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Meditation Two Hundred Sixty Nine

The Fourth Week of April 2008  

The Victory of Our Inheritance

 

 Begin with prayer to the Holy Spirit 

 

Readings : Eph 1:15-18 and Eph 3:14-20

 

            We Catholics have grown up with the constant idea of heaven ahead of us: It is our expectation.  We do good and avoid evil in order that we may come to the Kingdom of Heaven .  But what does this mean to us, and especially what did it mean to people during the time of Our Lord?  Life after death is always a mystery: “For eye has not seen nor ear heard nor has it entered into the hearts of men to think of those things that God has prepared for those who love him.”

            People with confused faith or little faith often have just a vague hunch of life after death and eternal life.  Their opinions often even lack a sense of mystery and probably are no more profound than the many cartoons we have all seen in which heaven is depicted as nothing more than billowy white clouds with winged people sailing along.

            According to Saint Paul , the mystery of Christ includes in itself the mystery of eternal life.  Christ came to bring us through death, to destroy death and give us everlasting life.  If you have ever been close to death or have someone dear to you die over a period of time, you know how distressing the experience of death can be.

            It is part of the genius of Saint Paul that he confronted the Christian people of his time, who obviously had limited ideas of life after death.  He spoke to them over and over again of the glories that were to come, dealing with the issue very directly.  You can hardly read an entire page of his writings without coming across an assertion that we have eternal life with God through Christ our Lord. This has been a fundamental part of the Christian faith from the very beginning, so it is surprising to hear that many Catholics are now buried without a funeral Mass.   Some families have no funeral at all.  This shows a decline in the belief in the immortality of the soul and the efficacy of the saving sacrifice of Christ offered in the Holy Mass.  Every Oratorian – and all those who take their faith seriously – ought to do the best they can to get others to think of eternal life, what Christ has promised and what Saint Paul has emphasized for us. 

                                                                                                            

Quotation for Meditation

 

     

To imagine ourselves outside the temporality that imprisons us and in some way to sense that eternity is not an unending succession of days in the calendar but something more  like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totatality embraces us and we embrace totality — this we can only attempt. It would be like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time – the before and the after – no longer exists. We can only attempt to grasp the idea that such a moment is life in the full sense, a plunging ever anew into the vastness of being in which we are simply overwhelmed with joy.  This is how Jesus expresses it in Saint John’s Gospel: “I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice and no one will take your joy from you (John 16:22 ).”

 

                                    From The Encyclical Letter Spe Salvi by Pope Benedict XVI

Quiet Time and Then Discussion

 

Questions for Meditation

 

1.    What is the goal of the Christian life?

2.    What  was Christ’s purpose in coming into this world and offering himself on the cross?

  3.    We can have no clear picture of eternal life, but what are some of the things that it is not as listed by Pope Benedict in the

        Encyclical?

 

Prayer