25 October 2014
Saturday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time
Heaven. What a poor, battered word! And yet, it is our home, our goal – and the place where our true family lives. For the only fully realized Christians are those who have “run the race” and are with Our Lord in Heaven – in the places He has prepared for them.
We live in a world which has decided the only reality is that which can be measured by tools, by instruments. If it can’t be measured, it isn’t real. Sadly, this infects everything in the world, attacking anything of quality by insisting that only quantity is real. No wonder so many people are immense! Only bulk seems to count! CS Lewis once observed that the world won’t return to sanity until what we call “the sky” can be seen as “the Heavens” once again. And we won’t return to normal as people until we can stand outside and gaze in “awesome wonder” at the vast Heavens above us – an image of that vast order of the spiritual Heaven where the angels and saints dwell, eternally aglow with the love of the God who made Heaven and earth.
Meanwhile, ah, we stumble along in this poor, battered world. A rocky road, a fallen world. This world is not Heaven: this world wants to forget Heaven. Heaven is very far indeed from the fallen world, but Heaven has come close, very close, in the God who became Man, in Jesus. He is present in every tabernacle of the world, the outpost of Heaven – and as in His Body and Blood He was lifted up, He has promised to lift us up, far above all the heavens. “Through Him, with Him, in Him” – to the home of all glory and honor. Amen.