On my way to Fraternus each week I pass a very efficiently built Protestant church, the metal-building type with a steeple-y kind of thing on top (no cross on it though). There is no landscaping to speak of. There’s no noticeable ornamentation of any kind in fact. Out front there is a mall sign, made like those stick-in campaign signs, that I expect they think is as too-the-point as their building is – it reads, “Heaven or Hell? Choose!”
Although I’m sure they see themselves as promoting that “old-time religion” that focuses on the reality of sin and hell, which I can appreciate. It is also something quintessentially modern in that it frames our salvation to personal choice, which can inadvertently emphasize the power of our will, perhaps more than receiving the mercy and gift of God’s life in us. Modern men love to be pro-choice in all things, even in this case framing salvation as a solely a matter of private and personal choosing.
To be sure, our will is essential in our salvation and our personal responsibility over our own eternal reward is no small matter. We do chose heaven, albeit by accepting a gift. Yet, the word “choice”, as we commonly use it, and a reduction of life to making that right choice, runs the risk of dismissing the life of God in us as manifested in the entirety of life on earth. Or, to make this visual, it might make us build ugly metal buildings and buy cheap signs with boldly colored words on them instead of building dignified and beautiful buildings and living a sacramental culture wherein we expect God’s life to touch every aspect of life. I would propose that making life in God solely about “making the right choice” stunts our ability to grow a culture that makes that “right choice” easier to make.
A visual of this truth might be seen in the likes of fiery preachers of salvation reminding medieval Christians that all is lost if they lose their soul. Yet, he is preaching from the pulpit of a grand basilica, surrounded by the visual articulation of the same truths that he is preaching. The virtue of hope that accompanies salvation discloses to us that hope in God points to heaven and earth at the same time, because both “places” are His. This is why the traditional act of hope mentions both hope for eternal life and hope for help in this life – one virtue acting in both “places.”
Josef Pieper, the unending source of wisdom about virtues, reminds us that hope is the virtue of “not yet,” that it constantly reminds us that we are on the way. But Pieper also compels us to acknowledge that hope embraces the whole of reality – accepting the world as it is, and the truth that it is good. God made it that way. Hope in heaven’s eternal feast, therefore, shapes and inspires our feasts on earth.
The priest/poet Gerald Manley Hopkins articulates the point beautifully in his poem Sunday. First, he sings the overarching joy and call of heaven:
There shall transfigured souls be filled
With Christ’s eternal name,
Dipped, like bright censers, in the sea
Of molten glass and flame.
But the poem makes a turn in focus, reminding us that seeing heaven afar helps us see the reality of life that is closer (which, conversely, helps us see heaven not as distant as we might thing):
Yet set not in thy thoughts too far
Our heaven and earth apart,
Lest thou shouldst wrong the heaven begun
Already in thy heart.
My favorite line asks the question, perhaps to the strain of Protestantism (and even to some Catholics), that refuse the festive cultures of this life, perhaps inadvertently drawing a line in our very nature as man, made up of body and soul:
Is earth to be as nothing here,
When we are sons of earth?
May not the body and the heart
Share in the spirit’s mirth?
The tension of man will always be this, that we are body and soul. The goodness of God has given us earth, will give us heaven, and the mingling of the two keeps our feet planted thankfully on a good earth with our heart eagerly looking and receiving the gifts of God.