Am I being self-absorbed when praying for spiritual growth?

Q: Can praying for spiritual growth indicate being self absorbed? I am troubled by my intercessory prayer.  I pray quite a bit for others but, I also pray a lot for myself. I pray that I grow in faith, that I love and see others as Christ sees them, etc. Still, I wonder if I am too focused on self. These thoughts have become distractions in prayer and in Mass. In Mass, as I was thinking on this, I even wondered if I should fast from self prayer and pray only for others. In adoration, I wondered if that was a temptation rather than of God. What do I do with these thoughts?

A: Asking for good things from God is one of the most basic forms of prayer that we have. Jesus himself encouraged us to do this – over and over again! My favorite is: “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7). In the Jewish mindset, repeating the same concept three times in a row, changing only the words, was a mode of emphasis. Jesus wants us to desire, ask for, and pursue all the good things we need, most especially the graces of spiritual growth. The thoughts that are making you want to stop asking for these good things cannot, I think, come from the Holy Spirit. They are distractions. Two observations may help you avoid getting tangled up in them as you continue to seek union with God in prayer.

Partnering with God

First, remember that God has decided to require our partnership in the building up of his Kingdom. On the one hand, without God’s grace we “can do nothing” (John 15:5). But on the other hand, Jesus has given us work to do in his Kingdom. He has commanded us to follow him, to obey him, to seek to be his witnesses and spread his teaching “to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). St. Paul understood this so well. He wrote to Christians in Corinth: “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me did not prove vain; but I labored even more than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10).

Prayer and Action Should Be in Harmony

This means that while our prayer should be fervent and heartfelt, we can always test its sincerity by looking at our actions. If we pray “Thy Kingdom come!” sincerely, then in our actions we will try to second that prayer, to reiterate it. We will make a decent effort to speak and behave in ways that are pleasing to God and that will help bring God’s light into this darkened world.

And so, when you find yourself badgered by doubts about whether you are being too demanding in your petitions to God, reflect on your actions. Are you doing your part to cooperate with the grace God is sending you? Are you working hard to avoid sin and the occasions of sin? Are you living the sacraments, practicing mental prayer, carrying your cross with faith, seeking to fulfill the duties of your state in life, finding ways to build up your neighbor and serve those in need?… A clean conscience will assure you that you are not being hypocritical in your petitions to our Lord. Of course, you will never be impeccable in your actions; the important thing is to make a decent effort, day after day.

Why Prayer of Petition Is Pleasing to God

Second, remember the reasons that the prayer of petition is so pleasing to God. When we approach God our Father and voice our needs to him, we are exercising all the most beautiful and powerful Christian virtues. We are exercising profound humility by acknowledging that we need God, that we can’t do it on our own. We are expressing our faith in God’s existence and interest in us. We are expressing our trust in his goodness towards us. We are expressing our love for him – our desire to live in a closer and closer union with him in all things. The prayer of petition (this is when we “intercede” for our own needs; usually, the term “prayer of intercession” refers specifically to praying for the needs of others) is an exquisite bouquet of multifarious love, and we should never hesitate to continue begging God our Father to pour his grace into our hearts.

The Catechism makes this abundantly clear (#2629): “The vocabulary of supplication in the New Testament is rich in shades of meaning: ask, beseech, plead, invoke, entreat, cry out, even “struggle in prayer” (cf. Romans 15:30, Colossians 4:12). Its most usual form, because the most spontaneous, is petition: by prayer of petition we express awareness of our relationship with God. We are creatures who are not our own beginning, not the masters of adversity, not our own last end. We are sinners who as Christians know that we have turned away from our Father. Our petition is already a turning back to him.”

Remembering that the prayer of petition gives glory to God should help you deflect the distractions and doubts that you describe in your question.

A Final Thought

I can’t tell from your question whether or not you habitually engage in mental prayer. If you don’t, I would highly recommend that you give it a go. Not only is it the bread-and-butter for real spiritual growth, but it may also help you achieve a better balance between the different forms of prayer (praise, adoration, supplication, contrition, thanksgiving). The influence that the doubts and distractions have had in your prayer life may be partially due to a lack of that balance. Here is a link to a post that can get you started.

God bless you!

How do I know if God is talking to me in prayer?

Q: Dear Father John, I keep hearing (and reading) that Christian prayer is a conversation with God. But, to be totally honest, when I pray I don’t really hear God speaking to me. At least, how do I know it’s God and not just my own thoughts? Am I doing something wrong?

A: You are right: the phrase “conversation with God” describes Christian prayer beautifully. Christ has revealed that God is a real person, and that he is interested – passionately interested – in our lives, our friendship, our closeness. For Christians then, prayer, as Pope Benedict explained when he visited Yonkers, NY in 2007, is an expression of our “personal relationship with God.” And that relationship, the Holy Father went on to say, “is what matters most.”

Parameters of Faith

When we pray, God speaks to us in three ways. But to understand these three ways, we need a reminder. Our relationship with God is based on faith. Faith gives us access to knowledge that goes beyond what we can perceive by our senses. By faith, for example, we know that Christ is truly present in the Eucharist, even though our senses only perceive the appearances of bread and wine. Whenever a Christian prays, the prayer takes place within this atmosphere of faith. When I address God in vocal prayer, I know that he is listening to me, even if I don’t feel his presence with my senses or emotions. When I praise him, ask things of him, adore him, thank him, tell him I am sorry… In all these expressions of prayer, I know by faith (not necessarily by my senses or my feelings) that God is listening, interested, and that he cares. If we try to understand Christian prayer outside of this atmosphere of faith, we will get nowhere.

Keeping that in mind, we can look briefly at the three ways God speaks to us in prayer.

The Gift of Consolation

In the first place, God can speak to us by giving us what spiritual writers call consolation. Through consolation, he touches the soul and allows it to be comforted and strengthened by a felt awareness of his love, his presence, his goodness, his power, his beauty…

This consolation can flow directly from the meaning of the words of a vocal prayer. For instance, when I pray Blessed Cardinal Newman’s famous “Lead, Kindly Light..” prayer, God may boost my hope and my confidence, simply because the meaning of the words nourish and revitalize my awareness of God’s power and goodness.

The consolation can also flow from the reflection and pondering involved in mental prayer. As I read and reflect slowly, prayerfully on the parable of the Prodigal Son, for example, I can feel my soul being comforted by that picture of the Father embracing the repentant younger brother. That picture of God’s love comes to my mind, and gives me a renewed awareness of God’s mercy and his goodness: “God is so merciful!” I think to myself, and I feel the warmth of his mercy in my heart. That image and those ideas are mine, insofar as they arise in my mind, but they are from God, insofar as they arose in response to my consideration of God’s revelation, in an atmosphere of faith. Or, on another occasion, I could meditate on the same biblical passage and be moved to a deep experience of sorrow for my own sins: in the ungrateful rebellion of the Prodigal Son, I see an image of my own sins and rebellions, and I am repelled by them. Again, the idea of the ugliness of sin and the feeling of sorrow for my personal sins are my own ideas and feelings, but they are a response to God’s action in my mind as he guides my mind’s eye to perceive certain aspects of his truth while I listen to him speaking through his revealed Word in the Bible.

In any of these cases, my soul is touched anew, and thus nourished and consoled, by the truth of who God is for me, and who I am for him – a truth which God speaks to my soul. But the distinction between God’s speaking and my own ideas is not so clear as we would sometimes like. He actually speaks through the ideas that come as I turn my attention towards him in prayer. He speaks within my heart, within the words that form in my heart as I gaze at the Word.

Nourishing the Gifts of the Holy Spirit

In the second place, God can respond to us in prayer by increasing in our souls the gifts of the Holy Spirit: wisdom, knowledge, understanding, piety, fear of the Lord, fortitude, and counsel. Each of these gifts nourishes our spiritual muscles, so to speak; they build up our spiritual faculties. They make it easier for us to discover God’s will in our lives, to appreciate and want his will, and to carry out that will.  In short, they enhance our ability to believe, to hope, and to love God and neighbor. During a time of prayer, then, when I am addressing God in vocal prayer, or seeking to know him more deeply through mental prayer, or adoring him through liturgical prayer, God’s grace touches my soul, nourishing it through increasing the power of these gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Since these gifts are spiritual, and not material, and since God’s grace is spiritual, I will not always feel the nourishing take place. I may spend fifteen minutes reading and reflecting on the parable of the God Shepherd, and no consoling ideas or feelings are stirred up; my prayer feels dry. But that doesn’t mean that God’s grace is not nourishing my soul, that he is not strengthening within me the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

When I take vitamins (or eat broccoli), I don’t feel my muscles grow, but I know that those vitamins are indeed enabling that growth. Likewise, when we pray, we know we are entering into contact with God’s grace, with a God who loves us and is making us holy. When I don’t experience consolation, I can be certain that God is still working in my soul, strengthening it with his gifts by means of the spiritual vitamins that my soul takes in whenever I have faith-filled contact with God. But I only know this by faith, because God doesn’t always send sensible consolation with this spiritual nourishment. This is why spiritual growth depends so significantly on our perseverance in prayer, regardless of whether we feel consolation.

Direct Inspirations

Thirdly, God can speak to our souls through words, ideas, or inspirations that we recognize clearly as coming right from him. Personally, I have a vivid memory of the first time the thought of the priesthood came into my mind. I wasn’t even Catholic yet. No one had told me that I should become a priest. And yet, in the aftermath of a powerful spiritual experience, the thought simply appeared in my mind, fully formed, with compelling clarity. I knew without any doubt that the thought had come directly from God, that he had spoken to me directly, giving me an inspiration.

Most of us have had some, even if only a few, experiences like this, when we knew God was saying something specific to us, even though we heard the words only in our hearts, and not with our physical ears. God can speak in this way even when we are not at prayer. But a mature prayer life will make our souls more sensitive to these direct inspirations, and create more room for God to speak directly more often, if he wishes to do so.

Jesus assured us that any effort we make in prayer will bring grace into our souls, whether we feel it or not: “Seek, and you shall find; ask, and it shall be given to you; knock, and the door will be opened” (Matthew 7:7-8). But at the same time, we have to always remember that we must live our entire lives, including our prayer lives, in the light of our faith, not only in accordance with what we perceive and with what we feel. As St. Paul said so powerfully, “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7).

How can I learn to trust?

Q:  Dear Father John, I have felt a great desire to enter religious life for a few years now, but keep hitting an invisible wall so-to-speak. After attempting the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, the Lord helped me to see that I am not ‘indifferent’ and have to rebuild my foundation of a personal relationship with Him. In particular He helped me see my utter inability to surrender stemming from a lack of trust. Unfortunately, due to my lived experience of past hurts, I find myself unable to trust anyone, relying only on myself which is then projected onto God and I feel utterly stuck. I feel as though trust requires gratitude, but gratitude requires humility and being humble, seeing and accepting my weakness is utterly impossible when you have established a pattern of trusting only in yourself and so it is an endless cycle.

Where does one go from here? How does one learn to trust, to be grateful when you only see the failures and hurts in life, how does one surrender and become humble? Is it all a pure gift from God, or is there more I can do on
my end as I have been begging for these graces for years to no avail?

Thank you for your wonderful blog which has been very fruitful!

A: Reading this question gives me deep joy. The grace you have already received is so beautiful! I mean, the grace of understanding the core of the spiritual life (trust) and your need for deep, spiritual rehabilitation in that area. God has been speaking his wisdom to your soul!! You actually bring up at least three separate but related issues. I will comment briefly on them one by one.

Trust: The Heart of Holiness

First, and most importantly, you bring up the issue of trust. However much of the Spiritual Exercises you completed, you can be sure that it was fruitful. The Exercises allow us to confront in a powerfully intimate and personal way the fundamental, universal truths of the spiritual life. The universal truth that struck you the most is the very core of the Christian journey: the need for trust. Sin separates us and distances us from God. All sin – our own personal sins as well as the sins of others, both of which damage our souls – traces its origin back to the Fall of Adam and Eve (that’s why their sin is called “original sin”). What was the essence, the deepest core of their sin? We tend to think it was disobedience. Think again. You see, that disobedience was the trunk, but it grew out of an ever deeper root. Here’s how the Catechism puts it (#397):

Man, tempted by the devil, let his trust in his Creator die in his heart and, abusing his freedom, disobeyed God’s command. This is what man’s first sin consisted of. All subsequent sin would be disobedience toward God and lack of trust in his goodness [emphasis added].

So rehabilitating trust in God is not only YOUR primary project for growth in holiness, but it is EVERY CHRISTIAN’S primary project! That’s not to belittle your journey. Your experiences in life, good and bad, have damaged your capacity to trust in God in a personal, unique way. Your mission in life, your vocation, your way of knowing, loving and serving God is also personal and unique. And so, the path you take to rehabilitate your trust in God will have certain twists and turns, certain epiphanies and setbacks, that will be entirely your own. But, in the end, re-learning to trust God is for each one of us the central, defining spiritual project.

What To Do?

Now we are ready to face the second issue you bring up: “Where does one go from here?” I detect frustration in your question. That’s totally understandable – but it’s also an indicator that something is askew. I think it has to do with expectations. You are wondering how you can develop trust when you don’t have much. You are wondering how to develop gratitude when you don’t have humility. You are wondering how to develop humility when you have formed such a strong and deep pattern of self-reliance.

Let me answer your question with a question. Let’s pretend you don’t know how to play tennis, but you decide that you want to learn. How do you do it? How do you go from zero to beginner to intermediate to advanced? How do you develop the physical skills and coordination and muscle memory necessary for tennis, when you have none of those things? The answer, I think you will agree, is fairly simple. You learn to play tennis by playing tennis.

Holy Tennis

Growth in virtue (trust, confidence in God, surrender, humility, and gratitude) is similar.  Virtues are moral habits, just as like skills are physical habits. They are developed under two conditions. First, we need to have the raw material. Future tennis players have to have the normal use of all the major muscle groups (you can’t play tennis without arms). Future saints have to have the normal use of human nature: “heart, soul, mind, and strength” as our Lord put it (Luke 10:27). From your question, it is clear that you have the raw material. Now you just need to begin to put it into action. Virtues are not developed “once and for all.” We can never check a virtue off our “to-do” list. We grow in trust, little by little, by trusting. We grow in humility, little by little, by exercising self-denial. We grow in gratitude, little by little, by saying thank you, sincerely and intentionally, over and over again, especially when we don’t feel like it. The sacraments nourish these efforts; prayer and spiritual reading/study informs and enlightens these efforts; the Holy Spirit – directly, through a spiritual director or mentor, through faith-based friendships, and through God’s Providence – will coach you.

St. John of the Cross put it succinctly when writing about the virtue of love (which is the core of every virtue, so it applies equally to trust, humility, gratitude…): “Where there is no love, put love, and you will find love.”

As long as you are patient, even the tiniest effort to trust God will give God’s grace a chance to touch your soul and strengthen the very trust that you are using. Remember, at Baptism you received sanctifying grace and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and at Confirmation you received a strengthening of them. God is already at work in your life.  He is drawing you closer to him. The journey will take your whole life, so don’t think that you have to make yourself perfect before God can do anything with you. On the contrary! God is already working in and through your life! Your desire to know and follow him better is already a clear sign that you are growing!

Two Time-Tested Trust Workouts

On a practical level, the saints all agree on two spiritual exercises that directly strengthen our capacity to trust God.

First, meditating on Christ’s Passion. As we gaze on Christ “loving us to the end” (John 13:1), our fears are quelled and we realize, gradually, that even though everyone else may have betrayed us and wounded us and lost their trustworthiness, Christ will never betray us. He is worthy of our trust. No matter what happens, he will keep on loving us. That’s one of the core messages of the Passion. On this point, I would greatly encourage you to watch The Passion of the Christ, and go through it gradually, using Inside the Passion as a kind of study guide, or guide for meditating on this central mystery of our faith.

Second, focus on discovering and embracing God’s will in the nitty-gritty of your daily life. We know what God’s will is through his Commandments, through the teachings of the Church, through the duties of our state in life, and through the circumstances of God’s Providence. Lord, what do you want me to do right now? That question, that prayer, is a powerful ally in your path of growing trust. Because every time we accept and embrace, and try to fulfill, God’s will, even with a fragile love and flimsy faith, we are actually exercising our trust in God. We are saying, “Okay Lord, I don’t really understand this completely, but I know that you want me to do it, so here goes…” That counts for simple tasks like washing the dishes. And it counts for more daunting tasks like talking about the faith or defending a Catholic position in a conversation at work. This is especially true when God’s will contradicts our natural preferences. That’s when we get to carry our own crosses, which is the privileged place for exercising, and therefore growing in, our trust in God.

We have done some related posts on these issues that you may want to read or re-read: a two-part post on trusting in God, and a two-part post on discerning God’s will.  If you keep those elements in play, you can be sure that you are making progress, regardless of how you may feel at any given moment.

Follow Your Call!!!

Finally, you mention at the beginning of your post that your trust issues have been “an invisible wall” in following what may be a vocation to the religious life. That may be a ruse of the devil. Being holy is not a requirement for entering religious life. In fact, a religious vocation, like any vocation, is actually, first and foremost, a specific path for growth in holiness. If your heart quickens at the thought of entering religious or consecrated life, you should act on it now. Visit religious congregations; speak with consecrated persons; keep taking whatever next step God puts in your mind until you discover your path. Don’t rush, but don’t delay! Maybe a good next step would be to finish the Spiritual Exercises retreat that you started (you mentioned that you “attempted” to do the Exercises – sounds like you didn’t finish!). If you like that idea, I can highly recommend my confreres’ who preach Spiritual Exercises Retreats here. In any case, if God has put that question in your heart, you can be sure that doing what you can to answer that question will help put you on the fast track to greater intimacy with him, and that’s what it’s all about.

God bless you!

More indulgence clarification…

Q: Dear Father John, As I read your excellent posts on indulgences. A question occurred to me. If a person were to perform these suggested spiritual exercises without asking for the indulgence, would he still obtain the indulgence? Also since no longer are there no longer specified “time outs” applied to the purgatory… how do we arrive at how many indulgences are enough to avoid as much “time” in purgatory to begin with? Isn’t this kind of thinking sort of like the idea of God having a check list of who is naughty/nice? and how much purgatorial time is required for a particular kind of sin? I don’t mean to sound flippant but it sounds like a massive book-keeping system would be required to keep the “accounts” straight! But then God, being God, would have it all figured out I guess. As you can no doubt tell this is an area of “difficulty” for me. Thank you!

A: Actually, this is an area of difficulty for many people.  In fact, the issue of indulgences was one of the sparks that started the tragic blaze of the Protestant Reformation, a blaze that incinerated the cultural and religious unity of Christendom starting back in the 1500s.  I don’t know if I will be able to completely resolve the difficulty, but I will try to share some thoughts that may help.

Indulgences vs. Benefits

Your first question is easier than your second.  An indulgence can only be attained with the intention of attaining it.  So, if I were to lift my mind to God in the midst of my work day, I would not receive an indulgence for doing that unless I were consciously intending to receive it.  But we need to be very clear about something here.  Indulgences are not the only spiritual benefits out there.  Any time we engage in these spiritual exercises (reading Sacred Scripture, praying the Stations of the Cross, saying specific prayers…), we give glory to God and bring ourselves and our world into contact with the rushing stream of redeeming grace flowing from Christ’s cross.  Even if I am not intending to receive an indulgence, therefore, these spiritual practices are worthwhile, and God will reward them and utilize them to build up his Kingdom.  Through prayer and sacrifice, we become channels of God’s grace.  An indulgence is simply a specific manifestation of that grace, one that the Church offers to us as a concrete way show our love for the Lord and for our neighbor.  That’s why you should feel no obligation to go indulgence hunting.  If this practice doesn’t resonate in your heart, don’t worry about it!  Continue to pray and seek the face of Christ in all you do, and let God worry about the rest.

A Touch of History

Your second question is a bit thornier.  We have to do a small history lesson to get to the bottom of it.  In the first centuries of the Church, confession and penance were much more public than they are now.  Only in the 500s did the Irish monks really begin to popularize individual, private confession.  Until that era, it was more common for Christians who had fallen into grave sin to make their confession in front of the bishop and the entire congregation, and to be assigned a visible penance.  For example, a public sinner may be required to wear some kind of penitential garb and to stay in the back of the church during Mass for six months or 365 days.  Only at the end of that period of penance would he be admitted back into full communion with the Church.  Even during those early centuries, however, the practice of indulgences was emerging.  For example, if you caved in under pressure of persecution and publicly denied your faith, that was the grave sin of apostasy, and if you repented, you would be given a hefty penance.  But that penance could be lessened if you were to go visit a future martyr or confessor who had not caved in and who was being held in prison for their faith.  You would get this holy person to sign an affidavit by which they would express their desire to apply the merits of their sacrifice to your penance.  Then you would bring this document to the bishop, and some or all of your penance could be remitted.

After the period of the Roman persecutions, obtaining this kind of remission of penance through the merits of the saints continued.  Thus, the practice of indulgences emerged.  Until recently, the relative value of the different indulgences was still expressed by correlating them to certain amounts of days – this harkens back to the early Church and its public penances, which were assigned for specific periods of time.  Today, as mentioned in an earlier post, this method of expressing the relative value of indulgences has been simplified.  Instead of specific numbers of days, we just have partial or plenary (full) indulgences.

The Real Issue

That’s some complicated background (you can find a more detailed explanation here) that can help you understand where the length-of-time factor came from.  But I don’t think that’s what is really causing you the difficulty.  After all, we really don’t have the final say about how much benefit is bestowed when we obtain an indulgence.  God is the final arbiter, and since only he can see our hearts, only he can see how pure is our love, our intention, and our detachment from sin – all of which are factors that contribute to the fruitfulness of any spiritual exercise we undertake.  If we ever find ourselves getting caught up in the math, we can be sure that we are losing focus.

The real difficulty with the practice of indulgences, I think, is rooted elsewhere.  Generally speaking (and it’s always dangerous to generalize), our culture has lost a keen sense of sin.  We tend to belittle the reality of sin and the seriousness of its consequences.  This is partially a result of the influence of modern, secular psychology, which attributes blame not to free choice, but to subconscious influences and tendencies.  But our faith teaches us that there is only one thing in the universe more horrible than a venial sin, and that is a mortal sin.  Sin is rebellion against God.  Every sin is an attempt to destroy the universe.  It is spiritual self-mutilation.  It is spiritual chain-saw-massacring.  When we spread lies about someone, for example, we actually upset the order of the cosmos; we do lasting damage to souls – ours and others’ – souls that were created for eternal life and redeemed by Christ on the cross.  Sin is a spiritual suicide-bomber attack.

If we really perceived the gravity of sin, we would more readily perceive the real need for penance and reparation.  Then we would better understand the wisdom and the gentle love of God expressed in his giving to the Church the beautiful practice of indulgences.  Through this practice, God offers us a concrete way to help right wrongs in the spiritual realm, to pour out spiritual balm on spiritual wounds, and to reestablish spiritual peace in war-torn souls.

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC, ThD

Why would the Church recommend that we meditate on such horrible things as hell and the last judgment?

Q: Dear Father Joseph, why would the Church recommend that we meditate on such horrible things as hell and the last judgment (aren’t there four things.)? Anyway, if there is a benefit to doing such a thing, what would that look like?

A: “The Last Things”, or “Eschatology” is the subject that deals with the ultimate truths of our existence. Often called “The Four Last Things,” the number can vary. They are death, judgment, heaven, and hell, but we can also include purgatory and the final judgment. Some add the resurrection of the body and the end of the present world to complete the picture.

Your comment that they are horrible would apply to hell (at least inasmuch as it is the greatest definitive disaster that could befall man), but I would not qualify the others with the same adjective. Death is not humanly attractive – and our nature shies from it – but it is a necessary step in order to get to heaven. The same can be said of judgment and purgatory. For those in friendship with God, these are not to be feared. Although awe-inspiring and even painful they lead to eternal bliss, and we can consider them as purification for our sins.

I think many avoid these themes because they make us feel our limitedness and our necessary dependence on God. They prick our conscience and shake us out of our comfort zone. Most of all, however, they make us suffer because we often lack faith and trust in God’s love and mercy. We contemplate only our sinfulness and misery and realize that we cannot cause our own salvation. It is a scary thought. We are totally in the hands of God and his compassion. Nothing we can ever do can make us worthy of heaven. It is his gift, his grace (albeit, a grace he offers to all and, once accepted in faith, a grace that we can expand upon and gain merit with).

Contemplation of this nature, based on fear and without faith, is never recommendable. It will do little good; it will only make us agitated and worrisome.

If, on the other hand, we meditate on these realities based on the sureness of God’s love for us, the panorama changes. Death becomes a sacrifice I can present to God just like Jesus did… my last and most profound offering: my life.

The judgment may reveal my sins, but more importantly it will reveal God’s loving care and constant presence in my life – the almost infinite graces he has showered on me and the glories he has worked through me.

Purgatory becomes a place to grow in ardent love for him. I find myself not quite ready, with too many imperfections. I want to cleanse myself and enjoy God fully with no limitations. I “purge” myself; I sacrifice myself as fast as I can so that I can enjoy that final embrace.

Heaven is indescribable. Think of it as the sum of the most intense desires of your heart, all of them, all together. Multiply that by infinity and then grasp it in one act of love that will never pass. It is too hard to find the words.

Hell… definitely not a good subject. But the thought of it can lead us to wake up and shed our spiritual sloth. The children of Fatima were granted a vision of hell from our Lady, and it turned them into ardent apostles of prayer. Christ himself mentions it in the Gospel for those who would rather not take the narrow path but instead choose the wide and easy one. He mentions the fire that is never extinguished and the worm that dies not. This is not just a scare tactic to get us to worry, but as the Catechism says, “a call to the responsibility incumbent upon man to make use of his freedom in view of his eternal destiny… and at the same time, an urgent call to conversion” (CCC, 1036). I think that is the reason we should contemplate the eternal truths: they give meaning to our lives. They get us to pull our heads out of the sand and realize what life is really about and where we are heading. They turn us back to God and teach us to value him and his things above all else. God is not a bookkeeper, keeping track of our faults and sins and waiting for the proper moment to cut us down and cut us off. He is a loving God who loved us so much that he sent us his only Son to show us the way to him. Meditating on the last things enables us to grow in love for him and his mercy.

Finally, it is good to remember that the Fathers of the Church and the Popes have always recommended the awareness of (or the contemplation of) these Last Things. A couple of quotes from John Paul II and Benedict XVI can give us ulterior reasons for this contemplation.

To preach a version of Christianity which benignly ignores, when it does not explicitly deny, that our ultimate hope is the ‘resurrection of the body and life everlasting’ (Symbolum Apostolorum) runs counter to Revelation and the whole of Catholic tradition. More vigorous preaching and catechesis on eschatological themes is needed in order to eliminate confusion regarding the true nature of Christian life and of the Church’s unfailing hope in her Lord who is ‘the resurrection and the life…’

While many prefer to avoid these ultimate questions and some are tempted to think of salvation as a right and as a foregone conclusion, the Church must continue to remind people of the awesome reality of human freedom, the price of salvation (cf. 1Cor. 7: 23) and the riches of divine mercy (cf. Eph. 2: 4). In doing so the Church is defending the worth and dignity of every individual against all efforts to trivialize human existence” (John Paul II to the bishops of the United States on May 28, 1993).

“Unless we take (the eternal truths) into account, we cannot work well for the earth… When one does not know the judgment of God one does not know the possibility of Hell, of the radical and definitive failure of life; one does not know the possibility of and need for purification. Man then fails to work well for the earth because he ultimately loses his criteria, he no longer knows himself – through not knowing God – and destroys the earth” (Benedict XVI to parish priests of Rome on February 7, 2008).

Yours in Christ, Father Joseph Burtka, LC