Fourteenth of Year B - Heaven & Hell
July 2009
Heaven and Hell; what can we say about them. Very little.
We can deduce a certain amount from first principles.
When Jesus was asked questions about the subject, his response was basically ‘mind your own business.’
Heaven is Eternal life. This is not life as we know it that goes on forever. This could be a big bore. Eternal Life is sharing in the very life of God; the Father, the Son & the Holy Spirit. This is an existence away above and beyond anything we can imagine in our wildest dreams. It is a totally new existence unconnected with and totally incomprehensible by this life’s standards.
God is love. The Holy Trinity Family is a family of total love, total acceptance, total appreciation, total sharing.
Eternal life is being totally involved in the Holy Trinity Family.
It is only reasonable to conclude that in Eternal Life there can be no place for enmity, for grudges, for nursing hurts, for pride, for selfishness, for envy etc. Therefore it is logical to assume that if I freely refuse to abandon these thing I will also refuse to enter Eternal Life. So there seems to be a need for true repentance and reconciliation, for rebuilding of bridges, for forgiveness, if I am to fit snugly into the Holy Trinity Family. How or when this is to be done is unknown, hence the term Purgatory which covers whatever this process might be.
So, if there is need for repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation, better that I see to it now when I know what it involves rather than waiting for what it might involve in the future.
Hell is not a place to which God sends you. God is not malicious. God does not seek revenge. God does not punish. God is love.
Whatever Hell is, be it a state of existence or a certain place, it is, and will be occupied, only by those who freely go there by choice.
Those who are there and those who go there are those who freely and knowingly choose to have nothing to do with God.
If God is love, acceptance, appreciation and sharing then I suppose that Hell totally lacks these things.
What else can one say about it?
Be quite sure that nobody ends up in Heaven or in Hell by mistake. If you go to Heaven it is because you have freely chosen to go there. If you go to Hell it is because you have freely chosen to go there. It is just like an invitation: I can choose to go or not.
Way back between the wars (that is the first and second world wars), when money and jobs were hard to find in Ireland, it was decided that a certain parish badly needed a new church. Things were going very slowly and many predicted that the building would never be finished. In the parish there was one very rich man named McGuire who seldom or ever came near the church. How he had done so well financially was the subject of much speculation among the locals. Much to everyone’s surprise, one day McGuire visited the parish priest and announced that he would pay for the completion of the church. From then on the church was called ‘McGuire’s fire escape.’
The last talk in this series will be next week.