My first day at Visitation, someone asked me a question I had never been asked before.
“Father, are you planning,” they began to ask a with voice almost giddy with the prospect I might say yes, “to preach about hell?”
I thought about it for a second, and a question popped into my head…so I asked, “Do the people of Visitation need to hear about hell?”
“Well, obviously.”
When I asked what made it so obvious, I got the usual answer of “well, just look around at the state of the worldculturenationChurchfamilylifetraditionalmorality and draw your own conclusion, Father.”
My own conclusion, I replied, is a conclusion at which I’d arrived in my very first parish, and which has only been reinforced by every subsequent assignment, and it goes something like this:
Hell is a real place, and I’m certain it’s an undesirable place to end up. Hell is a place of near-total separation from God, which is the most excruciatingly painful state we can imagine - beyond the images of fire and ice, brimstone and death, it’s the prospect of the loss of communion with God that ought to frighten the Christian the most. The thing is that when most Christians think about hell, they just think about the fire and ice and brimstone and death and spend next to no time lamenting what hell actually is, namely, this near-total loss of communion with God. (I say “near-total” because for better or worse, I’m a Thomist who thinks that if God totally withdrew his love from us, we’d cease to exist)
And the fact that they don’t think of the real pain of hell as being a state of perpetual separation from the only source of true, lasting fulfillment in the entire cosmos is troubling to me because it indicates that communion with God is not at the forefront of most Christians’ minds, and if a lived experience of communion with the living and Risen Jesus is not on the forefront of the Christian mind, then it means the heart and foundation of the entirety of Christianity is not on the forefront of their mind. That is troubling.
So, I told my interlocutor, I would probably not preach very much about hell. Instead, I would preach about the heart of the Gospel, about communion with God being the most marvelous thing we can think of and -
He interrupted me. “People will misinterpret that and take it to mean they can do whatever they want as long as it makes them happy!”
The moralists are broken records, I thought.
Well, I began, you didn’t let me finish. In addition to the things I mentioned, I also plan to preach with my words and demonstrate so imperfectly with my way of life the natural conclusion of the Christian message: that all of this is designed to orchestrate, for every believer, the death of his or her fat, relentless ego which has taken center stage for far too long.
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The thing is that there was a time when I was all too ready to make the crux of my messaging the reality of hell and punishment for sins. “The Church has very clear teachings. Follow the clear teaching right this minute or risk eternal damnation.”
In the words of Bishop Barron: “Well, yeah, okay, but…”
But of course, there’s more to the story than that. It’s so hard as a parish priest in the suburbs to speak deeply about anything, largely because most suburban people no longer think deeply about anything. Everything, and I mean everything, is reduced to a left/right, this/that, my way/highway worldview. The bifurcated American political system has even infiltrated our conversations about mercy.
Consider this: my interlocutor from the beginning of this would say to me at a later time that Pope Francis had failed because his emphasis on accompaniment and mercy meant that people felt free to use those words as justification to do whatever they wanted, with very little accountability, and some who’d use this worldview to eschew the call to repentance altogether.
Standing nearby, a woman in the parish listened to this whole exchange. She chimed in: Pope Francis had been the best pope of the modern era because his emphasis on accompaniment and mercy meant that people felt free to begin from where they were and not from where someone else expected them to be, and thereby allow the living Jesus to meet them and change them.
Needless to say, I walked through the midst of them and went out of the temple.
To reduce everything to this bifurcated worldview is to suck the very “stuff” that makes life interesting out of every situation and it also makes talking to the people who propose such a worldview unbelievably tiresome. When I teach moral theology, whether it was to high school students or now to adults at Mundelein, I’m famous for shouting: you really have got to think harder than that.
We have to think harder and with a broader mind, informed of course by charity and a desire to become conformed more perfectly each day to the Crucified Man whom we dare to call our brother and friend. We do not want to become so open-minded, as GK Chesterton warned us, that our brains fall out. But we do, in general, need to ask for the grace to desire a renewed openness to those around, and this begins with a renewed openness to ourselves and all within us that requires the touch of Divine Mercy.
How could we possibly be expected to give witness to something we have never experienced for ourselves? And yet, by virtue of the fact that we are the “church people” as far as our [not-church-people?] families and friends are concerned, regardless of the fervor of our discipleship, everything we say and do gives witness; witness either to a life transformed which compels others to reconsider all their assumptions about Jesus and his Church or a witness which reaffirms their desire to stay as far away from church people as possible.
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I would like to write more about this at some point soon, but I think it needs saying that having genuine questions or difficulties with some aspects of Francis’ papacy does not mean he was a bad pope; certainly, if we labeled everyone with whose ideas or actions we struggle as a “bad _______” we’d all have to recognize that we’re “bad ________”.
The emphasis of Pope Francis on the lowly ones, the poor, the marginalized, and especially on people like those in our towns and families who feel like the circumstances of their lives disqualify them from participation in the Church or even from the Mercy of God is something that we can rally behind as good and even Providential.
And we find the foundation for the Pope’s emphasis on these things in the context of his own story. On the Feast of St. Matthew - September 21st - when Pope Francis was just 17 years old, he reported that he experienced something very powerful in what he thought was going to be a routine confession. He experienced the merciful presence of the living Jesus in his life, and even credits this moment as being the moment in which he heard this Jesus call him to follow after him as a member of la Compañia de Jesús, the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits.
Keeping this moment ever close to his mind, he chose a line from a commentary on the scriptural account of the calling of St. Matthew as his motto when he was appointed an Auxiliary Bishop in Buenos Aires: miserando atque eligendo, which means “having mercy and by choosing”, which translated into this context might mean, “In his mercy I have been called.”
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Let me say a final word about the hellish interlocutor from the beginning. The temptation is to judge him, and I admit that I did for a time. The question bothered me. But then I remembered someone I met, very early in my priesthood, whose story I did get to know in greater detail. He had an emphasis on the notion of hell that also bothered me, but one day he explained:
“Father, I used to live like St. Augustine. I was wild and thought I was happy and free. No one ever warned me of the spiritual danger I was putting myself in, and no one ever taught me what the Church teaches beyond the word ‘NO’. I am interested in hell because I believe I very well could have ended up there were it not for the power and mercy of God.”
Think of the way we’ve labeled St. Thomas from the Gospel
Judge not, lest ye be judged.
So this prayer of Divine Mercy, “Jesus I Trust in You”, is a prayer that sums up many others.
Jesus, I Trust that I am seen even and especially in my lowliness;
Jesus, I Trust in your desire for communion with me and in your grace to bring me close to you;
Jesus, I Trust that you are with me until the end, just as you promised;
Jesus, I Trust that the difficulty I notice in leaving my old self behind and living in a new for you is not unknown to you and that you are patient with my in my weakness;
Jesus, I Trust in the power of your sorrowful passion to free me in the ways I need to be freed, and I invite you, Jesus, into all that I am and have so that I might become united with you and might become a convincing witness to a dark and deaf world that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is risen from the dead.