The Thirty-third Sunday of the Year, C - November 14, 2004

    When I was growing up I rarely argued and never fought with my twin sister. We were too close. Well, we never really argued very angrily except about one thing, one thing that she would do – and still does – which I found to be absolutely intolerable.
    What does my sister do that I find so abominable? She takes up a novel and immediately proceeds to read the end of the story first. She asks me, almost incredulously, how I cannot understand her reason for this: How does she know whether she wants to read a story if she does not know how it ends? Silly boy, why waste one’s time on a book that ends wrong? Here was the one chink in my good sister’s armor of virtue (and she is a very good woman). For me, who love to read great novels, my sister’s attitude is analogous to life: Why live life if one doesn’t know how it ends?
Just as a proper reading of a novel involves suspense and an adventure of not knowing exactly how it will end, so is life. Life is like a novel that is still being written. We can’t see the particulars of the future, for the simple reason that it has not happened yet. Thus, the Church’s condemnation of all those attempts to read the future through the use of cards, crystal balls, Ouiji boards and mediums. Yes, because they often involve the delving into the occult -- something that is very dangerous to the human soul -- but also because they are exercises in futility. They are like my sister’s insistence -- though much, much more serious -- on reading the end of a novel first. Read the end of the story first and ruin the whole novel. Live life by trying to know the absolute particulars of the future, and you will never really live.
    One of the chief requirements of a great novel is what is called verisimilitude; that is, a true reflection of reality, of life. The novel must appear, come across, as a real life story. And so as Christians we know then that a great novel’s end will be marked by this one certainty: the triumph of good over evil. Just so is life and time, this story we call history. At its end -- and it does have an end -- good triumphs, and evil is vanquished. “But for you who fear my name,” we hear in the first reading, “there will arise the sun of justice with healing in its wings,” that dawning of a new day, a new creation, that marks the end of time; or rather, time and space and all of history’s being assumed into and made complete in eternity.
    It should not surprise us that the novel, that particular kind of writing of a story, when done well, that reflects life so accurately -- it shouldn’t surprise us then that the novel is the fruit of Christian culture. The great novelist writes about life from what he or she knows from revelation: that life itself is a story. We don’t know the particulars of its end; but we do know that after the last day and night of time, something will come into being, or rather something that is and has always been from all eternity, will be made manifest, and its beauty and glory, the very splendor of it can only be hinted at in the best of literature, poetry, music and painting. Only those very best moments of our lives on this earth, those moments of joy unspeakable when a short glimpse of glory is granted us, when in those seconds of revelation it occurs to us how much we love someone and are loved by someone, in those few and far between recognitions of how really good it is to exist, to be a character in this great adventure called life, an adventure that is going somewhere -- only at those times do we get a hint of what the end will be like.
    Ah, but here’s the rub. We are characters in a story whose future is not fixed. We follow no predetermined route. What a terrible burden this can be, even as it is potentially the richest of blessings. Because we know, if we bother to reflect on our Catholic faith and read our catechism, we know that no character’s destiny is really fixed. At the end there is still heaven or hell. “Lo, the day is coming, blazing like an oven, when all the proud and all evildoers will be stubble, and the day that is coming will set them on fire....” Or, “for you who fear my name, there will arise the sun of justice with its healing rays.”
    No one mentions hell in polite, cheery, churchy circles anymore. Many priests and perhaps even bishops are afraid that to talk about hell from the pulpit would cause the collection plate to be emptier, would cause people to leave the parish. Well, why stay, if one is not interested in the purpose and mission of the Church – to bring glory to God by the salvation of souls? If that is not someone’s purpose as a member of the Church, then why bother? Listen, dear people, you are much more important to God, the Church, to me as your priest, than a mere source of income. You are all beings with an eternal destiny, marked at the very core of your person with the Image of God. That’s why we must talk about hell. But for many it just is not polite. Then I suppose Jesus Himself would not be welcome in such gatherings of oh so nice people; for Christ spoke about hell much more often than He did about heaven. But the possibility of hell, the awful potentiality for living -- or rather forever dying -- apart from God’s glory and joy, is in no way a denial or a lessening of God’s deep, infinitely deep, mercy and goodness. On the contrary, the real possibility of hell is a constant reminder of the burden of freedom that is ours. We are real live characters in the story of life. The end for us is not fixed, but will be the result of what we believe, the choices we make, the lives that we live, that move us either toward God and His mercy or shut God out of the picture completely. Hell is not, could never be, God’s will for us; hell is our will in defiance of God. But to deny the existence of hell or the possibility of ending up there – to say that everything comes out just fine for all the characters in the novel no matter how they live, behave, no matter what they do or believe or refuse to believe – to say all that is to say that the novel, that life itself, is without meaning.
    The greatest novels end with the triumph of the good. Some characters -- sometimes the unlikeliest of them -- end up astoundingly victorious. Others follow the way of damnation. Nothing is for sure until the end, till the day of judgment. Nothing, that is, except for this most comforting of truths: that the Author of this story called life is on our side, that God brought all the characters -- you and me -- into this story, this history, so that we might share in the final and everlasting triumph of the good, the glory, the bliss of heaven. God is writing the story with that in view; but somewhat unlike characters in a novel, we are free. With the initiation, the present power, the infinite generosity of the grace of God, we can choose now to triumph at the end. Or we can -- God forbid -- reject the very thing we were made for -- heaven. The story is not over yet. And so this adventure we call life is full of hope and expectation that it will have a most happy ending for all. That’s God’s will for us. He has made the way of salvation open to us and offers us His grace at every turn. The rest is up to us, to you and me.