The Heart of the Matter

Damien the Leper - soon to be Saint Damien

Sometimes when I pray the Our Father and come across the line, "thy kingdom come," I am carried away in my mind's eye for a moment to Hawaii.  So far in my life, the most heavenly place I have been is Hawaii.  So, when I read this week that Damien the Leper is about to canonized a saint, I cheered.  For someone to become a canonized saint by the Catholic Church, there has to be a second miraculous healing of 2 different people whose deadly conditions left no hope other than Heaven's intervening.

Audrey Toguchi of Hawaii had a form of cancer that her doctor described as surely fatal, "Nobody has ever survived this cancer.  It's going to take you."  Audrey is the granddaughter of a leper who was exiled to the part of Molokai that was the leper colony where Father Damien de Veuster, a Belgian priest, served as priest to the lepers, eventually becoming a leper himself. 

Audrey and her two sisters visited Blessed Damien's grave and prayed for his intercession.  Shortly thereafter her healing began and turned into a miraculous healing that medicine could not explain.  This second miracle ascribed to the intervention of Damien the Leper was just recognized as authentic by the Vatican.  The date of the actual canonization will be set in the fall.

One event in Father Damien's life that describes his sanctity was his desire to go to confession, but no priest would risk going to the leper colony to minister to this minister of the most rejected people.  He sent word to his bishop, begging for some priest to come to him, so the bishop himself came by boat but everyone on the boat did not want to get close enough for a meeting between the two.  So Damien shouted his confession to the bishop on the boat and received absolution by the bishop shouting back to him. 

Have you ever been to heaven?

Have you ever been to heaven?  Back in 1993 I spent a month at a retreat house in Chatawa, Mississippi doing the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola.  Spending a whole month in quiet prayer and meeting once a day for an hour with the retreat director can lead to mystical moments.  In one of these prayer experiences, the Lord took me on a tour of heaven.  I saw Mary, the Lord's Mother.  She was sewing!  She explained, when I asked, that she was sewing all the prayers and petitions of people praying to her.  "They're all wonderfully connected," she said as she sewed them into a beautiful tapestry that she gives to her Son to present to the Father.

Then, the Lord introduced me to my (deceased) parents, but I couldn't see them.  He said, "That'll be for later. That would be too much now."  Then He introduced me to one saint after another, including my patron saints, one saint after another - including all my deceased relatives and significant people I've prayed for.

It was a wonderful experience of love and peace and joy and hospitality.  The Lord said, "I've showed you heaven once before; and this is surely your destiny, but you must pray for final perseverance.  All of these saints are praying for you," - and then Jesus got their attention and told them that it was the Father's will that my petitions be heard; and "It surely is your will too, isn't it?"  And a great Amen resounded in heaven.  I then prayed a litany of saints as I left heaven and came back to my chair on the screened porch at the retreat house.

Are "the entitled" entitled to heaven too?

There is a creeping poison sweeping into the souls of really good people.  It's a sense of entitlement.  It's a sense that I deserve everything good and nothing bad.  It can be seen in very fine people, even movers and shakers in society, who have no real concern about the state of their souls.  As if it's obvious that heaven is their due just as well as all the other good things life has to offer.  It's as if heaven is simply the dessert that's part of the banquet of life and comes with the whole deal of being the very special people they really are.  Here's the problem: if heaven is my due for my being the very fine person I am, then I really don't need a Savior, do I?  And if heaven is my due, then when I die I simply go on to heaven without passing through the Judgment.  And if heaven is my due, then I really don't have to "enter by the narrow gate," do I?

Really?  Sounds like achieving salvation by oneself.  Hmmm.

Accepting what you cannot change: a key to happiness

I had a funeral today for an 89 year old lady whom I did not know until I gave her Last Rites last week.  She had suffered a life's worth of tragedy.  When she was 8 years old, a child threw a lit cigarette at her back.  Her taffeta dress erupted into flames; and instead of smothering the flames, water was used to put out the fire.  This made the burn even worse than the original burn because the result was that her back and internal organs were cooked.  To eliminate the possibility of her being made fun of, she was kept home.  She never learned how to read or write; she never dated and never married. 

If this had happened to you, do you think you might have become embittered?  Or self-pitying?  Instead of becoming bitter, she accepted what she could not change and became a loving, favorite aunt in her very large extended family and became known as the one who could be counted on to care for the little children in the family.  As her eulogist, a nephew, said in his eulogy, "She was dealt lemons in life, and she turned them into lemonade."

Imagine the joy God is having as He welcomes her into Paradise where there will be no more tears, no more suffering, no more scars, no more crying out in pain.  Imagine what joy God has whenever He gives the reward of Eternal Life to anyone who has suffered from the actions of others.  Oh, the joy in heaven tonight! 

The best tumble I ever had!

When I took that tumble yesterday, and was suddenly surrounded by college students (I was over on the Hill just having finished getting a haircut), it was like a moment in heaven. They gathered around me, one taking off his coat to put it under my profusely bleeding head; a college girl putting her coat on top of my chest; and a parish school graduate calling 911, talking to me until the ambulance arrived and got me inside. Off to the ER and 5 stitches later and by the time I got to bed last night, I felt like I had just been taken care of by a host of angels. 

Teaser # 2 of "Spe Salvi" - Do we really want to live eternally?

In his encyclical, Pope Benedict looks at arguments atheists have for not beliving in God or having a hope for heaven.  One question he looks at is: What is a more accurate description of heaven than our thinking that we live forever?  Here's a teaser from "Spe Salvi."

"But then the question arises: do we really want this—to live eternally? Perhaps many people reject the faith today simply because they do not find the prospect of eternal life attractive. What they desire is not eternal life at all, but this present life, for which faith in eternal life seems something of an impediment. To continue living for ever —endlessly—appears more like a curse than a gift. Death, admittedly, one would wish to postpone for as long as possible. But to live always, without end—this, all things considered, can only be monotonous and ultimately unbearable."

". . . it is true that to eliminate death or to postpone it more or less indefinitely would place the earth and humanity in an impossible situation, and even for the individual would bring no benefit. Obviously there is a contradiction in our attitude, which points to an inner contradiction in our very existence. On the one hand, we do not want to die; above all, those who love us do not want us to die. Yet on the other hand, neither do we want to continue living indefinitely, nor was the earth created with that in view. So what do we really want? Our paradoxical attitude gives rise to a deeper question: what in fact is “life”? And what does “eternity” really mean? There are moments when it suddenly seems clear to us: yes, this is what true “life” is—this is what it should be like." 

"The term “eternal life” is. . . an inadequate term that creates confusion. “Eternal”, in fact, suggests to us the idea of something interminable, and this frightens us; “life” makes us think of the life that we know and love and do not want to lose, even though very often it brings more toil than satisfaction, so that while on the one hand we desire it, on the other hand we do not want it. To imagine ourselves outside the temporality that imprisons us and in some way to sense that eternity is not an unending succession of days in the calendar, but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality—this we can only attempt. It would be like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time—the before and after—no longer exists." 

"We can only attempt to grasp the idea that such a moment is life in the full sense, a plunging ever anew into the vastness of being, in which we are simply overwhelmed with joy. This is how Jesus expresses it in Saint John's Gospel: “I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you” (John 16:22). We must think along these lines if we want to understand the object of Christian hope, to understand what it is that our faith, our being with Christ, leads us to expect."

Thoughts on the Last Judgment

When we depart this life our Catholic faith teaches us that we will be judged.  If we have not alienated ourselves irrevocably from the love of God, then before we enter heaven we must give the Lord an accounting of what we have done in the body, whether for good or for bad.  (See Romans 14:12)  Every Sunday we profess our faith and one of the elements of the creed we pray together is that the Lord Jesus "will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead."  It's just as it is in this life: we are held accountable again and again, whether by tests in school, levels of achievement in athletics, benchmarks of accomplishment in the work place, growth into virtue or descent into vice, and so on.  So, when we die we will face the Lord in total honesty, with no excuses, nothing to hide behind, and no dodging the truth of what we did with the precious gift of life.  This judgment will be exercised by the Just Judge, who is full of mercy, and who came among us in the flesh not to condemn us but to save us.  The Judge we will face is absolute love, for in Him justice and peace have kissed.  He is forgiveness Itself, but He is also Truth itself, and does not call evil good or good evil.  In the clear light of eternity we will see ourselves through the eyes of the Lord who gave us a calling when we were created.  Seeing ourselves as He sees us will result in grief, but this kind of grief is that of the beatidue: "Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted."  The adjustment in seeing the raw truth of what we did with our life compared to what God was calling us to, again and again through all the years of our life, is part of the process that has been called purgatory.  In this process "we shall be like Him for we shall see Him as He is."  Becoming like God who is both love and justice involves an adjustment.  That adjustment, whatever it is like, contains the promise that this holy grief will be comforted, that heaven is straight ahead once the adjustment happens after realizing how we disappointed the One who loved us into existence and gave us our own unique calling.  The General Judgment, at the end of time, will include an awareness of what God called the whole human race to be, and how each of us participated in slowing down the advance of the Kingdom of Heaven.  Let us never forget that when our times comes to meet the Lord, we should be well prepared for that moment by doing all we can to die in the state of grace.  Requesting the Last Rites of the Church, being full of repentance for the sins of our lives, and trusting completely in the mercy of our forgiving Savior, all make up what is called the grace of a happy death.  It is also sweet indeed to be surrounded by the loves of our lives. 

Just what do they do in heaven?

An All Saints Day reflection:  Did you ever wonder what the saints do in heaven?  Do they sit around on a cloud and play a harp?  (Boring!)  Do they rest, like on a vacation - eternally?  (Even a vacation, after so long, gets old.)  So what do they do in heaven?

I think the plan devised by the architect Antonio Gaudi for the Sagrada Familia is stunning in its capturing a sense of heaven. 

Its other-worldly design includes a design for the interior of the church where figures of angels and saints are to be suspended in a way that depicts them as ascending and descending upon those gathered in worship.  Gaudi's vision is that what happens at Mass is a window into heaven.

The Scriptures and our Catholic Church teach us that in heaven there is "a great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue."  And what do they do?  They stand "before the throne and before the Lamb, wearing white robes and holding palm branches in their hands."  And they cry out in a loud voice: “Salvation comes from our God, who is seated on the throne, and from the Lamb.”  In other words, they worship!  (And so, what about people who don't want to worship in this life?  Well, it will be quite an adjustment when they get to heaven, won't it!) 

We also know from our faith that the saints intercede for humanity.  So, heaven is no lollygagging affair.  When we get there, we will see the Lord Jesus face to face and will know for the first time what it's really like to be in the presence of Absolute Love.  Worship will flow naturally, just as awe rises up naturally in the heart of someone looking at stunning beauty.  And That Love will evoke in us a zealous love for others, with a particular love that exercises concern and attention to those who have yet to make their way through what sometimes can be described as a "valley of tears," those still in their earthly life, wending their way towards the Kingdom of Heaven.

The grace of "a happy death"

One of my key responsibility areas as a priest is to administer the sacraments to the dying.  Sometimes I get called while the dying person is still conscious and able to swallow.  In that case three sacraments can be given: Penance (AKA "Confession"), the Anointing of the forehead and the hands in the Sacrament of the Sick, and Holy Communion.  When the person is unconscious the priest administers the Apostolic Pardon, the Anointing of the Sacrament of the Sick, and Commendation of the Dying.  All of this sacramental attention is what is called the Last Rites, which include any or all of these three sacraments plus the prayers for the dying. 

Since our society does not want us to think about death, the calling for the priest to come for the Last Rites is often put off until the patient is not conscious.  Perhaps it's a cultural preference of not wanting to face the harsh reality of death, perhaps it's a matter of not wanting to scare the dying person, or perhaps it's a matter of not grasping the beauty and consolation these sacraments can bring not only to the dying person, but also to the family and friends who are gathered together.  More on this another time.