As the Church begins a new liturgical year, the readings continue with the theme that characterized the end of the previous liturgical year, the Second Coming of Christ.  We often associate the Season of Advent exclusively with the first coming of Christ in His Incarnation.  This theme is taken up more intentionally in the final days of Advent, but it is the Second Coming of Christ that the Church invites us to reflect on with greater attention, for we do not know the day or the hour, thus the need to always be prepared.  This has hit close to home over the past few weeks here at the Cathedral as we have had a larger number of parishioners and family members of parishioners who have passed away, some of them rather unexpectedly.  We keep all of them and their families in our prayers in a special way.

As I mentioned in my article two weeks ago, we find ourselves in the final few paragraphs of Pope Benedict’s document on Christian Hope, Spe salvi.  In the sadness of the loss of our loved ones, we look for that light of hope given to us in the promises of Jesus Christ who has conquered death through His death and Resurrection.  In these final paragraphs, the Holy Father is reflecting on the Church’s doctrine on Purgatory, a topic which many shy away from as being something negative, but when we truly understand the beauty of this teaching, we cannot help but be buoyed up with hope.

In the previous paragraph, the pope noted the two extremes of where people can find themselves at the end of their lives as they stand before the judgment seat of Christ.  On the one hand, there are those who are utterly pure, filled with love for God and neighbor, and free from any sin, they enter immediately into Heaven.  On the other extreme, there are those who have definitively rejected God, lived for hatred and suppressed all love.  They have consciously chosen in life to be apart from God, and after death, they remain in that condition they have freely chosen.  But as the Holy Father notes: “Yet we know from experience that neither case is normal in human life.” (SS 46) He then offers the following explanation of what he (and really the Church) presumes for the majority of those people of faith who die in friendship with the Lord:

For the great majority of people—we may suppose—there remains in the depths of their being an ultimate interior openness to truth, to love, to God. In the concrete choices of life, however, it is covered over by ever new compromises with evil—much filth covers purity, but the thirst for purity remains and it still constantly re-emerges from all that is base and remains present in the soul. (ibid.)

He goes on to explain how the firm foundation of faith in Christ upon which these lives are built cannot be destroyed by death, giving a firm hope in the promise of sharing in the victory of Heaven.  But those places of impurity need to be dealt with, and the pope appeals to the words of St. Paul who speaks of a sort of fire which burns away that which is not of God, so that souls can be fully pure and capable of being admitted into Heaven.  This “fire” of purification after death is Purgatory.  Though the image evokes fear and seems somehow at odds with a loving God, the Holy Father will explain in the next paragraph a way of understanding this fire in a way which is far more hopeful and consoling.

Psalm 63 is one of the most frequently prayed Psalms. In the Liturgy of the Hours, the liturgical prayer of the entire Church, which is prayed daily by all priests and religious, and many lay people, this Psalm is set for morning prayer for every major feast day. It begins with the Psalmist expressing a deep longing for God. God is like water for a desert land. It moves into a section of praise and then ends with deep sentiments of trust in God’s providential care. 

In the third verse of the Psalm (in the NRSVCE translation) we read these words, “Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you.” This is a strong statement, to say the least. This “steadfast love,” is also sometimes translated as “mercy” or simply, “love.” The translation that Saint Augustine used when commenting on this verse in his Expositions of the Psalms goes like this: “Because your mercy is better than all possible lives, my lips will praise you.” These words are slightly different, and even stronger! Essentially, there is nothing better than this mercy.

Saint Augustine’s reflection on these lines mirrors a somewhat well-remembered phrase from the liturgy of the Mass. We hear in one of the prefaces for the Eucharistic prayer, “… although you have no need of our praise, yet our thanksgiving is itself your gift….” The very act of our giving thanks to God is a great gift to us from him. He grants us this gift of prayer, and it brings us blessings to thank him. 

In a similar way, regarding Psalm 63:3, Saint Augustine wrote these beautiful words:

“My lips would not be praising you if your mercy had not taken the initiative with me. Thanks to your own gift I praise you, through your own mercy I praise you. I could not praise God if he had not given me the power to praise him.” (Translated by Maria Boulding, Exposition of Psalm 63, 12).

Praise of God is a type of prayer that is entirely other-focused. We lift our minds and hearts to God, and in praise, we kind of forget ourselves. Because of our self-forgetfulness, when we praise God, we experience a joy that is unmatched by almost any other type of prayer. This joy is a true gift from God. The praise we give him is a true gift from God. Each of these gifts come, in their own way, from the depths of God’s heart. 

God wants us to turn to him with our whole being. He knows that in this life we can never truly forget ourselves entirely. We are body/soul creatures affected by sin, so we will always experience distractions and inclinations to selfishness. Praise as a practice of prayer, however, can turn our hearts toward God. Praise of him and his greatness can begin to strip away the earthly desires we struggle against. 

God has shown us mercy in our lives. We can thank him for that mercy, but we can also praise his Mercy. Your mercy is beyond all our understanding, O Lord. It is better than all possible lives. Your steadfast love is better than life itself. I praise your mercy, O Lord!