Called Home
During these few short weeks of Advent we have explored a few topics that are meant to help orient ourselves to being more receptive of Christ, not only on Christmas, but also through a regularly daily act of conversion. During the first week, we looked at our need to see clearly the kind of content we consume in order to be sure that we are being formed in the reality of the biblical narrative. Last week, I wanted to refocus our activity on really doing nothing at all, but simply dwelling in the reality of our identity as beloved children of God the Father. I think that resting in the fact that we are loved as beloved sons and daughters can be one of the hardest things to do and is often one of the first things we abandon when any kind of struggle, sadness, anxiety, or temptation comes our way - we simply forget who we are.
One of the key missions of this knowHis.love project is to re-emphasize the relational component of our faith in hopes of helping those that come across our content to discover or rediscover who they are in light of their baptism and the love of God. If we lose or forget the filial identity we possess through our baptisms, the way we see God, others, and ourselves can be badly distorted. Living out this identity is hard - especially in a world that wants to do everything in its power to convince you that you are something other than worthy of being loved.
Knowing who we are, however, is only part of the equation of what can help us navigate through the many pitfalls and allurements that lead us to believe in a false sense of self. In order to truly root ourselves in a proper identity of how the Father sees us, we also have to acknowledge where our Father longs for us to be, that is, with Himself - He is calling us home.
We possess this gift of freedom that is both beautiful and terrifying at the same time as it gives us both the ability and responsibility to either receive or reject His love. Our lives reflect this freedom as each day we have a chance to conform our hearts and wills to His or completely reject it and turn away from what is good, true, and beautiful. Upon our deaths, we will be confronted with the consequences of how we have disposed our hearts to either receive or reject His love.
If our life has been one consistent “no” to His love, God isn’t going to force Himself on us in any way and loves us enough to give us what we want - to be separated from Him for all eternity. If, on the other hand, our hearts have practiced receiving His love day after day, our Heaven will be just that, union with Him.
I think that popular media and artistic license over the centuries has led many to see Heaven or Hell through a lens of either pleasure or punishment. If we only see life after death as a reward or loss of reward and do not ground it in the relational foundation through which everything was created, we lose sight of who our God has revealed Himself to be. Again, we need to be thoroughly transformed by the biblical narrative, and in that worldview we see God as personal. This means that our entire existence and every good thing that we encounter in our lives is a reflection of the relational capacity of our God. Reducing the afterlife to a caricature by thinking that it is only about being rewarded or punished leads us to look only at the effects of a relationship with God and not the relationship itself.
Fundamentally, Heaven and Hell is either about entering into or separating ourselves from eternal life with the Blessed Trinity. In Heaven, we see the “ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longing” (CCC 1024). Far from the cartoonish images of Heaven that portray a cloudy environment with any kind of pleasure we could imagine, union with God truly fulfills the deepest of human longings and that yearning will be satisfied.
Hell, on the other hand, is really a recognition of what has been lost. Contrary to how we may live now where we can maintain a naivety about the reality of what it means to cut ourselves off from God through sin, in Hell, a person is confronted with the truth of what it means to turn away from Love. In fact, it is God’s love and mercy that can permit a person to choose the “state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed” (CCC 1033). Love, by its very definition, must be freely chosen. Even in Hell, we see the relational (or lack thereof) component of our existence on full display. The punishments that we hear described by saints and poets, are a consequence of rejecting a relationship with God - it is not simply about the punishments in and of themselves.
Philosopher Peter Kreeft speaks to the relational aspect of Heaven and Hell in his book Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Heaven-- But Never Dreamed of Asking:
In reality, the damned are in the same place as the saved—in reality! But they hate it; it is their Hell. The saved love it, and it is their Heaven. It is like two people sitting side by side at an opera or a rock concert: the very thing that is Heaven to one is Hell to the other. Dostoyevski says, 'We are all in paradise, but we won’t see it'…Hell is not literally the 'wrath of God.' The love of God is an objective fact; the 'wrath of God' is a human projection of our own wrath upon God, as the Lady Julian saw—a disastrous misinterpretation of God’s love as wrath. God really says to all His creatures, 'I know you and I love you' but they hear Him saying, 'I never knew you; depart from me.' It is like angry children misinterpreting their loving parents’ affectionate advances as threats. They project their own hate onto their parents’ love and experience love as an enemy—which it is: an enemy to their egotistic defenses against joy…
Since God is love, since love is the essence of the divine life, the consequence of loss of this life is loss of love...Though the damned do not love God, God loves them, and this is their torture. The very fires of Hell are made of the love of God! Love received by one who only wants to hate and fight thwarts his deepest want and is therefore torture. If God could stop loving the damned, Hell would cease to be pure torture. If the sun could stop shining, lovers of the dark would no longer be tortured by it. But the sun could sooner cease to shine than God cease to be God...The lovelessness of the damned blinds them to the light of glory in which they stand, the glory of God’s fire. God is in the fire that to them is Hell. God is in Hell ('If I make my bed in Hell, Thou art there' [Ps 139:8]) but the damned do not know Him.
Recognizing the relational foundation of reality, especially eternity, helps us order our lives on earth towards Heaven in a way that can take on a more clear direction. We can begin to see our baptismal identity (as a beloved child of God the Father) and everything that flows from it in what we do, say, and think as an anticipation of what kind of relationship we would like to have with God for eternity. The “rewards” or “punishments” become secondary to the desire to simply be in loving union with our God. Rather than living in the fear of eternal punishment, we can become motivated to want to be in right relationship with our God - who is just and merciful, all good, all loving, and desires that we be with Him for all eternity.
If we only see Heaven and Hell through a distorted lens that only emphasizes rewards or punishments, we can quickly take on a distorted view of God that is more akin to an abusive parent or spouse - “you better behave… or else.”
It is true that the consequences of how we live our life on earth matter, but we cannot reduce eternity with God to only looking at these consequences - doing so risks losing sight of the Giver of every good gift and fixating our attention only on what is done for me rather than the beauty and intimacy of the relationship itself.
During this Advent season, as we anticipate not only the first coming of Jesus, but also look forward towards His second, we have an opportunity to order our lives within the framework of our baptismal identity and the eternal destiny where our hearts long to find rest. Our words will always fall short in describing the full reality of what Heaven will be, but I think that John Paul II was helpful in acknowledging that, “In the context of Revelation, we know that the “heaven” or “happiness” in which we will find ourselves is neither an abstraction nor a physical place in the clouds, but a living, personal relationship with the Holy Trinity. It is our meeting with the Father which takes place in the risen Christ through the communion of the Holy Spirit.” (General Audience - Wednesday 21 July 1999).
Our Father is calling us home and Christ goes before us to prepare a place for us (Jn 14:2).