There are humble religious, and there are proud religious. The proud ones should not promise themselves the kingdom of God. The place to which dedicated chastity leads is certainly higher, but the one who exalts himself will be humbled. Why seek the higher place with an appetite for the heights, when you can make it simply by holding on to lowliness? If you exalt yourself, God throws you down. If you cast yourself down, God lifts you up. One may not add to or subtract from the Lord’s pronouncement.read more
Though death is something everyone must face, we feel a strong instinctive conviction that it is something unintelligibly negative. The raw ugliness of it could kill our sense of purpose, so forgetting about it would seem to help us simply get on living. While the morose and morbid can become an unhealthy obsession, the fact of our mortality forces the way we understand and live life into perspective. If our capacity for life and activity ends with death, we have to wonder if what we are could somehow be greater than all our activity. Attempting to be happy requires some kind of activity – indeed happiness itself must be the kind of activity which makes existing meaningful and good. If the activity of happiness itself becomes impossible at death, our act of existing would contain an internal contradiction. So if we reject skepticism, and hope to find the happiness that makes sense of our existence, we must also be certain this happiness is possible beyond death. Without that certitude, we are forced to ignore death, flee from it, or thrust ourselves into it prematurely out of despair.read more
On the Feast of All the Saints, the Church rejoices with its fully divinized and purified members in Heaven. The joy they have of being finally free from temptation, worldly allurements and the chaos of the passions expresses only a comparatively insignificant fraction of their happiness. Their joy comes from an unobstructed vision of the Trinity, whose eternal glory has thickened their souls with love. Heaven is filled with beings whose purity and perfection are the burning reality of God’s love that has completely transformed their essence. The lives of the Saints as they were known on earth are but a depressing and sad shadow of their heavenly bliss.read more
