By JAMES MONTI
The arrival of November invariably turns the mind and heart to what lies beyond the horizon of this world, what is beyond the confines of time. For it is a month that begins with a celebration of the citizens of Heaven, All Saints Day, followed immediately by All Souls Day, a day of Masses and prayers for the faithful departed who wait for Heaven’s gate to be opened for them. We all have different journeys to make in this life, some short, some long, and some exceedingly difficult, but all our journeys need to have one final destination, that incredible place we call Heaven.
Perhaps now more than ever, at a time in history when this world has turned so horribly dark as it revels in a relentless pursuit of evil, impurity, and malice, we need to lift our eyes from the darkness to contemplate anew “what God has prepared for those who love Him” (1 Cor. 2:9).
The voices of this world try to tell us that Heaven is “boring,” that only “losers” want to go there. But if we step away from the incessant noise of this world and contemplate in silence just who God is and what He has done for us, our hearts will begin to experience that hunger to be with Him, to see Him and be with Him forever, that blissful destiny we were created for. Every single thing that God has created to fill the universe with beauty and wonder He has created as an invitation to the human heart, an invitation to come to know and love the One who created it.
And it is no accident that for each of us there are certain things in nature that particularly attract us and fascinate us in a very personal way. God loves each and every one of us individually, as if each of us were the only person in the whole universe, so His gifts to us are very personal. I know a man who for many years was an expert and experienced mountain-climber. But more importantly, he is a man of deep faith. I know his fascination with mountain-climbing was given to him by God, that he sought God at the top of the mountains he climbed, and that God was there awaiting him at the summit.
There are things in nature that God has created to awe us, to manifest His omnipotence, that we might rejoice in our utter dependence upon Him as His creatures and have that priceless reassurance that He is in full command of the universe — “Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.” Yet there are also those things that reveal His deep tenderness to us, like a tiny plump sparrow, or a squirrel doing something silly to make us laugh, to assure that He knows and understands even our little troubles and sorrows, and that even in His divine justice He will be gentle with us, a gentleness we have all experienced when in the confessional His mercy and forgiveness have been poured like a soothing balm upon the ugly sores of our sins.
What takes place in the confessional, what is accomplished in the confessional, is one of the principal reasons for great festivity in Heaven, as the famed English spiritual writer and hymnist Fr. Frederick William Faber (+1863) explains:
“But how does the Creator, the King of Kings, receive His tribute? He bursts forth all divinely into triumph, because a half-converted sinner has condescended to accept His grace. He bids the angels rejoice, and holds high feast through all the empyrean heaven, not because He has evolved some new and wonder-stirring system out of nothing, not because He has called into being some million-worlded nebula, and cast upon it such an effulgence of beauty as throws all the rest of His creation into the shade — but because one wretched, unworthy, offensive man has, after an immense amount of divine eloquence and pleading, consented to take the first step towards not being damned — because one outcast of human society, who has drunk his fill of every vice, has graciously condescended for fear of hell to accept heaven! These are the Creator’s triumphs, these the ovations of everlasting and of all-wise mercy” (Fr. Frederick William Faber, The Creator and the Creature; or, The Wonders of Divine Love, Baltimore, Murphy and Co., 1857, p. 264).
All of us in one way or another have experienced that human longing to explore, to search for and discover what we have not yet seen, driven by the hope that something very special and wonderful awaits us at the end of our quest. Little children are endlessly eager to “explore,” often in ways that give their loving parents quite a scare! The famous explorers from the fifteenth century onward were all driven to undergo great hardships and face great dangers in their hunger to discover what lay beyond what was already known, to find and see unseen wonders. And often enough, they were not disappointed, discovering something they had never imagined.
This thirst for “the quest” is given to the human heart by God to school us in embarking upon that greatest quest of all, the quest of a lifetime beyond all others, the quest for God Himself, and for that “New World” where at long last we will see Him with unveiled sight, Heaven. To plant our feet firmly on the path for that journey, He has given us the Holy Eucharist, whereby we come as close as we can to finding Heaven on Earth. Just imagine if while we were kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament exposed in a monstrance, the veil of the sacred Host’s appearance were pulled back like a curtain to show us in a totally unveiled manner just Who it is we are kneeling before, the One whose face is infinitely more resplendent than the sun and the stars.
And then, as if we didn’t already have more than sufficient reason to long for Heaven in that we will see and be with God there forever, He gives us the added incentive of the countless others we will share Heaven with. First and foremost among these is Mary, all-beautiful, all-pure, all-glorious Mary, Mother of God and Virgins of virgins — just think what it will be to behold her lovely face, to hear her fair voice, to be with her forever. For centuries, artist after artist has tried to express on canvas or in sculpture some inkling of what her beauty must be like. The saints who have experienced a glimpse of it in apparitions of her have all said her beauty is indescribable.
Heaven will also be the place where we will meet for the very first time all those men and women who by their words, thoughts, and actions while on Earth decades or centuries before our own lifespan taught us what it truly means to love and follow Christ, the Communion of Saints, saints with a capital “S” in that they not only made it to Heaven but did so by living as heroes, giving themselves to God with boundless generosity and courage.
In his Dialogues, Pope St. Gregory the Great (+604) speaks of what it will be to meet in person those past champions of the faith whom we have admired, whom we have begged to intercede for us, and whom we have striven to imitate: “The good . . . will recognize not only those whom they knew on Earth, but many saintly men and women whom they had never seen before will appear to them as old friends. And so, when they meet the saints of the ancient past, they will not appear unfamiliar to them, for they always knew them through their deeds” (Saint Gregory the Great: Dialogues, trans. Odo John Zimmerman, OSB, Fathers of the Church, volume 39, New York, Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1959, Dialogue 4, chapter 34, p. 233).
But Heaven will also be a place of happy reunions, happier than any we have ever known on Earth. Each year, over the days leading up to Christmas, highways, airports and train stations are crowded with travelers — travelers with a single purpose in mind: going home for Christmas. They want to be reunited with family members, often enough loved ones they haven’t seen in a long time.
Many Are Waiting For Us
Yet these reunions, as joyful as they are, nonetheless are transient. The reunion we will have with our family and friends in Heaven will last forever, and will be one of perfect and unsullied jubilation, and incomparably more beautiful in that it will be a reunion before the face of God: with all our loved ones we will behold together the Lord in all His infinite splendor. Of this reunion above and beyond all others, St. Cyprian (+258) observes:
“Why should we not make haste and run, to see our home, and to greet our kinsfolk? There are a great many of those we love waiting for us there — father, and mother, and brothers, and children, there in great company they await us, they who are sure now never to die any more, but are not sure of us. O when we come to see them and to embrace them, what gladness will it be both for us and for them!” (St. Cyprian, On Mortality, from the Office of Matins for the Octave of All Saints Day, Nocturn 2, lesson 5, in The Roman Breviary, trans. John, Marquess of Bute, Edinburgh and London, William Blackwood and Sons, 1879, volume 2, p. 1344).
In Heaven we will also get to meet and spend eternity with those we have never known at all, holy souls who professed the same faith as we did while on Earth but whose paths never crossed ours until now, in the Heavenly Jerusalem, some who were our contemporaries in time and others from the distant past, men and women from every corner of the Earth. For as St. Jerome (+420) notes, through the Gate of Heaven “daily the souls of the just enter from every part of the world” (Homily 93, in The Homilies of Saint Jerome: Volume 2 (Homilies 60-96), trans. Sr. Marie Liguori Ewald, I.H.M., Fathers of the Church, volume 57, Washington, Catholic University of America Press, 1966, rpt. 2005, pp. 249-250).
Whatever journeys we find ourselves making, there is only one journey’s end that will fully satisfy the longings of the human heart, only one destination that will fully bring us home. The time to set our sights on Heaven, that ultimate destination, is now.
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