Want to know a secret? Sometimes I feel sorry for Judas. It’s like someone wrote a beautiful play, a tragedy, really (but with a happy ending), and needed an antagonist. Scanning the candidates lined up, mostly bearded men competing for 12 lead roles, he makes the cut and gets a part, not the one he wanted, but hey, its got a lot of lines, and he even gets to throw some pieces of silver at people.
In all seriousness, I am grateful that the Church does not
declare him or anyone in particular to be certainly in hell. I am head
over heels in love with the image of Divine Mercy, and juxtaposed to
Our Lady of Fatima’s message regarding the number of souls falling into
hell; it makes my heart ache and my head spin… so much that I have
almost become humble enough to stop trying to figure it out. Almost.
A
priest recently mentioned to me C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, where
Lewis makes the point that many people actually choose hell because they
are so absorbed in themselves that they are not ready to spend eternity
thinking about someone else (a.k.a. God). Because in reality, heaven
is probably less about the one million flavors of ice-cream and swimming
with dolphins, and more about joining the choir of voices that will be
singing the praises of the Lamb. So as much as we want the peace, the
joy, the painlessness of heaven, the glaring reality is that heaven is
not all about you.
Are we ready to spend eternity NOT thinking about
ourselves? Honestly I am not so sure I am. I am still too
self-absorbed. But God is a genius.-Really, He is. And He has come up
with a genius way to get us there, and it starts with two pink lines on a
test strip. It ends with learning to put someone else’s needs before
our own, and to do it so often that we don’t even realize we are doing
it. This plan comes fully equipped with a number of humiliating
experiences, like tantrums in the grocery store, so as to protect the
whole beautiful thing from crumbling down because of our pride.
All women are called to mother either in a physical or
spiritual way and it is God’s plan to bring us to heaven by turning us
into the kind of people we need to be to want heaven. Each putting down
of the book, blog, sewing project, whatever, to attend to someone else
helps us to live a life where we become secondary, and another becomes
primary. A busy mother rarely has the time to think of herself, and
before she knows it, a habit of selflessness is formed. And you know
what a good habit is called don’t you? It’s called virtue.
Christian life is Sacrifice. And just as the bad we have
done in this life cannot be undone, the good we have done cannot be
undone either. May our bodies lie in the grave wrinkled and tired and
worn, like our dear St. Catherine’s shoes, and may our own creases, be
they stretch marks, cesarean scars, varicose veins, or wrinkled smile
lines, be our signs of virtue, that our good Lord loves us enough to
save us from ourselves.
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