30th Week OT (W)
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
NDS, NOLA
Contrary
to the often-preached pablum that “All People Go To Heaven,”
Jesus preaches the possibility of being left behind. Rather than the
all-inclusive gospel of therapeutic deism, Christianity acknowledges
the fact that God will honor a choice not to join Him at the heavenly
wedding feast. This truth rubs against our modernist grain precisely
b/c it places the choice of where you will spend your eternal life
squarely where it belongs. On you. Not your parents. Not your
culture. Not your genetics. On you. And that kind of
responsibility harshes the emotional buzz that Doing It My Way
is supposed to produce. Maybe it's not exactly pastoral to say so,
but truth is truth. And the truth is always pastoral. A corollary to
this hard truth is this: I don't get to decide whether or not you
go to heaven. That judgment comes when God stares into your soul
after death and asks Himself, “Do I see Christ?” Whether or not
he sees Christ looking back at Him is up to you. . .while you still
live. Jesus tells us that the entrance to Heaven is a Narrow Gate.
Some see it as door. Others see a window or maybe a slip-and-slide.
Mrs. Turpin sees it as a bridge.
Mrs.
Turpin, that paragon of middle-class Caucasian Christianity created
by Flannery O'Connor, believes that the social order she occupies is
God-made and absolute. As it is here on Earth, so it shall be in
Heaven. Meaning that the first – and possibly only – ones through
the Narrow Gate will be the respectable, law-abiding, tax-paying,
property owning white folks who keep the divine order in order here
on the ground. She has a revelation when a acne-plagued girl bounces
a sociology textbook off her head, jumps on her chest, strangles her,
and yells, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog!”
After the crazed girl is drugged and restrained by a doctor, Mrs.
Turpin returns to her pig farm. There she watches the pigs gather
around an old sow, “a red glow suffused them. They appeared to pant
with a secret life.” In a moment of odd ecstasy, Mrs. Turpin sees a
bridge form, connecting the ground and heaven, and on that bridge,
marching straight through the Narrow Gate were all of those people
she believed would never make it. The white trash. The Negroes.
Freaks and lunatics. And bringing up the rear were Her Kind of
People. She watches them process upward, and sees “by their shocked
and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.”
Rather
than spend our sparse time imagining who will get through the Narrow
Gate and who won't – like Mrs. Turpin, we could carefully consider
our own relationship with the Just Judge and his Church. What can I
do now to strengthen myself for the trip through the Gate?
What can I do now for others to help strengthen them? Well,
first, you can't lie to yourself and others by teaching that the
Narrow Gate is actually a Celestial Slip-and-Slide. Everyone makes it
through! Second, you can't believe that getting through the Gate is
about race, class, tribal allegiance, or good intentions. Third, what
we call virtue may be nothing more than social convention –
cleanliness, ambition, hard work, saving money – these are the
“virtues” that crossing into heaven burns away. Lastly, Jesus
wants to know where you are from before he opens that Gate. Are you
from his Body, the Church? Do you “do it your way,” or his Way?
More importantly, did you make yourself the servant of all? The last
to be first? That Gate is narrow. To fit through: burn away anything
and everything that is not Christ.
Follow HancAquam or Subscribe ----->
No comments:
Post a Comment