The human Heart Demanding

Introduction

End-time Sunday

The Western World ends its old year on New Year’s Eve, the last day of December. For all practical purposes the church ends her liturgical year today, the 33^rd Sunday of Ordinary Time with scripture readings about the End-time. The secular calendar begins its new year on January 1. The church begins its new year on the First Sunday of Advent (this year November 30--the Sunday after next). The Advent season with its busyness and the Christmas season with its warmth and light momentarily lift us out of the gloom of these days, only to toss us back into the doldrums of January, February and March.

Apocalypses

The End-time reading in the gospel today speaks about the great tribulation and about the sun growing dark, the moon no longer shining, the stars falling from the skies, and the heavenly bodies being shaken. “Then will appear `the Son of Man coming in the clouds’ with great power and glory" (Mk 13:24-26; Dn 7:13-14). At first it all sounds very scary.

Such scary writings in scripture are called apocalypses. They appeared with frequency in the two centuries before and the two centuries after Christ. Strange as it may seem, they were written not to scare people but to console them. You write an apocalypse because CNN, MSNBC, and FOX news with their 24 hour coverage of terrorism, suicide bombers, Iraqi casualties, plus all the famous rape and murder cases handled by top notch lawyers in which top notch lawyers and not justice win—all that news is so discouraging and depressing that in your despair you believe that only God and God’s Messiah can put an end to all that bad news and fix, once and for all, this most imperfect of all possible worlds.

So you write an apocalypse describing a stunning and momentous event which brings on the great Messiah and Fixer. You paint a picture with apocalyptic strokes: “The sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, the stars will fall from the sky and the powers in heaven will be shaken. Then will come `the Son of Man coming in the clouds’ with great power and glory” to fix it all up, and to do for us what we couldn’t do for ourselves.

You don’t take the apocalyptic strokes themselves literally, as some preachers like to do. But you do take literally the great event which the strokes attempt to depict—that event which we Christians profess to be waiting for, namely the coming of the Son of Man to gather the elect, once and for all, into the best world possible, where there will be no more terrorism, no more ground zeros, no more suicide bombers, no more casualties of war, no more AIDS and cancer and no more justice which can be bought with money. In this best world possible there will be “no more dying and no more crying out in pain” and there “God will wipe away all tears from their eyes” at a time and hour which no one knows except the Father in heaven (Rev 21:3-4).

The End-time now

But the End-time really doesn’t come just at the very end. The End-time is already and always upon us. Things are always ending on us all along our journey of life. Why, he End-time began for me already as a very little boy. How well I remember Sunday afternoons when we were given a dime (big money in those days), and off we’d go to the movies. When the movie was finished, the word FINIS (THE END) flashed across the screen as the curtains swung shut. That was the end of my dime, the end of my movie and the end of my Sunday (which I had looked forward to), and tomorrow was Monday and school (which I didn’t look forward to). I remember a kind of sadness settling in on me with this very primordial experience of FINIS (THE END).

Things are always ending on us. FINIS is written on everything along our journey of life. The falling leaves of autumn write FINIS upon the warm and pleasant days of summer. The setting sun writes FINIS upon Thanksgiving and Christmas Day and upon all the other great days we wait for with great expectation along our journey. Painful farewells and tearful goodbyes write FINIS upon precious friendships, loving relations and happy reunions.

Nothing writes FINIS so unequivocally, chisels it into things so definitively, as does death. Death is, in fact, the great FINIS, the mother of all endings. Carl Jung, the father of modern psychiatry, swore that no one over forty ever came to his office with a problem that wasn't somehow rooted in the sense that death, the mother of all endings, was drawing near! Death is the great ending from which all the other endings along our journey receive their sting and take their second name. Nicholas Berdyaev, theologian of the Orthodox Church, claimed that every heartfelt good-bye has the taste of death in it.

A farewell

Just last month I said good-bye to my Chicago cousin, Salvatore, as I was leaving for Rome. A restaurant entrepreneur, Sal was the one who put on that great Italian dinner here at Old St. Mary’s on the occasion of my fiftieth. That good-bye, indeed, was heartfelt, and it had, indeed, the taste of death in it for me. For he was already suffering a whole year from a bout with cancer and from being dragged through a keg of nails in the attempt to cure him. A young man of only 65 years, he died while I was in Rome.

Since I have been the family chaplain practically for fifty years, we decided to bring deep personal closure to the life and death of Salvatore, as no hectic funeral service in a funeral parlor on the day of burial could ever do. So the whole clan of us gathered together in the paternal household, at the family coffee table as altar, as we had done for a good forty years at every Christmas and Easter and on all other important events along our journey. Gathered were his wife, sons and daughters, and a whole kindergarten full of grandchildren ranging from seven to seventeen. We all wept, especially the grandchildren. I was surprised how much the grandchildren wept. After all, it was a whole month since Grandpa’s passing, and by then most grandchildren have moved on to “life as usual.”

There at the family altar and in the family church I told them the same story I told you on the feast of All Souls, this past November 2--about my pilgrimage to the tomb of Padre Vittorio Falsina. Some of those present knew and admired him. I told them about that great and gifted human being and priest who died in an auto accident at the early age of 39, and whose body was flown back to his little village in northern Italy, where he lies under a marble slab in a little chapel in the village cemetery. I told them about the great faith of the mother who had room in her heart even for death, and about the caption under the picture of Padre Vittorio near his tomb which says, “What seems to be the end is, in fact, just the beginning.”

We were all weeping, especially the grandchildren. The End-time is now; we are always experiencing the ending of things. That kindergarten full of grandchildren, I thought to myself, is beginning to learn what it will keep on learning all along its journey--that the moment we are born, we are born not only to live but also to die, and that faith comes to help us deal with all the endings along our way, but especially with the mother of all endings, death.

Faith’s expansive vision of the end.

Faith’s vision of the End-time is that at the end of the journey we and all those we love will in some way be there.

Faith’s vision of the End-time is even fuller and more expansive than that. At the end of the journey not only we and those we love will be there but there also, in some way, will be all our creations and works of our hands. Preachers and evangelists don’t speak about that too much. It’s too hairy. It calls for thought. But Pierre Teilhard de Chardin spoke eloquently about it. A Jesuit, a paleontologist, and a mystic theologian of the End-time, he contended that we humans beings don’t raise a single finger to do the smallest task unless moved by a conviction (be it ever so refined) that we are contributing to something that will be eternally saved--that our creations will not perish completely but will in some form be rescued to adorn the New Jerusalem. The Book of Revelation promises that, “Their works shall follow them” (Rv 14:13).

Teilhard’s voice echoed through the nave of St. Peter’s basilica during the deliberations of Vatican II. We hear it speaking in the words of the Council’s second most important document, The Church in the Modern world. At the end of time and on the last day “all the good fruits of our nature and enterprise will be there, but freed of stain, burnished and transfigured” (Art 39). All my homilies, my creations and brain children, will be there but “freed of stain, burnished and transfigured.”

Faith’s vision of the End-time is fuller and more expansive than even that. It includes even our cats and dogs. That’s even more “wild” than Teilhard. But listen to St. Paul in Romans: “For we know that even the things of nature, like animals and plants, groan (ingemiscit) and suffer in sickness and death, and that they too are in labor (parturit) and long to be born into the glory that is to come” (Rm 8:22).

Listen also to Berdyaev again, and hear how emotionally he speaks to that point. He writes, “At the very time of the liberation of Paris we lost our beloved Muri (their dog) who died after a painful illness. Through his sufferings before death I was united to the whole of creation and I awaited its redemption. It was extremely moving to watch Muri on the eve of his death make his way with difficulty to Lydia’s room (where she was herself already seriously ill). He jumped on her bed and had come to say good-bye. I very rarely weep, but when Muri died I wept bitterly. That might sound strange or comic or trivial for some. People speculate about the immortality of the soul, but there I was demanding from the depths of my heart nothing less than eternal life for and with my dog, Muri” (Dreams and Reality).

Conclusion

Proof: the heart demanding

At the end of the day, that just might be the best proof of all --the human heart demanding—the human heart demanding nothing less than eternal life for everything we hold dear: our loved ones, our life’s work, our cats and dogs. Anything less than that at the end of the journey would be a mean trick that our hearts have played on us. The people we love, the fruits of our labor, our pets are the fine wines in our lives. Ite, missal est. Go, and trust the human heart demanding that we all be given eternal life together at some time and in some form. Go, and trust that that demand is not a trick but a promise, breathed into us by the living God of Cana, that the best wine is being saved for last.

Grow old along with me.

The best is yet to be.

the end of life,

for which the first was made.

Our days are in your hands.

(Poet Browning).