Homily for November 1, 2009
Liturgical Year B - Cycle I
32th Sunday in Ordinary Time
By Dcn. Ray Alcouffe
Topic: Heaven Our Destiny
+ + +
Reading II
1John 3:1-3
Beloved:
See what love the Father has bestowed on us
that we may be called the children of God.
Yet so we are.
The reason the world does not know us
is that it did not know him.
Beloved, we are God’s children now;
what we shall be has not yet been revealed.
We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him,
for we shall see him as he is.
Everyone who has this hope based on him makes himself pure,
as he is pure.
Gospel
Matthew 5:1-12
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain,
and after he had sat down, his disciples came to him.
He began to teach them, saying:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the land.
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the clean of heart,
for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness,
for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you
and utter every kind of evil against you falsely because of me.
Rejoice and be glad,
for your reward will be great in heaven.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God.”
Today we are celebrating All Saints Day. In doing so we are celebrating
those people who are clean of heart and now see God face to face, those
we call the Saints. In celebrating these people, in bringing them to our
soul-conscienceness, we are also celebrating our joyful destiny. , we are
celebrating what God created each and everyone of us to be. For as St. John
reminds us in his first letter: “We are God’s children now; what we
shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we
shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” In this ho,ily I want to
explore the consequences of embracing what St. John is telling us. In doing
so we will consider the role of the Saints, the concept of heaven as the
foundational reality of all creation, the nature of the Church, and the role
we are called to play in order to reap the benefits of God’s plan. We do
indeed have an active role to play for we hear St. John tell us: “Everyone
who has this hope based on God makes himself pure as he is pure”; and we
hear Jesus say, “Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God.”
Now as a preliminary consider this. In our celebration of All Saints,
we also celebrate what scares us the most. We do this on the eve of All
Saints, on All Hallowed’s Eve, or halloween. I have a question: who are the
scariest people we know? My candidate is the person who tells us, “leave
me alone, do not bother me, get out of my face and my space, let me be -
I want nothing to do with you or anyone.” This scares me because I think,
“What if I were to die in that state. What if I were to die and wake
up on the other side and there is nothing there but me? There is nothing
but an eternal aloneness?” This frightens me to the core of my being -
yet this is the logical consequence of the way I lived my life on earth -
I have constructed my own hell. I don’t want to be there!
This is not what God has in mind for us - that we should spend our lives
constructing Hell. Rather we should spend our lives accepting heaven. Heaven
is the foundational reality of God’s creation. Everything we see as real,
the earth, the solar system, the universe, a sunset or a rainbow, mountain
vistas, waterfalls, plants and animals, men and women and children, electrons
and protons, all have their origins in heaven. I mean the concrete material
reality we experience is an image of the spiritual reality that we call
heaven. When we expand our vision to include all God created, both heaven
and earth, we don’t need to look at the universe or to look at our lives
to say, “Is that all there is?” The resounding answer is “no”. Or as
St. Paul points out in 1 Cor: “Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has
it so much as dawned on man what God has prepared for those who love him.”
And yet in our modern world our pictures of heaven do not move us. We have
visions of heaven as a place where we sit on clouds playing our harps and
polishing halos. Theologian Peter Kreeft says, “For the most part our
modern day pictures of heaven are dull, platitudiness, syrupy as is our faith,
hope and our love of heaven.”
We need to change this vapid vision we have. One way to do this is to
contemplate the question - what will we do in heaven? To answer this we can
distill the meditations of spiritual thinkers and writers to say that we will
have three main activities. [I take this from Peter Kreeft; Everything You
Ever Wanted to Know About Heaven, But Never Dreamt of Asking]. In heaven we
will first understand our earthly life by means of “Godlight”. We will
then share all other human lives until finally we will go into the exploration
of God himself. So in heaven we will first be involved in reviewing our past
life with divine understanding and appreciation of every single experience; a
phenomenon the Church calls Purgatory. As we progress we will also do the same
in other’s lives from within. We get to know them intimately and gain their
perspective in the deepest way. Even more than we do with our best friends
here on earth. When we know, love, understand and appreciated completely by
inner experience everything we and everyone else have experienced - we will be
spiritually mature enough to begin the endlessly fascinating task of exploring,
learning and loving the facets of the inexhaustible nature of God. These
activities are not sequential but are more like an upward expanding spiral
of love and understanding as we experience more of our lives, the lives of
others and that of God. As a tiny example of the implications of the heavenly
process I offer this: A baby dies and enters the heavenly realm. Because of
its short earthly sojourn, the baby will need parents to provide love and all
parental support in its heavenly sojourn. And as providence will have it,
there will be persons who did not have the opportunity to parent a child;
they will be given this gift. Such is the economy of God.
No heaven is not boring, it is inexpressibly joyous and a completion of
who God created us to be. So this earthly journey, this life’s road does
indeed lead to somewhere real where we want to be. In view of heaven as
reality, what we learn in our earthly life, what we do in our earthly life,
is freely to create in time the baseline of our eternal identities. To do
this effectively, to choose the path to life that is joyously everlasting,
we need someone to show us the way. That someone is Jesu Christ and the
vehicle he has designed for us is his Church. Now the Church is more than
we might suspect. In fact the Church exists in three states so that some
of Jesus’ disciples are pilgrims on earth, some have died and are being
purified, while still others are in glory experiencing in full light God
exactly as he is. Thus the Church includes heaven and earth because the
incarnate Jesus includes heaven and earth in his being. He is our link and
he provides the means whereby we can enter heaven. Think of it! We say we
are the body of Christ and so we are. Now the cells in the one body are all
living cells and only a very few are living on earth.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says it in this way. We as pilgrims on
earth are in union with those who sleep in Christ and this union is reinforced
by an exchange of spiritual gifts. As we pray for our loved ones in heaven,
they pray and intercede for us. And that is where the saints come in. They
see God face to face and they see us. With their help and intercession we
have that extra that we need to orient our lives toward heaven and thus be
heaven bound. Those who dwell in heaven fix the whole Church firmly in
holiness. And thus we have saints like Therese of Lisieux who says: “I
want to spend my heaven in doing good on earth.”
OK. I want to be part of that, I want to orient all I do in order to be
such a citizen of heaven. Or as the song that we used to sing in my Saint
Mary’s College days says:
“Oh when the saints go marching in,
When the saints go marching in,
Oh Lord I want to be in that number,
When the saints go marching in.”