Alleluia!  He is Risen!  One of the more beautiful parts of the liturgy on Easter morning is the proclamation of the Easter Sequence, sung right before the Gospel.  This hymn dates back roughly 1000 years, and the Church has required its use on Easter Sunday since 1570.  Suffice it to say that it has stood the test of time!

In the middle of the hymn, the attention turns to St. Mary Madgalene, who was the first witness of the Resurrection of Jesus.  The hymn asks: “Speak, Mary, declaring, what you saw, wayfaring.”  Her response follows:

The tomb of Christ, who is living,
The glory of Jesus’ resurrection;
bright angels attesting,
The shroud and napkin resting.
Yes, Christ my hope is arisen;
to Galilee he goes before you.

During this Jubilee Year, as we are invited to be pilgrims of hope, we find in St. Mary Magdalene a model for us to imitate.  Recall that she was present when Jesus died on the Cross.  But even in the sadness of that dark moment, she still possessed hope.  It was hope that brought her to the tomb early Easter morning, and when she sees the Risen Christ, she is overjoyed as her hopes are fulfilled.  We then read in John’s Gospel:

Jesus said to her, “Stop holding on to me,^* for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am going to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”ⁱ18Mary of Magdala went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord,” and what he told her. (Jn 20:17-18)

Mary Magdelene, having had her hope fulfilled, now goes out to share that message of hope with others, not content to keep it to herself.  She becomes a pilgrim of hope, or in the words of Pope Francis, she becomes an “Apostle to the Apostles.”  The message of great hope that Christ is Risen begins to spread, thanks to Mary’s witness of hope.

On first hearing this hymn, people might confuse the mention of the name Mary to be that of our Blessed Mother.  And although this is not the Mary it is referring to, nevertheless we can turn to Mary, the Mother of God, on this day as well.  For she too was at the foot of the Cross when her Son died.  Although she would have suffered greater anguish than Mary Magdelene, her hope was far greater.  Therefore we can turn to her as well on this Easter morning, asking her to pray for us who look forward in hope to the Lord’s return in glory.  I share a portion of the final paragraph of Pope Benedict’s document on hope, Spe salvi, in which he reflects on Mary as a great model of hope, especially in the light of this great feast we celebrate today:

In this faith, which even in the darkness of Holy Saturday bore the certitude of hope, you made your way towards Easter morning. The joy of the Resurrection touched your heart and united you in a new way to the disciples, destined to become the family of Jesus through faith. In this way you were in the midst of the community of believers, who in the days following the Ascension prayed with one voice for the gift of the Holy Spirit (cf. Acts 1:14) and then received that gift on the day of Pentecost. The “Kingdom” of Jesus was not as might have been imagined. It began in that hour, and of this “Kingdom” there will be no end. Thus you remain in the midst of the disciples as their Mother, as the Mother of hope. Holy Mary, Mother of God, our Mother, teach us to believe, to hope, to love with you. Show us the way to his Kingdom! Star of the Sea, shine upon us and guide us on our way! (SS 50)

It was a bitterly cold February day in 1941 when Karol Wojtyła returned from his labors at the Zakrzówek quarry. He walked back, as usual, with a coworker and friend Juliusz Kydryński, whose mother gave Karol some dinner to take back for him and his father. When Karol entered his father’s room at the end of their dark hallway, he found his bedridden father slumped over, and when he tried to lift him up, discovered that during that day he had died. They had nicknamed their drafty and dark apartment “the catacomb.” That evening it was heart-wrenchingly apropos. “I was not at my mother’s death, I was not at my brother’s death, I was not at my father’s death. At twenty, I had already lost all the people I loved.” The distraught son ran for a priest from St. Satanisław’s to give his father the Last Rites (they can be given when there is doubt about whether the person is dead) and all that night he stayed kneeling by his father’s side. Juliusz came to be with him, though Karol ever after said that he had never felt so alone. 

My friends, this week we have stayed with Christ as he approached His death for our sake, spending time at Jesus’ cross and tomb, watching Him win for us the grace to make us saints. It is a tremendous gift to be with Him! We will all face our share of catacombs, crosses, or calvaries too. Perhaps right now for you that is an interior place of suffering or temptation, or a loss in your family or brokenness in a relationship, or maybe it is the burdens and fears that are just part of being human. Holy Week reminds us that in every suffering we are with Our Lord. 

But there is more in the cross than that! 

The Kydryńska’s invited Karol to come live with them for a time, intense prayer continuing to pour from his heart. “He went to Mass every day, he prayed a lot in his room, and he lay prostrate” they remembered of him, practices would mark the rest of his life. We do not get to see the grace at work within him but about a year later Karol chose to enter the underground seminary (the Nazi’s still occupying Poland, and most of Europe). It was not the obvious choice for a man with many young friends, fervently engaged in theatre and acting, and wanting to finish a degree in philology, BUT it makes sense if he took that year to pray like his recently-passed father. In Crossing the Threshold of Hope, JPII recalls from his childhood: “… after my mother’s death, [my father’s] life became one of constant prayer. Sometimes I would wake up during the night and find my father on his knees, just as I would always see him kneeling in the parish church. We never spoke about a vocation to the priesthood, but his example was in a way my first seminary, a kind of domestic seminary.” 

Crosses, losses, sufferings, these do not just make us more like Jesus, they incorporate us into His saving the world! St. Paul says to the Colossians, “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.” Paul is not saying that carrying his cross adds something to Jesus’ or completes something Jesus neglected to do on calvary. Rather, the phrase means that Paul carrying his cross – because he has been bonded with Christ by baptism – is in fact carrying Christ’s cross, or better yet, Christ is carrying His cross through Paul. My friends, when you pick up your cross – 

whatever it is – Jesus’ perfect act of obedience, and love, and trust – the act that saved the world – happens through your heart, your hands, your will, your body. Do not underestimate your cross! 

In 1946 (the Communists now in charge) Karol was ordained a priest on All Saints day and celebrated three ‘first’ Masses the following day (as priests are allowed to do on All Souls Day). He wore black vestments, and offered one Mass for his deceased mother, one for his decesaed brother, and one for his deceased father. One might think it was a somber day. It was not. 

It is a hard truth that there is no way to Easter except by Calvary, no way to the Father except through Christ. But the thing is that resurrection is not a gift if redemption has not happened yet. Going and eating from the tree of life is a terrible eternity if the hurt and separation from the tree of knolwedge has not yet been remedied! To be alive forever, but stuck in sin, would be hell – it is hell. BUT, when we carry our cross through, with, and in Jesus, then the gift of eternal life bursts into our lives now. When Fr. Wojtyła raised the consecrated host – and whenever we receive the Eucharist while carrying our own crosses – not only are we brought back to Holy Week, and not only are our crosses transfigured into His, but the resurrection is also renewed in us. Angels decend, Christ steps into our midst, forgiveness and joy are poured forth, and we are sent out with news of the greatest come back in history. 

And we aren’t bystanders! That Good News is part of our crosses too. 

In the previous article, we confronted the critique of a hope that is predominantly individualistic, excluding a sense of being a part of a community and seeing salvation as something private.  In this next paragraph, Pope Benedict offers a few different sources which support the consistent view that our hope is necessarily social in nature.  He writes the following:

Consistently with this view, sin is understood by the Fathers as the destruction of the unity of the human race, as fragmentation and division. Babel, the place where languages were confused, the place of separation, is seen to be an expression of what sin fundamentally is. Hence “redemption” appears as the reestablishment of unity, in which we come together once more in a union that begins to take shape in the world community of believers. (SS 14)

As Christians, we must always avoid the temptation to fall into a sense of isolation, believing that this journey of faith is a solo enterprise.  From the beginning of Creation, the Lord said: “it is not good for man to be alone.” (Gen 2:18) Since God Himself is a community of persons in the Trinity, and given that we are made in His likeness, then we too are called to see our identity as necessarily social in nature.   

In the quote above, the pope mentions how sin works against the unity of the human race.  There is a danger in considering this on too universal of a level.  We should take this to heart as we consider our own individual sins.  Perhaps we think that some of our sins are really only hurting ourselves.  But every sin that we commit, no matter how private, always affects the rest of the community.  As St. Paul writes: “If one member suffers, all suffer together.” (1 Cor 12:26) With that in mind, we should be very eager to repent of our sins as quickly as possible, not just for our good, but for the good of the entire body, for our being reconciled with God affects the strength of the body.  By avoiding being reconciled to God, avoiding His mercy, perhaps under the mindset that our sins are just that, our own personal sins, then we deprive the rest of the body from flourishing and making progress toward our common goal of Eternal Life.

As we enter into Holy Week, let us be very aware of our union with our brothers and sisters throughout the world and throughout time.  We are all united in the fact that “all have sinned” (Rom 3:23), and therefore we all should feel responsible for contributing to the sufferings that Jesus underwent.  But, thanks be to God, through His Passion that He underwent for all sinners, ourselves included, He has made possible our being reunited as brothers and sisters through the grace of His Resurrection.  His victory strengthens our identity as His Chosen People, delivered from slavery, and destined for the new Promised Land that awaits us in Heaven.

I would highly encourage you to consider joining us for as much of the Pascal Triduum as you can, for immersing ourselves in these most sacred mysteries of our salvation along with our fellow pilgrims, we will be renewed in our awareness of the blessing of being members of the same body, and rejoice with the words of the Psalmist: “Blessed the People whose God is the Lord” (Ps 144:15)

It was April 19^th, 1952, the Saturday after Easter that year, and a group of college students in Kraków were intent on escaping the drab, communist-controlled, city for a weekend trip to the Zakopane mountains. Five of the girls dormed together at the convent of the Sisters of Nazareth on Warszawska street and were that evening stealing across town to catch their late-night train south. Several of the men studying at the Kraków Polytechnic whom they had gotten to know through the Catholic chaplaincy in the city were going to meet them at the train station and they were going to spend Sunday hiking and taking in the splendid crocuses that were just then beginning to bloom. When they got to the station, news arrived that the guys’ exam had been moved up so they would miss the trip, instead a man in battered clothes stepped forward to join them for the trip. 

Their uncertainty was only slightly relieved when the recognized their college chaplain, Fr. Karol Wojtyła, whom they had gotten to know when attending Mass at St. Florian’s just outside of Kraków’s old town center where he was also one of the vicars. They had never seen him not wearing his cassock, and furthermore it was absolutely forbidden by the communist authorities for a priest to work with groups of young people. They could go to St. Florian’s without too much trouble, but traveling on a train with a priest could get them, and him, in very hot water. Poland was a country under the heel of Soviet Communism. Countless cities had only recently been rebuilt in the aftermath of WWII, during which millions of Poles had been sent to concentration camps and never returned. Millions more had returned, or been forcibly resettled into a newly redrawn Poland within the borders of the USSR. Countless priests and religious and other leaders had been killed during the war, and thousands more by the communists after, and the beatings and disappearings were still commonplace. 

Their Catholic faith was one of the few lights amid the darkness and anchors that the Poles still tenaciously held onto in those difficult days. But still … the train pulled to a stop … they glanced at their priest not knowing what to do … “Let’s get in” he simply said, and so they did, and so began an epic tale of taking on an evil empire from the inside.

It is a story I look forward to telling over these next weeks. Yes, about Fr. Wojtyła, many years before he was Pope St. John Paul II, and his teaching and investing and engaging and praying for this group of young people. But also, to come to know those ordinary university students – that night six young women: Danuta, Ola, Wanda, Elśbieta, Teresa, and (another) Danuta – who risked much (and gained much) by stepping into authentic Christian community. This was one of the many little groups that would come together over the next few years to form what John Paul would call “my środowisko.” That polish word has a range and depth of meanings something like “environment” or “mileau”, and it helpfully captures both the wide variety of different people who would choose to join the fledgling band coalescing around this thoughtful young curate and the sheer quantity of life they would share together. But I think that pronoun “my” adds the essential personal element that was always there when you were with Fr. Wojtyła. These were never just a “congregation” or anonymous members of his chaplaincy, they were a community,  friends, companions, fellow explorers and actors in the drama of human life, and yes, fellow combatants for a life of freedom, and truth, and authenticity, within a culture-of-death that sought to erase all that from their hearts.

Far away from the secret police wandering the foothills of the Zakopane mountains, the students slowly warmed up to their incognito chaplain, but as they headed back to the train station for their return journey something of the reality back in the city began to sink back in. “What should we call you on the train?” Danuta shyly asked. Their priest grinned and quoted the most famous line from a trilogy of iconic novels about polish history and identity, “Call me Uncle” he said. It was the term ‘Wujek’ in Polish, a nickname they would fondly call him by for the rest of his life.

---

– Fr. Dominic will return to Kraków next week. Just one thought to tie things together. Notice that Jesus also will be “incognito” in a different fashion when taking on the empire of Satan. He does not come with thunderbolts and heavenly hosts, He comes on a donkey, and takes up the weapon of the cross. Our fight will most likely be more like theirs’s than what we find in comic books and epic showdowns.  

The next question that the Holy Father proposes on the topic of hope is this: “Is Christian Hope Individualistic?”  He identifies a critique in modern times of a hope that is seen as “pure individualism.” (SS 13) This criticism is directed in part to the struggle to give to the mystery of hope images and figures that can be represented by our human experience.  Those attempts, however, always fall far short of “what, after all, can only be known negatively, via unknowing.” (ibid.)

Now, I do not think the Holy Father is so much calling out our attempts to “know the unknown”, but rather how, when it is taken too far, it can result in living with a longing for those things for which we hope, to the exclusion of our being attentive to the journey in which we are partaking in the life.  He notes the criticism of an individualistic hope as threatening to become “a way of abandoning the world to its misery and taking refuge in a private form of eternal salvation.” (ibid)

The next paragraph will provide the correction to the problem of purely individualistic hope by directing us to see that our hope is necessarily “social”, which commits us to being attentive to our fellow pilgrims on this journey, offering assistance so that we might all reach out final destination, not just being concerned about our own salvation.

Although the Holy Father is not specifically addressing it, I want to offer a few thoughts about the temptation toward an individualistic hope that is rooted in our own creation, and not that of God.  Over the years, I have heard this question of what Heaven will be like being answered in a variety of ways.  For example, when one asks if they will have this or that in Heaven, one popular answer is: “If you need that to be happy in Heaven, then it will be there.”  Now, I know those who offer such an answer are well meaning, but this is a wholly unsatisfactory answer, for it proposes an idea of Heaven of our own making, one consisting in our personal preferences and desires.  The fact of the matter is, we will have all that we need in Heaven, and there will be nothing lacking.  When I am asked if this or that will be in Heaven, or if we will finally be able to do things in Heaven that we cannot do here, I have to answer in all truth: “I do not know.”  I then add: “But I can make this guarantee, if Heaven is not what you want it to be while still here on earth, you will most certainly not say: ‘You know what will make Heaven better?’”  I then quote those words which we I have shared many times already in these articles: “St. Paul says, that ‘hope does not disappoint’ (Rom 5:5), so when we get to Heaven, whatever we see or do not see, whatever we can do or not do, we will not be disappointed.  Period.”

We can also call to mind a helpful passage from the Gospels that might help.  In it, Jesus is not necessarily speaking directly about Heaven, but I think we can trust that it very much applies to the question at hand.  “What father among you would hand his son a snake when he asks for a fish?  Or hand him a scorpion when he asks for an egg? If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father in heaven give the holy Spirit to those who ask Him?” (Lk 11:11-13)

We have a Father in Heaven who knows how to give good gifts to His children, and if that applies to us while here on earth, how much more does it apply to what He desires to give us in Heaven?  This is one of the reasons I love the Lord’s Prayer so much, for we begin by addressing God as Father, and from that posture, we ask Him for all of the good gifts we need for each day, our “daily bread”, but we also pray: “thy Kingdom come”, in which we abandon our need to know or control what Heaven will be like.  We can simply trust in His preparing to give us the good gifts of eternal life that will fill us with joy and peace, and when we receive those gifts, no disappointment will be present.

Feast day: March 30^th 

I promised last week to continue our encounter with St. John Climacus, this time not taking Pope Gregory the Great as our guide but Pope Benedict XVI. He spoke better than I could on St. John’s “Ladder” at his Wednesday audience of February 11^th, 2009:

He became famous, as I have already said, through his work, entitled The Climax, in the West known as the Ladder of Divine Ascent (PG 88, 632-1164). Composed at the insistent request of the hegumen of the neighbouring Monastery of Raithu in Sinai, the Ladder is a complete treatise of spiritual life in which John describes the monk’s journey from renunciation of the world to the perfection of love. This journey according to his book covers 30 steps, each one of which is linked to the next. The journey may be summarized in three consecutive stages: the first is expressed in renunciation of the world in order to return to a state of evangelical childhood. Thus, the essential is not the renunciation but rather the connection with what Jesus said, that is, the return to true childhood in the spiritual sense, becoming like children. John comments: “A good foundation of three layers and three pillars is: innocence, fasting and temperance. Let all babes in Christ (cf. 1 Cor 3: 1) begin with these virtues, taking as their model the natural babes” (1, 20; 636). Voluntary detachment from beloved people and places permits the soul to enter into deeper communion with God. This renunciation leads to obedience which is the way to humility through humiliations which will never be absent on the part of the brethren. John comments: “Blessed is he who has mortified his will to the very end and has entrusted the care of himself to his teacher in the Lord: indeed he will be placed on the right hand of the Crucified One!” (4, 37; 704). 

The second stage of the journey consists in spiritual combat against the passions. Every step of the ladder is linked to a principal passion that is defined and diagnosed, with an indication of the treatment and a proposal of the corresponding virtue. All together, these steps of the ladder undoubtedly constitute the most important treatise of spiritual strategy that we possess. The struggle against the passions, however, is steeped in the positive it does not remain as something negative thanks to the image of the “fire” of the Holy Spirit: that “all those who enter upon the good fight (cf. 1 Tm 6: 12), which is hard and narrow,… may realize that they must leap into the fire, if they really expect the celestial fire to dwell in them” (1,18; 636). The fire of the Holy Spirit is the fire of love and truth. The power of the Holy Spirit alone guarantees victory. However, according to John Climacus it is important to be aware that the passions are not evil in themselves; they become so through human freedom’s wrong use of them. If they are purified, the passions reveal to man the path towards God with energy unified by ascesis and grace and, “if they have received from the Creator an order and a beginning…, the limit of virtue is boundless” (26/2, 37; 1068). 

The last stage of the journey is Christian perfection that is developed in the last seven steps of the Ladder. These are the highest stages of spiritual life, which can be experienced by the “Hesychasts”: the solitaries, those who have attained quiet and inner peace; but these stages are also accessible to the more fervent cenobites. Of the first three simplicity, humility and discernment John, in line with the Desert Fathers, considered the ability to discern, the most important. Every type of behaviour must be subject to discernment; everything, in fact, depends on one’s deepest motivations, which need to be closely examined. Here one enters into the soul of the person and it is a question of reawakening in the hermit, in the Christian, spiritual sensitivity and a “feeling heart”, which are gifts from God: “After God, we ought to follow our conscience as a rule and guide in everything,” (26/1,5; 1013). In this way one reaches tranquillity of soul, hesychia, by means of which the soul may gaze upon the abyss of the divine mysteries. 

The state of quiet, of inner peace, prepares the Hesychast for prayer which in John is twofold: “corporeal prayer” and “prayer of the heart”. The former is proper to those who need the help of bodily movement: stretching out the hands, uttering groans, beating the breast, etc. (15, 26; 900). The latter is spontaneous, because it is an effect of the reawakening of spiritual sensitivity, a gift of God to those who devote themselves to corporeal prayer. In John this takes the name “Jesus prayer” (Iesou euche), and is constituted in the invocation of solely Jesus’ name, an invocation that is continuous like breathing: “May your remembrance of Jesus become one with your breathing, and you will then know the usefulness of hesychia“, inner peace (27/2, 26; 1112). At the end the prayer becomes very simple: the word “Jesus” simply becomes one with the breath.  

– Fr. Dominic 

As he concludes his short reflection on the question of “Eternal life – what is it?”, Pope Benedict explains that even though we do not know with great clarity what eternal life is, we nevertheless continue to reach out to it.  He describes that yearning in this way:

In some way we want life itself, true life, untouched even by death; yet at the same time we do not know the thing towards which we feel driven. We cannot stop reaching out for it, and yet we know that all we can experience or accomplish is not what we yearn for. (SS 12)

He concludes that this unknown “thing” is the true “hope” that drives us forward in our pursuit of what are hearts ultimately long for.  This longing for the unknown, which promises something fulfilling, often leaves us with an experience of suffering as we continue grasping at worldly hopes, only to find that they leave us feeling unfulfilled, longing for something more, longing for something that will endure.

This dynamic of grasping for something, and feeling unfulfilled, when directed toward unhealthy, worldly things, can result in addiction.  I recently came across a resource called Creedopedia, which is an online reference book on the Catholic faith, produced by the publishers of YOUCAT, the youth catechism first published in 2011 as resource for young people to learn their Catholic faith.  In the Creedopedia, there is a helpful, succinct definition of addiction that highlights the point I just made:

Behind every addiction, there is longing. People seek ecstasy, a never-ending feeling of happiness and fulfillment. Various types of addiction can numb a sense of inner emptiness for a moment, evoking “ecstatic feelings”. However, this is a far cry from what a person with an addiction is really longing for. (https://youcat.org/credopedia/addiction-a-longing-for-more/)

With the help of the words of the Holy Father from this paragraph, we know that what we are really longing for is God, more specifically eternal life with Him in Heaven.  But because this reality escapes our human experience, we find ourselves in a state of confusion.  The Holy Father comments on this confusion:

“Eternal”, in fact, suggests to us the idea of something interminable, and this frightens us; “life” makes us think of the life that we know and love and do not want to lose, even though very often it brings more toil than satisfaction, so that while on the one hand we desire it, on the other hand we do not want it. (SS 12)

In an attempt to give some sort of sense of what the experience of eternal life might be like, the pope proposes an interesting analogy:

It would be like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time—the before and 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. (ibid)

Perhaps these past few articles in which we struggle with the idea of what eternal life is still leaves us feeling somewhat uncertain, and maybe still a bit confused.  But hopefully the words of the Holy Father on this question has given us some encouragement, and most of all, a greater sense of hope – true hope, a hope that keeps us moving forward in faith, and a hope, which we believe with firm faith, will not disappoint.

Feast day: March 30^th 

In the year 600 AD, St. Gregory the Great penned a letter to the abbot of the famous St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai. (Yes, that would be where Moses encountered the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the burning bush, and where God gave His people the gift of the Ten Commandments.) Back in the early ages of the Church already some of the first desert fathers made their way here – it is the oldest continuously inhabited monastery in the world – and was originally entrusted to Mary. This because Our Lady, being the God-bearer, the theotokus, fulfills spectacularly what was foreseen in the burning bush – a bush on fire yet unburned; a mother, still a virgin, and manifesting the Lord in an even more extraordinary way! Some centuries later, it was now named after the famous St. Catherine of Alexandria whose relics had been enshrined there. Some 170 saints would come from this monastery in the centuries since, and the man that Gregory was writing to was one of them.

Gregory to John, Abbot of Mount Sina[i],

The Epistle of thy Humility testifies to the holiness of thy life; whence we give great thanks to Almighty God, for that we know that there are still some to pray for our sins. For we, under the colour of ecclesiastical government, are tossed in the billows of this world, which frequently overwhelm us. But by the protecting hand of heavenly grace we are raised up again from the deep. Do you, then, who lead a tranquil life in the so great serenity of your rest, and stand as it were safe on the shore, extend the hand of your prayer to us who are on our voyage, or rather who are suffering shipwreck, and with all the supplications in your power help us as we strive to reach the land of the living, so that not only for your own life, but also for our rescue, you may have reward for ever. May the Holy Trinity protect thy Love with the right hand of Its protection, and grant unto thee in Its sight, by praying, by admonishing, by shewing example of good work, to feed the flock committed to thee, that so thou mayest be able to reach the pastures of eternal life with the flock itself which thou feedest. For it is written, My sheep shall come and shall find pastures [John 10]. And these pastures in truth we find, when, freed from the winter of this life, we are satisfied with the greenness of eternal life, as of a new Spring. 

We have learnt from the report of our son Simplicius that there is a want of beds and bedding in the Gerontocomium[for the elderly], which has been constructed by one Isaurus there. Wherefore we have sent 15 cloaks, 30 rachanæ[probably some kind of cloak or blanket], and 15 beds. We have also given money for the purchase of mattresses and for their transport, which we beg thy Love not to disdain, but to supply them to the place for which they have been sent.

Given on the day of the Kalends of September, Indiction 4. [September 1, 600 A.D].

We do not know very much about “John”, though the surname “Climacus” is how we know him now, a simple phrase in Greek, “tēs klimakos”, “of the ladder”, for he was the author of a spiritual work “The Ladder of Perfection.” He was in his 70s when Gregory wrote to him, having spent decades as a hermit at the base of that mountain learning from another monk, Martyrius, and then studying the lives of the saints. At an elderly age, he had been begged by the monks of St. Catherine’s to become their leader and mentor. It was as an older, and famously holy, man that he wrote “the ladder”, modeled after the image of Jacob’s Ladder, with some thirty rungs making up the steps necessary to progress in holiness. The image has become a famous icon, depicting the ladder, with St. John helping others up towards heaven (with demons attempting to pull them off), and copies can be found all over the world (one is in bishop’s chapel upstairs!) 

– Fr. Dominic will return to Sinai, and again to one of our Popes next week!

As Pope Benedict continues his consideration on the topic of eternal life, he brings to our awareness an inner contradiction that so many of us face this side of eternity.  He writes:

On the one hand, we do not want to die; above all, those who love us do not want us to die. Yet on the other hand, neither do we want to continue living indefinitely, nor was the earth created with that in view. So what do we really want? (SS 11)

From that question, the Holy Father asks a deeper question – what is eternity? and what is life?  Then, citing some of the writings of the great St. Augustine, the pope offers this important point:

looking more closely, we have no idea what we ultimately desire, what we would really like. We do not know this reality at all; even in those moments when we think we can reach out and touch it, it eludes us. “We do not know what we should pray for as we ought,” he says, quoting Saint Paul (Rom 8:26). (ibid.)

Perhaps we can find this logic somewhat confusing, and even maybe a little frustrating.  How is it that St. Augustine can suggest that we do not know this reality at all?  Is God in someway hiding the truth from us?  Is that the way a loving Father should treat His children?

I am reminded of an analogy that somebody proposed to me at some point that helps me in grasping this somewhat confusing point made by St. Augustine.  We can consider married couples, and how certain couples cause us to scratch our head.  How can that relationship work?  What do they see in one another?  They seem so opposite!  For us who stand outside of the relationship, it seems to make no sense.  But to the couple, who are inside of the relationship, it makes all the sense in the world.  Their love for one another is special and unique, in a way that those on the outside may never appreciate, but which to them is a source of great joy and peace.

Outside of Heaven, we can never fully appreciate what awaits us.  We are outside of that relationship, in a sense.  Only when we get to Heaven will we fully appreciate its beauty and its goodness, how life there far surpasses any experience of life here.  This is at the heart of St. Paul’s words: “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him.” (1 Cor 2:9)

This analogy is not perfect, but I find it helpful when we struggle with looking forward to the unknown of eternal life, wondering if somehow we might be let down, and if it would be better to just remain with what is familiar and comfortable.  As I have said before, when we get to that place, we will not be disappointed.

Thankfully what awaits us in eternal life is not totally hidden from us, for through the gift of our baptism and the life of grace, we already begin to share in the relationship of love with God. After all, Heaven, more than anything else, will be about just that, our resting in the fullness of the Father’s love for eternity.  Let us pray that the Lord will increase our desire for this gift, and while we struggle with not yet seeing what awaits us, be at peace knowing that when we do see Him face to face, we will on longer question, no longer fear, but rest in His peace.