Real, Whether You "Feel" It Or Not
Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell
To consider the ends is to contemplate the means.
I have long considered this maxim to be an important intellectual and spiritual truth. As we pray for the dead throughout the month of November, considerations of our own mortality, and what comes beyond our experience of mortality, are unavoidable.
Such considerations point us to the ends, known as the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell. “Modern people”, exhibiting sensibilities which include significant numbers of contemporary Catholics, do not like to consider these realities. The regnant atheistic materialism, tinged with a touch of New Age absurdities and techno-paganism, makes a lot of Catholics susceptible to the notions that there is a “techno-medical” solution to the problem of death. It’s interesting to observe that people just assume, were such a solution possible, that it would somehow be a good or preferable to live “here” forever. That is an interesting ASSUMPTION.
As Catholics, everything begins and ends and begins again with Jesus Christ. If I am united to Christ in life that labors to follow His way and is governed by His truth, then I can be sure of His life, which is eternal. Even as I, just like Christ did, must pass through the dark valley of the shadow of death and trials that accompany that passage.
It offends the ethos of our age that we will be judged by anyone, perhaps especially by God. I think that resentment of judgment by God has much to do with deficient, even childish, conceptions of God. However, like it or not, judgment is what will be. Consequently, we prepare for that judgment by seeking holiness and virtue in this life. We submit ourselves to the discipline of discipleship and therein we discover our ultimate dignity and destiny as human persons. That we moderns find the thought of being judged offensive does not mean that such judgment does not occur. We should take heart that Jesus Christ is both the just judge and the merciful Savior. The best way to prepare for judgment is to make a regular confession.
A great many practicing Catholics seem quite averse to making a regular Confession. I think that leaves us significantly spiritually impoverished and woefully unprepared for the day of our own personal judgment by Jesus Christ.
Heaven and Hell are about choices- deliberate, informed, and persevering choices. None of us will accidentally or automatically stumble into these states of being. Heaven is that state of being of eternal union with the most Holy Trinity-an eternally dynamic form of being, which is divine, eternal love so extraordinary we cannot really conceive it. That is why it a divine revelation and a grace.
Hell is a place of eternal distance from God. The theologian turned Pope, Joseph Ratzinger, described Hell as “the loneliness into which love can no longer advance and the consequence of shutting oneself off from God’s love.” Therefore, we don’t somehow “trip” into Hell. We choose it by our adamant choices to be distant from God, to ignore Christ, to reject His revelation, to live as if we belong only to ourselves, to choose to persist in things we know are sinful, to choose to degrade our humanity, and to worship false gods with our manner of life.
To get a proper sense of Hell, we should understand Hell as the most merciful judgment the all-loving God can render to those who resolutely, consistently refuse the reality of God and the offer His love. God loves the souls in Hell-the realm of eternal distance from God. Such persons are in Hell because they persistently refused to love Him.
To consider the ends is to contemplate and engage the means. Through the Church Jesus Christ has extended His grace and truth through the Holy Sacraments and the Word of God to guide and to give us certain graces to live towards our proper end. God wills all men come to the knowledge of truth and be saved. The Heavenly Father, through Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit, always wills that every necessary grace-the means-be given us that we might achieve the ends of eternal life in His very being, which is Heaven.
The choice is ours.
