When you die, if you saw Hitler in heaven, would it upset you ?
Jim
No. Nor Stalin either, or Mao, as much as I despise them in a purely human way.
I would figure that, at minimum, they had a shot at final penitence. I don’t think we know for sure just that that is, but if one carefully reads Ste Therese of Lisieux, one can sort of “get it”.
She maintained that every person in hell is a volunteer; clear-eyed, rationally choosing hell. And they mean it, and mean it for all eternity. How could that be? How could anybody reject even final penitence and do that?
Pride. Our final judgment will be very clear, she said, and it will be terrible in that the full measure of every sin will be revealed. God’s love is offered and we can reject it out of pride. “How dare you!” our soul says. “I will worship myself forever. I don’t want you!”
Or, we accept it, be penitent and ask forgiveness, even in extremis. That is her view of “final penitence”. How do we try to assure ourselves that we will not miss that opportunity? By praying and doing things for the love of God even if we don’t feel a thing when we do it…rather like Julian of Norwich says.
Are we likely to develop the capacity for penitence, either right now or at the end? Well, if we don’t do any of it now, we’re not likely to do it later. If we don’t accept God’s love and seek His forgiveness now, we’re not likely to do it at our last chance either.
And if we are granted a vision of, say, Hitler in heaven, will we be more likely to rebel against a God who would forgive Hitler if he was penitent at the end if we have never forgiven anybody for lesser things than Hitler did? Maybe. I think we will be even more surprised at who is in heaven than we will at who is not. And being prideful creatures, we might rebel against even a merciful judgment if heaven is populated with the very dregs of sinners as well as those we would regard as saints here and now.
And so, being no theologian and being really unfamiliar with Julian of Norwich’s writings, I will speculate that there is a congruence between what she thought and what Ste Therese Thought. “All will be well…” But “well” is where we want to be, and not everyone’s “well” is the same.
Ste Therese said that if she had committed every sin there is to commit, she would still not fear hell. Why? Because she loved God. And she acted on it, even when she got no good feeling out of it and even when she doubted there was a God to do it for.
That’s why her “Little Way” was so renowned and for so long by so many. Nothing she ever did really amounted to much, except in God’s eyes. And she knew that.
And so, Julian’s statement about praying cited above is also consistent with what Ste Therese said. God measures what we do by a scale different from our own, and He does not lack graces to give us when we need them most.
