of God where all are made new.

So let us pray this psalm, too, we who are not old yet, in solidarity with our elder brothers and sisters, and let us be vigilant that we do not let society’s ethos and norms poison our minds in this matter. God is faithful, and He desires us to walk faithfully with Him until the very end of our life, so that His steadfast love may raise us up in the next one.

Friday, December 11, 2015

Right On the Knife's Edge

O God, you have rejected us, broken our defenses;

you have been angry; now restore us!

You have caused the land to quake; you have torn it open;

repair the cracks in it, for it is tottering.

You have made your people suffer hard things;

you have given us wine to drink that made us reel.

You have set up a banner for those who fear you,

to rally to it out of bowshot.

Give victory with your right hand, and answer us,

so that those whom you love may be rescued.

God has promised in his sanctuary:

“With exultation I will divide up Shechem,

and portion out the Vale of Succoth.

Gilead is mine, and Manasseh is mine;

Ephraim is my helmet; Judah is my scepter.

Moab is my washbasin; on Edom I hurl my shoe;

over Philistia I shout in triumph.”

Who will bring me to the fortified city?

Who will lead me to Edom?

Have you not rejected us, O God?

You do not go out, O God, with our armies.

O grant us help against the foe,

for human help is worthless.

With God we shall do valiantly;

it is he who will tread down our foes.

Psalm 60

Reflection – Well, we made it through the 50s, the ‘gloomy 50s’ as I’ve called them in this weekly psalm column (psal-umn?) on the blog. And with Psalm 60, while troubles are still abounding and enemies are afoot, we do seem to have turned a corner.

The victory belongs to the Lord. This, of course, is always the answer to the ‘gloom-mongers’ of this world. Whenever the very real problems and very real woes of our lives or the times we live in start to pile up and blot out the light of the sun… well, it’s good to remember that the sun (and the Son) is still there, right?

God is victorious. God not only is winning, He has won, and at this point we are simply living through the mopping up operations. Christ Jesus defeated the devil, and sin, and evil, and death. All of these are still around and can damage us, but so is He, and He is stronger, and that’s more or less the whole point.

The psalms in the weeks ahead will take quite a sharp turn away from what has been a pretty unrelenting focus on trouble, sorrow, distress. This psalm stands right at the knife’s edge of that turn, right where we finally sum up the case that human life is a mess, that we are besieged by enemies too powerful for us, that we can do nothing against these powerful enemies, and that all is lost… except God.

And with God, all that is lost, is found. All defeated, win. All besieged, prevail. So let us not give in, not for a second, not for a moment, to discouragement, to defeatism, to gloom and sadness. We are people of faith, and Jesus is bigger than all the evil in the world.

Gaudete Sunday is coming up this weekend, so let’s rejoice in the Lord always, and know His love is upon all His people.

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Nightmare on Your Street, Part Seventeen

On Wednesdays I am going through my book Idol Thoughts, presenting the classic Christian doctrine of the ‘eight thoughts’ that draw us away from God and from life, and what to do about them.

Much of the list corresponds to the more familiar ‘seven deadly sins’, of which it is the historical progenitor. But we are now in the thoughts that vary from that later list. Last week we talked about despondency, the settled conviction that happiness means getting one’s own way, and hence the glumness that pervades life when we so often don’t.

But there is an even deeper thought that can sadden us in an even more destructive way. Namely there is the thought that happiness is… well… not. That is, there is no such thing, not really, not in any lasting way. Not to speak of.

This is the crushing, paralyzing, soul sapping thought of acedia, which oddly has never had an adequate English word to describe it. I guess we English speakers just (sigh…) can’t be bothered to come up with a word for it.

It really is what ‘sloth’ used to refer to, but that word has come to mean exclusively physical laziness, which is quite a different thing, really. Acedia is a spiritual ailment more than a bodily one, and in fact can be expressed by an intense physical busyness and workaholism.

Acedia is the settled conviction that nothing is any good, anyhow, that there is no real point in striving for true and lasting happiness, that there is no heaven awaiting us, no real victory over sin and death in this life or the next, and so there is no value whatsoever in striving for such a victory through any real spiritual effort.

Acedia is the great ‘why bother?’ of the soul. Pray? Why bother? Fast? Really, why bother? Good works? Why bother? Practice virtue, resist temptation, repent of sin? Why bother, why bother, why bother?

Much of this goes on at a sub-conscious level. Of all the thoughts, acedia has the least actual truth to it—the other thoughts take great strength from the fact that they are all partial truths and so quite persuasive. Acedia has almost no truth to it, and so often lurks in secret underneath the level of conscious reflection.

But it is the thought that fuels so much of our sinful behavior. We know—most of us, if we have a scintilla of good sense—that stuffing our faces, hoarding riches, and messing around sexually will not really make us happy, not for more than a moment anyway. But we are constantly falling into those sinful deeds and others because acedia is constantly thrumming in the sub-basement of our soul its deadly refrain: ‘why bother, why bother, why bother’. We know those things won’t make us happy, but we do them because nothing else will make us happy, either, so why not have a bit of pleasure right now?

Acedia is the silent killer of the soul, the cancer that chokes off its life. Acedia is the abortionist of the soul, killing spiritual life and growth in its nascent beginning. Acedia is the atheist of the soul, loudly and obnoxiously proclaiming that there is no God, no point, nothing at all worth pursuing on the spiritual line.

Acedia is in all of us, to some degree or another. The only people who are entirely free of it are wholly transformed saints, and if any such people are reading this blog, they know quite a bit more about the subject than I do. Because the path to sainthood means having to do battle against acedia for years, truly. It is a tenacious foe, hard to kill, like Jason or Freddie or one of those other horror movie villains, perpetually back for one more sequel (Nightmare on Elm Street XXVII! Friday the 13th XXXII!), one more slash of the knife to our spiritual selves.

So when we speak of a ‘remedy’ for acedia we are not talking about quick fixes. There ain’t no such thing. The remedy for acedia is fundamentally perseverance and habit. Establishing a routine, a way of life, a fixed commitment to pray at certain times, fast on certain days, dedicate oneself to apostolic charity and love according to what is suitable for one’s way of life. To simply do these things, and when (as is near-inevitable) we fail to do these things, to promptly begin to do them again.

This, and the grace of God we dispose ourselves to receive as we simply ‘show up’ each day in prayer, fasting, and works of mercy, is the radical surgery, the radiation therapy, the chemotheraphy of the soul shrinking the tumor of acedia so that ultimately it can do us no damage, even if it still there in a reduced state, still muttering its insane little refrain of why bothers at us.

We have to endure that, for as long as it lasts, but that too can become a spur in us to fidelity and perseverance, and an atoning suffering borne for all our brothers and sisters who live lives of quiet desperation, who are so utterly in the grip of acedia that they don’t even know what it is, since it is the assumed fact of life—the sky is blue, grass is green, and nothing is any good in the end anyhow.

I have quite a bit more to say about this subject, but will leave the rest of it for the readers of my book to discover for themselves. For today, let’s fight the good fight against acedia, say our prayers and do the good that is before us today, en route to the Good that is awaiting us in God’s heart.