Don’t forget to set your clocks back one hour as Daylight Saving has ended. It is a fall ritual that changes our clocks and our routines, which as I get older is more difficult to adjust to. As beautiful as fall has been this year, the lengthening darkness and the chill in the air wears a bit. I have a harder time getting out of bed in the early morning for prayer. And I fall asleep in my chair earlier in the dark of evening.
Also please on Tuesday exercise your right to vote as faithful Catholics and good citizens. There are important contests and issues that deserve our conscientious attention because they affect core values especially relating to life and justice which transcend any one election or candidate.
This week we celebrated Halloween, All Saints Day and All Souls Day, all of which raise up what comes next in life clearly distinct from short term politics. Last week I was in Mexico where on the occasion of my tenth anniversary of ordination as a bishop I prayed before the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe revealed to Saint Juan Diego and re-consecrated my life and priesthood to her. The local folks there were already preparing for an annual three day celebration, El Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. It is a joyful family and community gathering filled with special foods, processions and visits to cemeteries to honor those who have gone before. From what I was told this is not a moment of sadness, although loved ones are missed, but rather an upbeat recognition of the hope and trust that those loved and gone will be at peace with God.
As I experienced this moment of gratitude amidst the reality of life expressed in local customs, it reminded me of the brevity of life which is reflected in the change of the seasons. The reality is that at some point my time as your bishop will end (be assured I am not rushing for that to happen), for I am going to die. I do not know when or where or how, but I know that it will happen. All of us know it about ourselves. The great St. Augustine wrote: “Listen to relatives and friends at a baptism speculating on the future of a baby: will he be famous? Perhaps so, perhaps not. Will he be happy? Perhaps so, perhaps not. Will his life be long and healthy? Perhaps so, perhaps not. But no one ever asks. Will he die? Or answers perhaps so, perhaps not. We know he will. We might ask,” said the saint, “will he have eternal joy. Perhaps so, perhaps not.”
What is eternal joy our readings encourage us to ponder. The courageous brothers in our first reading from Maccabees had a vision that eternal joy, heaven is worth the agony of earthly persecution. The Sadducees in the Gospel who did not believe in an afterlife set forth for Jesus an absurd proposition. The expectation was that if a husband died without offspring it was the duty of his brother to marry the widow to assure continuation of the family line and care for the widow. The Sadducees with probable sarcasm posed the question if this happened seven times which of the brothers would be the husband in the afterlife. Jesus made clear that the afterlife is not merely a continuation of this earthly life.
In this gospel, Jesus tells us that there is a heaven but one that is not merely a replica of this world. It is more and better and beyond our comprehension. God is the God of the living, not of the dead, Jesus reassures us. If we believe that, it ought to guide us every passing day.
Heaven, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, is the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness. To live in heaven is to be one with Christ. Hell on the other hand is self-exclusion from that supreme joy, a willful turning away which results in eternal separation from God. If we believe that heaven is oneness with God which fulfills our human longing, we will strive to be worthy of it in this world by living good and holy lives, lives of virtue and of love. But it remains our choice.
For Christians, death is not just a fact of nature. We do not believe that we were made for such an impersonal, abrupt and brutal end. Our very being fights against such a casual attitude. But it is a popular vision of death among many in our secular and political culture who advocate that we have the right to determine when death comes even before birth. We certainly have the power to do so. But without recognition of judgment and an afterlife, the unborn, the sick, the disabled, the elderly, the poor, the different are expendable because they do not meet someone’s estimate of value in this world or they interfere with selfish pleasures of the moment. We disciples of Christ believe that all lives and all deaths are not just random acts but are part of God’s creative plan which is a mystery to us, and yet a mystery bathed in hope. We believe that when one dies life is changed not ended.
Those who advocate abortion or assisted suicide view death as simply a release from the difficulties of this life, an escape from this world. This view minimizes the consequences of how we live in this world and how well we live the Great Commandments, to love God with all our heart and mind and soul and strength and our neighbor as ourselves.
For us heaven is a destination we seek, recognizing that there are consequences to our actions that require us to humbly admit with tears of repentance our need for forgiveness, and a renewed commitment to love as He has loved us.
A little girl was walking with her father on a clear night. She was enthralled by the sky filled with twinkling stars. Suddenly she looked at her father and said: “daddy, I was just thinking, if the wrong side of heaven is so beautiful, how wonderful the right side must be.”
How wonderful it will be to have our deepest longings fulfilled, to be one with Christ. When that is our goal we can live with hope and with the courage and strength to cope with the crosses of each day, with trust in God’s mercy. Or as St. Paul put in the 2nd reading: “May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father . . . encourage your hearts and strengthen them in every good deed and word.”
Will we have eternal joy? Perhaps so.