Grace & Peace!
If we are meant for the Next Life, why care about anything in this one? There’s so much bad stuff happening and so many people worried about bad stuff that might happen soon (look at the World News and End Times Speculation threads) that it just makes every aspect of this life seem pointless and that a nihilistic approach would be more appropriate.
Take heart, Wonder! Here’s the secret: the distinction between the next world and this world is a metaphorical/linguistic one. This world is shot through with the next, as Gerard Manley Hopkins reminds us:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out like shining from shook foil.
The difficulty is this: we are not available to the Next World in the same way that the Next World is always, relentlessly and gratuitously available to us. Think of the Eucharist: if we could truly see it as it really and truly is, and in the same way the Eucharist sees us as we are (and it does and it does and it always always does), we’d be gobsmacked, humbled, ashamed, enraptured and quickened in a heartbeat. The reality of the Eucharist is also the mystery of the whole world: it’s not a “this world” and a “that world” in opposition to each other or contrasted with each other, but the reality of grace that informs and enlivens all that is, that burns brightly at the heart of everything.
That’s not to say that sin doesn’t have consequences. It does. Bad stuff happens. But the chief consequence of sin is that it removes us from a right apprehension of the nature of the Real–it undoes us, it obscures our vision, it deforms our perceptions. We come to think that the deformity is what’s real–it’s all we see, it must be real. But it’s the grandeur of God that is the Reality. The grandeur and the grace that is nearer to us than our own blood, that is the Breath of our breath, that is the superabundant Light by which we see and that longs to heal our seeing.
Nihilism can be attractive, but its uses are limited. Don’t get trapped in an empty despair that is little more than a thwarted hope because, in the words of Eliot, you had “hope[d] for the wrong thing.” Actually, Eliot’s words in “East Coker” (from
Four Quartets) are germane here:
I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. (EC, III, 23-28)
This is the way of Christian apophatic theology. This is St. John of the Cross’ Ascent of Mount Carmel (Eliot riffs off St. John in “East Coker,” too). This is the Pseudo-Denys’ Mystical Theology, this is the end of St. Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, this is Meister Eckhart’s practice of detachment (St. John’s, too: “In this detachment the spiritual soul finds its quiet and repose; for, since it covets nothing, nothing wearies it when it is lifted up, and nothing oppresses it when it is cast down, because it is in the centre of its humility; but when it covets anything, at that very moment it becomes wearied” [Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book 1, Ch. XIII]).
The world is indeed passing away, and it is passing away in two different manners: 1) the world of human culture and death-centeredness is passing away, revealed as little more than smoke and shadow in the gentle light of the Resurrection of Christ; 2) the created world is passing into its eschatological fulfillment. Both of these things are good news! So what to do? Hold lightly to what is passing away. Cling firmly to the grace by which all things are. The Next World is here
in this one, the Next World is the Reality of this one. The two are not in conflict. Heaven and Earth have been reconciled in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, by whom we were made, for whom we were made, and to whom be glory unto the ages of ages.
Under the Mercy,
Mark
All is Grace and Mercy! Deo Gratias!
