The Meaning of Christian Priesthood

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and God created man in His own image, and God saw everything He had made, and behold, it was very good.  Yet in spite of such glorious and auspicious beginnings, man could not carry on more than a brief moment before the terrible ignominy of sin had torn asunder his relationship with the loving Creator to whom he owed his very being.  Since that time, the life of every human being has been driven by the great, often misunderstood longing to cross the threshold that sin has wrought and return to the loving embrace of Our Father.  The means to this reconciliation, somehow revealed by God to those first transgressors, has been handed down since the time of Cain and Abel, and so all men everywhere have always known that without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins. Thus has the priest always been the constant fixture in all cultures, punctuating every period of human history.  He – or in those places where men had exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images, she – has, in every place stood daily at service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins, until, in the fullness of time, God sent forth His Son to become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.

Therein lies the distinctiveness, the dignity, and the importance of the priesthood of Christ, which is the priesthood of the Church of God.  Men have sought since time immemorial to turn to God, and have employed the services of the priest for just as long.  However, only when God Himself became a priest in the person of Jesus Christ could such a ministry achieve its intended end.  Jesus Christ is our high priest, and He now continues His ministry through the hands of those men whom He calls to serve in His person at His Altar.  While Christ serves in the Holy of Holies of Heaven, the men of the ordained priesthood perpetuate His ministry on earth, making present to the people of God His one, eternal offering to the Father.  They serve not as priests in their own right, but by participating mystically in His one eternal priesthood, and as such, a true appreciation, and any real understanding at all, of the ordained priesthood can only be found in an appreciation and understanding of Christ Himself.

Do You Understand the Good Samaritan?

The parable of the good Samaritan is quite possibly the most well known of all Jesus' parables, the only other likely to challenge it in notoriety being of course the parable of the prodigal son.  So ubiquitous is this parable that the phrase "good Samaritan" has come to stand on its own as universally recognized part of the English language.

It came as a great surprise to me, then, when upon listening to the parable during this past Sunday's Liturgy I realized that I did not actually understand the parable!  Of course, as I walked into the church to prepare for Mass I certainly thought I understood it - even recognizing that in all of the Scriptures there are depths of meaning in it that I have yet to reap.  It seems like a rather straightforward parable, doesn't it?  Having been told that he must love his neighbor, a lawyer asks Jesus whom his neighbor is, which the Lord answers with His tale of the good Samaritan teaching that our neighbors whom we should love are the poor, the suffering, the needy, and by extension, everybody.

There's only one problem: the wounded, dying man isn't the neighbor in this parable: the Samaritan is.

It was this thought that occurred to me as I listened to the Gospel being read and which at first led me to some degree of confusion.  Jesus concludes the parable by getting His questioner to recognize that it was the Samaritan who was the neighbor of the dying, penniless man on the side of the road.  I had always understood Jesus' message to be that the dying man who was in need of help was the neighbor, people like whom we as His disciples were called to love.  From the conversations I have had with others, this seems to be how most folks interpret this Gospel at first hearing.

The realization that the Samaritan is identified as the neighbor the lawyer asked about leads to a variety of new questions.  Most significantly, it seems as though Jesus is teaching that our neighbors - those we are called to love - are those who do good to us, those who help us and show mercy to us.  The message of the parable is, after all, that the priest and Levite (whose indifference Jesus juxtaposes with the Samaritan's compassionate help) are not neighbors.  Should then we only love as ourselves those who do good to us, and not those who do not?  Following upon this, what do we make of Jesus' instruction to the lawyer to "go and do likewise?"  In fact, it is by considering this instruction that we can come to understand the greater depth of what Jesus is in fact teaching here.

First, we need to consider what exactly Jesus was telling this lawyer to do.  The instruction comes in response to the man's statement that the neighbor was "the one who showed mercy," that is, the Samaritan.  Christ then says that he must imitate the Samaritan.  Here we find an important aspect to this parable that has been lost to history: Jews and Samaritans at this time held bitter hatred for one another, similar - if not even in greater measure - to the hatred that currently exists between Jews and Muslims.  So strong was it that this man could not even utter the answer "the Samaritan," but had rather to convolutely admit that the neighbor was "the one who showed mercy" That this Jewish man would be asked to imitate a Samaritan would have been both shocking to him and a very difficult pill to swallow.

In fact, this hatred is at the very heart of the lawyer's question.  Christ's teaching to "love thy neighbor as thyself" was actually not a new teaching.  It was found in the book of Leviticus, which in the 18th verse of the 19th chapter commands that "Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."  The understanding of this existed was that one's fellow Jew was one's neighbor.  That the man asked who his neighbor was "to justify himself" indicates that he asked Jesus this so that the Lord might affirm him in his practice.  Jesus offers the parable so as to help the man see that all people - even a Samaritan - should be loved.  Rather than simply saying as much and being swiftly rejected, He presents the story of the compassionate Samaritan so as to appeal to this man's sense of decency and compassion.  

On this note, it's secondly important to consider that Christ actually changes the lawyer's question around on him.  He had asked who he should love, and while Christ in a roundabout way gives him the hard answer that he should love all people - even Samaritans - His more direct answer teaches who it is that loves.  The man wanted to know who his neighbor was, but Christ taught him that it is more important that he himself should be a neighbor.  The Greek text of Jesus' question actually carries the sense of "who became the neighbor" of the dying man? This lawyer - and all of us - are called to become neighbors to those around us, whether they love us or not.

Yes, then we are called to love all people, not only those who do good to us as did the Samaritan to the victim on the road.  My initial confusion emphasizes the very purpose of Jesus' parable and His decision to answer the lawyer in the way He did.  I, like the lawyer, should be less concerned with who to love than simply with loving.  We need not worry who our neighbors are, but rather, we should worry about how to be neighbors.

Sometimes, our focus is misdirected so that we do not even ask the right question.  Christ, in His Wisdom, often chooses not to answer our misplaced questions but rather to give us the answer to the questions that we should be asking!

Saint Maria Goretti - the Real Story

Today, the Church remembers Saint Maria Goretti, the young 12 year old girl who was martyred when she refused to submit to the sexual advances of Alessandro Serenelli.  The young man, on whose family's property Maria and her mother lived, had propositioned her for sexual favors on several occasions.  She had denied him each time until finally, he set his mind to have his way with or without her cooperation.  When she said no to him even after having been threatened at the end of a dagger, Alessandro stabbed her over a dozen times.

Typically, Saint Maria is remembered for purity and chastity.  Her most well known patronage is that of rape victims.  There is on occasion discussion as to whether or not she presents an ordered image of purity, with some expressing concern that her story would seem to place a burden of impurity on rape victims, who are of course victims rather than moral agents themselves.  This is certainly an understandable concern.

 On this subject, it is important to note several things.  First, when she was attacked, Maria expressed as much concern for Alessandro's purity as for her own, and certainly the act of rape would constitute an offense against his purity. Second, whether Maria had the right understanding of purity or not - recall that she was in fact only twelve years old at the time and can hardly be blamed for having an imperfect concept of it - there is certainly a great deal we can learn from considering just how greatly she valued purity. Even if she erroneously thought to impute to herself that affront against purity which would be found in a rape, the point is that she understood that her purity was more important than her physical life.  This is a tremendous lesson which we  must take to heart.  Now, could there ever arise a scenario in which one would need to sacrifice his life to preserve his purity?  I cannot conceive of one myself.  However, the concept itself is true: ultimately, our purity does have more value than our lives, for our earthly lives will cease while our souls - in which is found purity - will subsist forever.

All of this said, I do not think that purity is the real message of Maria Goretti.  Rather, it is forgiveness and compassion, and respect for the dignity of every person that Saint Maria and her story teach us more than anything, and in my opinion the single most important message she can give to those of us who are already dedicated Catholics.  While her lessons of purity are sorely needed by most of our current culture, for the dedicated, practicing Catholic purity is a given - a struggle, perhaps, but not something about which we need a great deal of convincing.

Forgiveness and compassion, on the other hand, seem to be sorely lacking amongst even the most sincere of Catholics.  To forgive was perhaps Christ's most frequently spoken teaching, and yet it is something we so frequently fail to do.  All the worse is this as we have been taught that we would be forgiven based on how we forgive others!

The photograph at the top of this post may seem rather out of place for a post on the subject of a twelve year old girl, but it is in fact at the very core of all that Maria can teach us.  It is the photo of an aged Alessandro Serenelli, kneeling in prayer before an image of Maria Goretti, whom years before he had sought to rape and ultimately brutally murdered.  After Maria appeared to him in prison, he had a conversion of heart which led him to be one of the most sincere of Christ's followers.  He spent the last 33 years of his life in a Franciscan monastery as a lay brother.

There is so much that we can learn from Maria and Alessandro.  While dying in the hospital of her wounds, Maria is said to have spent the last 20 hours of her life praying for her attacker and asking the Lord to forgive him.  As has already been said, she appeared to him after her death to bring about his conversion.  That she would wish to do this was not only a matter of her heavenly perfection, for during those hours in the hospital she also told people that she wanted to have Alessandro in Heaven with her.  How many times have we been angry at others - so often for things which are morbidly insignificant compared to rape and murder - and not been able to consider being with them in Heaven?  Consider the person the person who has done the most evil to you and caused you the most pain.  Indeed, as a follower of Christ, you are called not only to be willing to spend eternity with him or her, but indeed to desire it and even - yes and even this! - to work for it.  Oh, how terrible this can seem - yet Maria Goretti provides us with a tremendous example to follow.

Even Maria's mother forgave Alessandro - and attended Mass with him.  There are no limits to forgiveness.  How many of us could grudgingly - or even easily - forgive an offense against us yet could not approach forgiving something done to one we love?  Yet we must, and with the grace of God, we can.

I leave you with the testimony of Alessandro Serenelli, written about 9 years before his death and ultimately born from the compassion and forgiveness of that person whom he had hurt the most:

"I'm nearly 80 years old. I'm about to depart. 

"Looking back at my past, I can see that in my early youth, I chose a bad path which led me to ruin myself. 

"My behavior was influenced by print, mass-media and bad examples which are followed by the majority of young people without even thinking. And I did the same. I was not worried. 

"There were a lot of generous and devoted people who surrounded me, but I paid no attention to them because a violent force blinded me and pushed me toward a wrong way of life. 

"When I was 20 years-old, I committed a crime of passion. Now, that memory represents something horrible for me. Maria Goretti, now a Saint, was my good Angel, sent to me through Providence to guide and save me. I still have impressed upon my heart her words of rebuke and of pardon. She prayed for me, she interceded for her murderer. Thirty years of prison followed. 

"If I had been of age, I would have spent all my life in prison. I accepted to be condemned because it was my own fault. 

"Little Maria was really my light, my protectress; with her help, I behaved well during the 27 years of prison and tried to live honestly when I was again accepted among the members of society. The Brothers of St. Francis, Capuchins from Marche, welcomed me with angelic charity into their monastery as a brother, not as a servant. I've been living with their community for 24 years, and now I am serenely waiting to witness the vision of God, to hug my loved ones again, and to be next to my Guardian Angel and her dear mother, Assunta. 

"I hope this letter that I wrote can teach others the happy lesson of avoiding evil and of always following the right path, like little children. I feel that religion with its precepts is not something we can live without, but rather it is the real comfort, the real strength in life and the only safe way in every circumstance, even the most painful ones of life."

What Christianity Isn't

I want to address something that I've noticed quite a bit recently. It's something I've come across in many different places in my life. Unfortunately, it is the sort of thing that might make some people feel uncomfortable. Therefore, I just want to say that this isn't directed towards anyone in particular. No one person is the inspiration for this. I've seen this amongst friends, family, acquaintances, and all throughout the blogosphere and other Internet forums.

What I am talking about is, essentially, a false form of Christianity. It is, as the title suggests, what Christianity isn't.

Christianity isn't going to Mass. It's not believing all the right things. It's not standing up for the rights of the unborn, or opposing homosexual marriage, or believing that the Ten Commandments ought to be allowed in public space. It's not living morally - abstaining from sex outside of marriage, being polite, staying sober, and so forth. It's not praying frequently, fervently, or with dedication. Christianity isn't feeding the hungry, helping the poor, and in other ways helping the less fortunate. It isn't reading spiritual books. It isn't standing up against those who are hijacking the Christianity for their own causes, or being the lone voice in the wilderness in opposition to some un-Christian practice or idea. Christianity isn't hating sin or cultivating virtue. It isn't standing up for legitimate "modern innovations" in the Church, nor is it defending the "traditional Church." It isn't opposing heresy, preaching truth, admonishing sinners, or imitating saints.

If you think that Christianity is any of those things, you are worshipping an idol. Your idol may be orthodoxy. It may be Ignatian spirituality. It may be sexual purity. You may worship tradition, the prayer, or even the Mass. In fact, you may have a polytheism in which you worship virtue, prayer, morality, orthodoxy, the corporal works of mercy, and all of the other things that are associated with Christianity. The fact is, Christianity is none of these things. We don't worship the Mass - we go to the Mass to worship God. And God, as St. John tells us, is Love (1 John 4:10).

Christianity is Love. It is nothing else. It is singularly, completely, and unreservedly Love. Indeed, all of the things listed above are a part of Love. One who loves his child will admonish her when she does wrong. One who loves God will believe all the right things. One who loves the unborn will defend their lives against the abortion mill that is western civilization. Yet none of these things, apart from Love, has any place in Christianity. Apart from Love, they are simply idols for us to worship instead of God.

Indeed, many people do worship these things. It is very common to worship virtue. The ancient Greeks were quite good at it. Today, many Christians worship these things. Purity apart from Love is not directed toward God, and yet time after time Christians will practice purity, even look to it as a great virtue, while failing to have Love in their lives.

It's a great thing to defend the faith; the Scriptures command us to be ready to (see 1 Peter 3:15). It's a great thing to oppose some terrible sin that our government is committing. It's absolutely necessary to admonish the sinner (such as pro-abortion politicians), but any of this done apart from Love falls far short of being Christian. Apart from Love, it is simply ideology.

Love is what separates orthodoxy from ideology. Love is what separates purity from prudishness. Love is what separates prayer from babbling, virtue from habit, saints from good citizens, righteous anger from sin. Love is what separates Heaven from Hell.

"If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy
gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all
mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains,
but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up
my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and
kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not
insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at
wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all
things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. As for
prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for
knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but
when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke
like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a
man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to
face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully
known. So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of
these is love." (1Co 13:1-13)

Love makes Christians Christians. Unfortunately, as I go through life, I see so little of it.

I have to be clear, here. I am a sinner. We are all sinners. I am not talking about sin. Not everybody is Saint Thérèse. I and most other people will certainly fall short of Love in our lives. We will on occasion practice a virtue without Love. We will abstain from sin for selfish reasons. We will do each and every thing on my list apart from Love sometimes. That's not what I am talking about.

What I am talking about is a general attitude that I see wherein these things are so often taken to be all that there is to Christianity. Love is seen as being Christian, but simply as another item on the list rather than the only thing that makes one Christian. In reality, all of those other things are supposed to be subordinate to love. They are supposed to be part of Love - things that we do to Love. They are supposed to be means, rather than ends. Our only end is to be God - Who is Love.

So I encourage you - as humbly as I can - to examine yourself. Examine your motives. Examine why you do all the things you do. If you pray, why do you? If you live a moral sexuality, what is causing you to? How often do you do things - good, Holy, virtuous, pious things - without Love? I can only promise to do the same examination myself, and I will. I think that it's something our world is in such need of right now. If every Christian who is fighting abortion, defending the faith, or trying to restore Christ to our world in every other way would simply stop for a moment and start to Love first and do these things second, our world would turn around in a matter of weeks.

Salvation and the Theological Virtues

One of the big differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, theologically speaking, is the emphasis on the theological virtues: faith, hope, and love. In Catholic theology, all three of these are required for salvation. If a person is lacking any one of them, he or she will not inherit the kingdom of Heaven, as St. Paul would say. The virtues are called theological because they pertain to God, as opposed to something else. The theological virtue of Faith, for example, is faith in God. The theological virtue of Hope is hope in God, as opposed to hope in something else. Hope in some other thing would be called the natural virtue of hope, for it is hope in something natural.. In Protestantism, faith is regarded as necessary - and faith alone.

This difference naturally leads to quite a bit of confusion on the part of Protestants when coming across the Catholic teaching. "Hope and love," they might ask? "The Bible says we're saved by faith, not hope and love." The biggest question, however, is not one that is particular to Protestants, but one that might be on the mind of anyone considering the idea. Namely, why faith, hope, and love? Why does a person need these three particular things for salvation?

To understand this actually isn't all that difficult if one has a Catholic understanding of God Himself. I oughtn't generalize, as there are certainly many Protestants who have this understanding of God as well, but it's much easier to explain the Catholic viewpoint when contrasting it with another view, one not uncommon in Protestantism. This understanding is what I call the "bouncer" God. In this non-Catholic thinking, God is essentially like a bouncer who guards the entrance into the club of Heaven. Unfortunately, thanks to our sins, nobody is good enough to enter except for Jesus Christ. However, anyone who is with Jesus is allowed to enter by virtue of being associated with Him.

As opposed to this, the Catholic understanding of God is familial. God is understood as not only wanting to be like, but as wanting to be the true and literal Father of us all. He wishes only to adopt us as His children and bring us into His home to receive the true inheritance that we have as His children, but He won't force us to. In life, He offers this invitation. We can either choose Him and enter our home - Heaven - to receive our inheritance, or we can choose other things that we would rather have. When we choose something besides God, this is sin. Of course, there is a true justice to this all. The idea of punishment due sin is not lost, because sin is also understood as real, true moral choices; it does deserve punishment. For those adopted as children of God, He forgives as Father. For those remaining children of the devil, He condemns as judge.

In the Catholic understanding, then, salvation is not simply a matter of escaping hell. Rather, it is a matter of choosing Heaven - or more properly, of choosing God. To penetrate more deeply into this question, then, let us consider what is required to choose anything.

If I were to hold a ball out to you, what would be required for you to choose it? First, and most obviously, you would need to believe that the ball was existed, and beyond that, that it was in fact really being offered. Second, you would need to want the ball. I could offer you the ball all day long, but if you did not want it, you would not choose it. Now, believing that it is available to you and desiring it, you would be required finally to do something to claim the ball. You would need to reach out and take it, or perhaps speak up and tell me that you did in fact want it.

Our example here is of a ball, but it may as well have been anything else in existence. To choose anything at all, then, three things are required: one must believe both that the thing exists and that it can be chosen, one must want the thing, and one must make some action to claim it. These three things are referred to in Catholic theology as faith, hope, and love.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines the theological virtue of Faith as "the theological virtue by which we believe in God and believe all that he has said and revealed to us, and that Holy Church proposes for our belief, because he is truth itself" (1814). This is very similar to a description that the book of Hebrews gives for faith: "Without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him" (11:6). This is exactly the conclusion that we arrived at above in regards to choosing things.; one must believe both that a thing exists and that the thing is available to be chosen. Faith requires that one believe in God and in what He says, namely, that He rewards those who seek Him - He can be chosen.

The definition of Hope that the Catechism provides is also consistent with what we have discovered about choosing things. "Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ's promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit" (1817). If faith is the virtue by which we believe in God and His rewards, then Hope is that virtue by which we desire God.

Finally we come to Love. The Catechism says, "Charity [Love] is the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for his own sake, and our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God" (1822). This requires a bit more unpacking. In Catholic Theology, it is understood that when a person is made just before God, God's Love is poured into his heart (see Romans 5:5). When one is just before God, and thus in the state of salvation, the Holy Spirit is present in his or her soul (no Christian would disagree with this idea,so far as I know). The Holy Spirit is that which internally causes us to Love God, and so by accepting the Holy Spirit into his heart, one Loves God. In the understanding of choosing things that we established, one must, upon believing in and desiring a thing, make an act of claim on that thing. One must "reach out and grab" the thing, as it were. The same is true of God. In the case of God, it is Love by which one "grabs" God, because it is by accepting Love into one's heart that one accepts the Holy Spirit. This idea could be embellished upon greatly by analyzing St. John's exhortations that "God is Love" from his first epistle.

In the Catholic understanding, God, through the merits of Jesus Christ, offers us Himself. Our life is a prolonged opportunity to choose, either to choose Him or to choose something else. He will not force Himself upon us, and so if we choose something else, He will respect that choice rather than dragging us into His presence anyways. It is by Faith that we believe in God and that we believe He is choosable. It is by Hope that we desire God, and it is by Love that we actually make our claim on Him (for lack of a better term). It makes sense, then, that no person can be saved if lacking any one of these three virtues. Without Faith, of course, one would not even recognize anything to choose. If one did not have Hope, then one would not want God, and clearly no choice is made in which a person does not want the item chosen. Finally, without Love, a person has not made any claim that He in fact does want God. If you believe I am offering you a ball and want it, it will do you no good if you do not actually do anything and simply stand in place believing and wanting it.

And so we come back to the Protestant belief that faith alone is required for salvation. Part of this is simply a matter of terminology. Most Protestants who believe that faith alone is required define faith differently from Catholics. To them, Faith includes in it the idea of Hope, and generally a sense of Love as well, although in many cases this sense of Love may be rather incomplete. This topic itself could fill up and entire post, or book for that matter, and will not be expounded upon further. It will suffice for now to read the words of Saint Paul from 1 Corinthians:

"If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy
gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all
mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains,
but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up
my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing... So now faith,
hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love." (13:1-3;
13)

Thus we see that Faith, apart from Love, profits nothing. Even dying for Christ will "gain nothing" apart from Love. Love is far more important than most people realize, or at least than most people act as though they realize, and is the greatest of these three crucial theological virtues.

St. Thérèse on Love

"One evening, not knowing in what words to tell Our Lord how much I loved him, and how much I wished that He was served and honouredeverywhere, I thought sorrowfully that from the depths of hell there does not go up to Him one single act of love. Then, from my inmost heart, I cried out that I would gladly be cast into that place of torment and blasphemy so that He might be eternally loved even there. This could not be for His Glory, since He only wishes our happiness, but love sometimes feels the need of saying foolish things. If I spoke in this way, it was not that I did not long to go to Heaven, but that for me Heaven was nothing else than to Love, and in my ardour I felt that nothing could separate me from the Divine Being Who held me captive."

The Ascension, the Body, and the Beatific Vision

Today is the official date of the Feast of the Ascension. In some parts of the United States and in some other countries, the celebration has been moved to the 7th Sunday of Easter. However, here in my home archdiocese of Boston, it is still celebrated today. This is the day that, in a certain sense - as Fr. Ventura said at the evening Mass tonight - sums up the reason we're Catholic: to go to Heaven. Jesus ascended into Heaven, and we hope to get there.

GK Chesterton made a similar statement once when he was asked why he was Catholic. Of course, his questioner was expecting some sort of theological reasoning, perhaps a historical reference, or even an emotional appeal to aesthetics or some such thing. However, in classic Chestertonian fashion, the author responded simply, "to get my sins forgiven."

So here we have to answers to the question of why we are Catholic. One is provided by today's celebration, and might be called the more positive of the two: we hope for Heaven! The second might be understood to be more negative, focusing on that which we hope to escape rather than that which we hope to gain. However, in the classic beauty of the Catholic faith, the reality is that the two answers are not really all that different at all, much less opposed as being two different ways of looking at something. In fact, in a certain sense they are very really the same answer precisely.

St. Augustine touched on this point in one of his sermons on the Ascension. He wrote,

"While in heaven [Christ] is also with us; and we while on earth are with him. He is here with us by his divinity, his power and his love. We cannot be in heaven, as he is on earth, by divinity, but in him, we can be there by love."

The last statement really stuck out at me when I read it. We can be in Heaven - even now - by Love. This is really an astonishing statement. I'm sitting in a chair right now as I write this, and as much as I might try to love God, I certainly don't feel like I'm in Heaven. I'm in an orange basement, so far as my eyes tell me, and it seem quite far from Heaven, as you might imagine.

To explain this point further, Augustine speaks more specifically of Christ's incarnation, quoting John 3:13:

"He did not leave heaven when he came down to us; nor did he withdraw from us when he went up again into heaven. The fact that he was in heaven even while he was on earth is borne out by his own statement: No one has ever ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man, who is in heaven."

This statement is very though provoking. It could be the subject of a great deal of meditation. However, the reality is that its not that profound a statement, theologically speaking. It simply states a very basic theological statement, one which any student would learn in his first year of theology: Christ experienced the beatific vision from the first moment of His existence.

Now, the beatific vision is the very essence of Heaven. To be in Heaven, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, consists in"nothing else than the vision of the Divine Essence" (ST, I-II, 3, 8). Heaven is - in all that it is - the state of knowing God. Christ states the same in John's Gospel: "And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God..." (17:3)

So Christ was literally in Heaven while on earth, and St. Augustine says that we can be too, through Love. If you've noticed, however, I have been capitalizing "Love" most of the time in this post. This is because it's not our love that Augustine is speaking about, but the Love of God, and this brings us back to Fr. Ventura and GK Chesterton. We are forgiven our sins, per Chesterton's answer, thanks to the Love of God, and we are brought into Heaven, per Fr. Ventura's homily, by His Love as well. John expressed this in his first epistle, writing that what matters is "not that we loved God, but that He loved us..." (4:10).

It gets deeper than this, though. Love doesn't cause our forgiveness and beatification to Heaven simply as a final cause, but also as a efficient cause. In other words, Love isn't simply that which inspires God to forgive us and show us the vision of Himself, but it is also the means by which He does this. In our justification, God's Love is "poured into our hearts" (Rom. 5:5). It is this very Love which wipes away sin. Sin and Love are incompatible, because sin is the contradiction of Love. By pouring His own Love into our hearts, God eradicates sin. At the same time, it is through Love that we know God - that is, see Him. With Love in our souls (which is what "hearts" refers to in Scripture[excluding passages referring to the organ]), we see God. On the other hand, "Anyone who loves," St. John writes, "...knows God." (1 John 4:7).

To know God is to Love, but to Love not with our own, human Love, but with the Love that God has placed in us. Further, to know God is, according to Christ, the essence of eternal life. Love is that which at once - simultaneously - forgives sin and infuses the vision of God into our souls. Just as Christ was in Heaven while on earth, we too can be in Heaven, even while on earth. In fact, anyone who is in a state of Grace (does not have unforgiven mortal sin) is in Heaven, quite literally.

This makes more sense when we recall that Heaven belongs to the soul, not the body. Our bodies will be glorified and brought into Heaven, but even then, it is not by them which we experience Heaven (at least not directly; Heaven will involve the body, but not as a fundamental quality. See ST, I-II, 3,3 and ST, Sup., 92, 2 regarding this point). Heaven consists in the soul's vision of God.

The practical implications of this are tremendous. So long as we are in Grace, we are in Heaven, even here on earth. Christ experienced Heaven, even as He hung on the cross, and we can experience Heaven even as we bear some terrible pain or sadness. This explains the ability of the saints and the apostles, as recorded in Scripture, to profess tremendous joy even in their sufferings. By this, they were able to rejoice in their sufferings, as St. Paul said (Rom. 5:3). The pain can be overwhelming, but the soul is still in Heaven.

This also has implications for our consciences. Our bodies are afflicted with sin, even when our souls are striving for God. We will become angry without intention, our eyes will be drawn to look upon an illicit image, evil thoughts will pass through our minds. This does not matter. Our body will do these things even while our souls rejoice - in a certain very real sense unbeknownst to us - in the vision of God. Sin enters when we consent to these things, by allowing them in the door of our souls as it were. Make no mistake, to consent to or willingly engage in bodily wrong is sinful. It is also true that gradually, through living virtuously, God's Grace will heal our bodies so that these things will happen less and less, and if you are blessed in a special way, never at all. This must be what we strive for, but we must also not be discouraged if it does not happen this way. Some of the saints, for example Augustine, struggled with their bodies until their death.

And so as we go through life, it is easy to expect that we will have a lot of "cleaning up" to do in Purgatory. For many of us this will be the case. However, it is also possible that our souls may be much cleaner than we imagine. This is important to understand for the sake of perseverance, as it can be a great encouragement. Nevertheless, there is great danger in thinking of it in any way more than this. We all have many sins which indeed are in our souls, which indeed we do consent to and even engage in purposefully, and we needn't any excuses.

Rather, what we need to do is recognize just what it means to be in the state of Grace and strive to stay there. We need to recognize the reality that our souls are in Heaven even now, and live for that. "Is this song fit for a soul in Heaven?" "Is this movie something that is good to see when I can be seeing God?" "Should I spend time experiencing this when God is there for me to experience?"

And this is where all of this should bring us: to prayer. Our souls are filled with God's Love - they can see God - but because of our emphasis on the body, we don't recognize this. God is there, waiting to be experienced, and we don't even realize it. In prayer, we reach beyond the bodily senses of sight, taste, smell, touch, and sound, and reach the senses of our souls, the senses that have direct access to God Himself. We have this power, and we simply don't even realize it because we have never used it. Imagine if you had been fed intravenously your entire life and never had anything put into your mouth so that you didn't even realize there was such a thing as taste for never having used it before. This is the state we are in in regards to our souls.

In prayer, gradually and slowly, we are able to peel off the layers of flesh until we recognize these senses, the senses of our souls. I am not referring to verbal prayer, but mental prayer, to meditation. "Blessed is the man who... meditates night and day," David tells us in the first Psalm. Mary herself, the one creature living in the greatest communion with God, led a life of meditation, as Luke tells us when he says that Mary treasured sayings about Jesus and pondered them in her heart (2:19).

Our souls do not yet see God fully. As we grow in prayer and holiness, we will see God more and more as He is. If it is difficult to pray now, to take the time to do it, or to avoid sin, it will become easier. It can be frustrating when we struggle so much with these things, but we needn't feel this way. As we see God more and more, the choices between sin and God, or between one thing and the prayer by which we know God, will become easier. After all, the more we grow the more we will see Heaven - see God - and the choice between anything and this is really a very simple one when we see the choice we're making.

"For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known." (1 Cor. 13:12). St. Paul wrote these words immediately before writing that Love is the most important thing. I want to end on this point. Love is truly the most important thing in the world. To Love is literally to know God! All of our actions, be they of Love, are actions of prayer and actions of Heavenly contemplation. God is Love! When we Love, we are knowing God. If we Love, we are experiencing God, even if we can't quite see it yet. St. Thérèse understood this, and so she Loved. And she Loved some more. And she Loved and she Loved and she Loved. As John wrote, "We love because he first loved us." (1 John 4:19). He gave us His Love so that we can give it to others. By doing this - by Loving - we are entering more and more into the realm of God. Each simple, Loving action is nothing less than another step further into Heaven itself.

Take a plunge.