We had a wedding last month. Everything glowed. It reminded me of all the promises of the kingdom of heaven.
It was almost too good to believe. A community of joy united in a mission to get to heaven. Eternal reward. The wedding feast of the Lamb. Many mansions and streets paved with gold. All of it — the whole promise — seemed within reach.
And then, a week later, there was a death in the family. The crushing reality of mortality made itself known there in the afterglow of unbridled joy. A different community. One heavy with doubt and despair and scoffing indifference to the traditions of Christian passing.
Is it the conditions for our souls, the way we need to live our lives in order to be open to the blessing of heaven, in order to believe there is a good God who will welcome us home too out of reach? Is it too hard? Beyond our imaginations?
Is that why we are a post-Christian society? Is that why the people who are accepting — embracing even — of new age practices, abortion on demand, sex without commitment (and sometimes without affection) are scornful of Christianity?
They believe the lies, and they take aim at the truth behind the shields of their cultural superiority, using spears barbed with their sarcasm. Do they have no imagination for the promises of Christ, no fortitude for the moral imperatives of the beatitudes, and so they accept nothing that can’t be proven and rely entirely on the self-sufficiency of their intellectualism?
We are not martyrs being fed to the lions, but we are persecuted daily as our way of life is maligned by the majority and derided by those who believe themselves to be academically enlightened.
The Gospel is for the broken, not the arrogant souls who think they have it all figured out. The good news is that Christ came for the lame and the weak and the poor and the suffering.
We cannot receive him unless we acknowledge that we need him for our every breath. We cannot enter into Good Friday unless we are willing to have our bones broken as we hang upon a cross. We won’t be healed until we admit we are mortally ill. And we cannot rise on a glorious Easter morning unless we have our thirst met by rags soaked in vinegar. What a crazy thing it is to give the assent of our will to be a follower of Jesus.
When we give our fiat to a life with and for Christ, we give our assent to persecution for his name’s sake — whatever form that might take. This makes me a little afraid, to be honest. Some days, it makes me more than a little afraid.
Perhaps it does you, too? Do you worry and wonder what you will suffer in order to answer the call of your vocation? Do you ever look at the neighbor who chose an easy path dictated by an entirely secular perspective on success — the one who eats, drinks, and is merry without so much as a nod to inevitable death — and wonder if maybe you are just a misguided glutton for punishment?
But what if it’s all true? What if the Gospel is really, truly true? What if there is a God who created us for eternity and there is a glorious heaven and there is the punishment of hell?
If it’s all true, then the way that we live right now matters enormously. When we die, we will be judged on how we love. God will look at us with love and all eternity will hinge on whether we can raise our eyes to return his gaze.
Our Lord is a patient teacher. He wants nothing more than for us to learn to love, and he will keep teaching us for as long as we have breath.
So often, we are the worst impediments to the lessons he has for us. Puffed up by our perceived knowledge, paralyzed by our own self-importance, stymied by a lack of empathy, we fail to love.
He meets us there. He grants us the grace to move beyond ourselves to the transcendence of his Holy Spirit, and there, he teaches us to love. There, if we let him reveal it to us, we catch a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven here on this broken earth.
Foss, whose website is takeupandread.org, writes from Connecticut.
