Transcript

It seems altogether appropriate that we should express our faith in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

But isn't that at least questionable, even idolatrous?

To be professing belief in the Church?

That we do profess this in the Creed signals perhaps the most fundamental truth about the Mystical Body: that it is a sacrament of Christ, that it participates in His divinity.

The one holy Catholic and apostolic Church offers forgiveness, calls us out of the world, and invites us toward the light of the world to come.

We come now to the close of the Nicene Creed: I believe in one holy Catholic and apostolic Church.

Now here's the first thing to notice: we believe in God, we believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, we believe in the Holy Spirit, and we believe in the Church.

What isn't the Church there for?

Simply a human organization?

If that's all it were, we wouldn't believe in it.

We might accept it, and we might say, Okay, that's a good thing to have, but to profess one's belief in the Church is a sign that there's something divine in it, about the Church making it not simply an organization, if I can put it this way, but an organism.

Here's what I mean: the second person of the Trinity took to Himself a human nature.

We call that the Incarnation.

In Jesus, the second person of the Trinity now takes to Himself this icon of His presence.

Jesus rises from the dead, ascends to His heavenly place, and remains there in His glorified body.

But then the second person of the Trinity takes to Himself, as it were, another nature—this time, the Church.

With its roots in St. Paul, we have this idea of the Mystical Body of Jesus.

There's the body He took to Himself 2,000 years ago.

And then there's this Mystical Body that He takes to Himself across space and time.

All of us baptized are cells and molecules and organs in this Mystical Body, which is now the means by which Jesus continues to do His work in the Church.

Do you see now why it's so inappropriate to refer to the Church simply as an organization?

No, no, it's a living organism by which Christ continues to act in the Church.

Think now in the New Testament, in the Acts of the Apostles.

Jesus appears to Saul on the road to Damascus.

He says, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?

He didn't say, Why are you persecuting that organization that I founded?

He said, Why are you persecuting me?

Matthew 25 says, Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters, you do it to me.

He's not saying, Well, you do it to these nice people that have organized themselves under my inspiration.

No, no, you do it to me.

That's how close Christ identifies with His body, the Church.

Put it this way: the Church is the means by which we become, as it were, participants in the very life of the Trinity.

As I said, we become sons and daughters in the Son.

You know, sometimes you hear the objection, Well, why would Catholics have this institution that stands between them and Jesus?

Why would we need this sort of mediator?

Well, we just don't think of it that way.

I mean, I wouldn't say that my body is somehow mediating the real me to you.

No, I mean, my body—that's the real me.

That's how you know me, precisely through my presence, my voice, etc. In the same way, we don't think of the Church as some institution standing between us and Jesus.

I love this from St. Joan of Arc.

When she was being interrogated at her trial, she said this about Jesus Christ and the Church: I simply know they're just one thing, and we shouldn't complicate the matter.

That's a great expression of the Church as organism, not as organization.

Now the word Church in Greek, used all the time in the New Testament, is ekklesia.

So our words, you know, ecclesiastic and ecclesiastical, come from that.

But ekklesia is an interesting word because, as I mentioned before, kalein means to call, and ek means from or out of.

So an ekklesia is a group of people who've been called out of something into something else.

They've been called forth to be something new.

So the Church is called by somebody out of something into something else.

Well, who does the calling?

That should be pretty clear: Jesus.

It's not you who have chosen me; it's I who have chosen you.

As I've said before, Christianity is not the story of our quest for God.

I mean, that's any spirituality.

No, no, it's not you who have chosen me; you've come searching for me.

I've chosen you.

Christ calls us out of what?

Out of the world, to use that biblical term.

What's the world?

It means that whole world—conjuries of styles and institutions and influences marked by sin.

It means the space of selfishness and violence and what Augustine called the lust to dominate.

Think of the fallen world.

We're called out of that by Christ into something else—into a whole new way of being, thinking, speaking, acting.

That's the Church.

And called not just into the Church in this world, but ultimately into that fullness of communion with Christ on high in heaven.

There are three figures from the Old Testament that I think are really evocative of all this dimension.

And the Church Fathers love to meditate on this.

The first one is Noah.

Think of the great biblical figure of Noah—Noah, who is called out of the sinful world.

So the tohu vabohu of sin has come rushing back into the world; that's what the floodwaters symbolize.

But God calls Noah and his little family, and representatives of the animal kingdom, out of that fallen world into the Ark, which is a place of safety where that life is preserved.

That's a beautiful image of the Church, isn't it?

In fact, churches classically were meant to look a bit like boats.

The central section—I look down the central section of this beautiful basilica—this church is called the nave, from the Latin navis, meaning boat or ship.

So Noah is a symbol of the Church as we make our way through the stormy waters of the world.

We've been called out of that into a new way of being.

The second image is Abraham.

Think of Abraham, who is called out from Ur of the Chaldees, his home city, out from everything and everybody he knew, to go, guided by the divine voice, in search of the promised land.

Abraham became a wanderer, a pilgrim, called out of what he knew, called out of the familiar, now in search of something new and fresh promised.

So the Church, up and down the ages, has this Abrahamic quality.

There's a kind of in-between dimension to the Church.

We've been called away from something, and now we're following the divine voice.

Where exactly?

I don't always know, but I'm trusting.

I'm on my way to the promised land.

A third great figure for the Church?

Moses.

Moses himself, called out of Egypt, summoned by God, and then sent as liberator of his people to lead them out of slavery in search of the promised land—the same one that Abraham was seeking.

But Moses, leading his people through 40 years of the desert, again that in-between quality: the Church is on the march; it's going somewhere.

Out of slavery, yes, thank God, but not quite arrived where it's supposed to be.

Well, that's all of us in the Church, in the Mystical Body of Jesus, in the nave, the ship of the Church, making our way through the stormy waters or across the desert.

Pick your metaphor, but we're in between what we've been called out of and what we're being called to.

Those are all images of the Church.

I love this from now Saint Pope Paul VI in his great encyclical Evangelii Nuntiandi.

He says, The Church doesn't have a mission; the Church is a mission.

Every aspect of the Church is a mission to announce Jesus Christ to the world.

Everything we are, everything we do, is all about the announcing of this mission.

That's the journey we're on; that's the vocation we have as a Church.

Bishop, the Church is described not just as Catholic but as Roman Catholic.

What does this mean, and then how does this particularity still express universality?

Yeah, some people see that as a contradiction.

How can you be Catholic, meaning universal, and Roman, which seems very particular?

I would say it's an old biblical principle, which is you tend to get to the universal through the particular.

So God chooses this particular people, Israel, not for their own sake but for the sake of the world.

There's this particular Christ, the Jew of the first century, who is also the incarnation of the Logos meant for everybody.

So it really isn't a contradiction; it's more of a biblical principle that to the many, through the one.

Rome, because of Peter and Paul, the two great apostles who died in Rome—Rome, especially because of Peter, who is the prince of the apostles, to whom Christ gave the keys to the kingdom.

And so that's where the natural place of churchly leadership is.

But it doesn't mean for a minute that it's unique to Rome or unique to Italy or to Europe.

It's through Peter to the whole world.

You know, one reason why people like Peter and Paul went to Rome in the ancient world was it was the center of things.

You want to get this message out as widely as possible?

You want to go there.

The way someone today would say, I want to go to New York or LA or to London, or some center of communication, so they went to Rome.

Okay, the Creed goes on to qualify this Church as one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic.

I want to just look briefly at each of those four classic characteristics.

First of all, the Church is one.

How come?

Well, because God is one.

Hear, O Israel: the Lord your God is God alone.

Actus purus—the simple reality is one, and the purpose of the Church is to draw the whole world into the unity of God.

God in the Bible is a great gathering force; the devil, diabolos in Greek, means the scatterer.

The devil scatters; God gathers into His own unity, and that's why we say the Church is one.

How about this from Paul to the Ephesians?

He [Christ] has put all things under His feet and has made Him the head over all things for the Church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.

That's the great vision of all things being drawn under the lordship of Jesus.

But mind you, today especially, even as I kind of sing the praises of unity, people today have a keen sense of the dark side of unity.

It can sound like the monolithic, the imperialistic, the oppressive.

We celebrate diversity, right?

Difference.

Well, how do we make sense of this?

Notice, please, in the life of the Church, the unity we're talking about here is not an imperialistic, domineering unity, but what I call an assimilating unity.

What do I mean?

I mean, up and down the centuries, as the Church goes out to bring all people to Christ, it resists what it must.

So there are always things in any given culture that are simply antipathetic to Christ; they have to be resisted.

But whenever it can, the Church, at its best, assimilates what's good and true and beautiful from the cultures around it.

Think of, from the earliest centuries, how the Church took in the work of the philosophers and the poets, how it sometimes took in even pagan festivals and customs and adapted them to the Church's purpose.

Think of Thomas Aquinas using the philosophy of Aristotle.

Think of John Henry Newman using the philosophy of Locke.

Think of St. John Paul II using the philosophy of Husserl.

At its best, the Church doesn't dominate but rather draws what's good and true and beautiful in the culture in an assimilating way into its unity.

The second great mark of the Church is that it's holy.

Well, the Church is holy because God is holy—kadosh, the Hebrew.

The angels sing, Kadosh, kadosh, kadosh—holy, holy, holy.

It means set apart.

God is holy, and the Church is the vehicle by which God wants to make the whole world holy.

Therefore, the Church has this quality.

We speak of the Holy Spirit as the soul of the Mystical Body.

So the Church is the Mystical Body, the head of the Church, Christ; the soul of the Church, the Holy Spirit.

Now think of the Church in its sacraments, especially the Eucharist, in its great saints, in its works of mercy, in its teaching, in its apostolic authority.

In all these ways, the Church expresses its own holiness; it expresses the presence in it of the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete.

And by this holiness, the Church attracts the world.

I love that image, and Bernini had this very much in mind when he built the great colonnade in front of St. Peter's. They reach out like two great arms to draw in the world.

Every single time I stand in that piazza there in front of St. Peter's, I think of that.

And when I've been there with these giant crowds—hundreds of thousands of people gathered by these great arms—well, that's the unity of the Church and the holiness of the Church, which is attractive.

It has been up and down the ages.

Now you say, Okay, Bishop, I get all that, but what do you do with all the very unholy people who are part of the Church?

Well, I understand.

Up and down the centuries, you can find plenty of sinners.

In fact, with the sole exception of the Blessed Mother, every single person who has ever been a member of the Church is a sinner.

Every member of the Church today is a sinner.

I'm not really surprised by that; the doctrine of original sin causes me to expect it.

And even the worst sins of its members do not compromise the essential holiness of the Church that I'm talking about.

Oh, it's a collection of a kind of motley crew, the Church, and it's the spotless Bride of Christ.

It's that second quality where you see its holiness.

Yes, you know the great parable Jesus told of the wheat and the tares, right?

The wheat is growing, and then sown among the wheat are these weeds that compromise, and they grow up alongside.

Why don't we just tear up all the weeds?

No, no, let them grow together.

At the last day, they'll be separated.

So it goes in the life of the Church.

Its holiness is manifested, yes, in its great saints, especially in the sacraments and the Eucharist, but alongside that holiness, wrapped around it very often, are the sins of its members.

Okay, so it goes.

Christ will make that discrimination at the end of time.

The Church is one, the Church is holy, and the Church is Catholic.

We hear from the lovely Greek phrase kata holos.

Holos means the whole; kataholos means according to the whole.

So it means universal—Catholic.

God wants to draw not some people to Himself; He wants to draw everybody to Himself.

God’s not interested in getting just some nations, a few chosen nations; He wants all nations.

The Church is meant, therefore, to be a reality everywhere, all over the world.

Again, St. Paul says in Galatians, There’s no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or free, no longer male or female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

Look at those three great divisions.

Those are three of the most fundamental ways that people in Paul's time divided themselves; they stratified society along those lines.

No, no, that's been overcome in Christ.

Don't tell me one group is in and one group is out, one group is up and one group is down, and all those that apply.

If you're a Greek, well, the Jews are no good; if you're a Jew, the Greeks are no good.

Male and female—they were sharply divided in a hierarchical way in that time.

Paul’s saying, No, those divisions and stratifications are overcome in Christ.

Kataholos, according to the whole—that's why the Church of Christ can never be limited to one place, or one people, or one language, or one nation.

That's inimical to its catholicity.

You know, John Paul II saw this so beautifully, and again this is the tension.

Does that mean that everything becomes monolithically one?

No, no.

Think of the World Youth Days of John Paul, where he drew people from all over the world, encouraged these young kids to bring the flags of their nations and bring their songs and particular customs.

Terrific!

But then to realize beyond all those divisions, there’s this great unity and catholicity of the Church.

Whether they’re from Poland or from Brazil or from the Philippines or from Canada, wherever they’re from, they were all Catholics—katholikos, the universality of the Church.

Beautiful!

Beautiful!

Another dimension, if I can quote here one of my spiritual mentors, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago.

He said, The Catholic Church has all the gifts that Christ wants His people to have.

His point was, you know, other Christian denominations have gifts that Christ wanted His people to have, but the Catholic Church, the universal Church, has all the gifts: Scripture and sacraments, and the Eucharist, and the Blessed Mother, and apostolic authority, and the Pope, etc. Well, there's another aspect of its universality.

Now, Cardinal George, mind you, always said it doesn't mean that other Christian denominations might not exercise some of those gifts better than we tend to do.

Okay, I'll fully admit that.

I've learned so much Scripture from Protestant scholars, learned so much about preaching, have seen charismatic gifts in other denominations.

But the Catholic Church, I think Cardinal George is right, has all the gifts that Christ wants His people to have.

The final mark the Creed points out is apostolicity.

The Church is apostolic.

You know what it means, everybody?

Think of the grandeur of the Catholic Church stretching over the whole world and all of its institutions and all of its people and the buildings associated with it.

This grandeur of the Church—how did it all start?

With this little band of 12 around Jesus, who walked the roads of Galilee with Him, who went fishing with Him, who sat and listened to Him, stayed with Him, knew Him personally, intimately.

That's where the Church started.

It's not a philosophy, not a social movement, not a political organization.

The Church is a band of brothers around Jesus, and from that original band came and comes the Church.

We trace it back to those 12 who knew Him.

Why is it called apostolic?

Well, apostellane in Greek means to send, right?

What did Jesus do with these 12? He didn't just say, Well, come and listen to me; now let's just stay there.

No, they listened to Him, they were formed by Him, and then, boom, He sent them out.

And how wonderful that this little group, you know, varying degrees of education, but none of them was, in a worldly sense, a particularly impressive figure.

And yet they went out like rockets; they went out to the ends of the world and to their deaths.

They were all sent.

Well, from that original energy comes the Church to this day—apostolic, grounded in them, and like them, sent out still.

True, that's the whole stress today on the new evangelization: the Church that goes out from itself.

That's its apostolic quality.

Bishop, with all the corruption that has beset the Church up and down the ages, from bad popes to the scandals of the present day, how can we still claim that the Roman Catholic Church is guided by and filled with the Holy Spirit?

Because in its essential structures, nature, and teaching, it remains holy.

If every single pope from Peter until today had been hopelessly corrupt morally, would that undermine the sanctity of the Church?

No, not essentially.

The sanctity of the Church is connected to the sacraments, the liturgy, especially the Eucharist, to the great saints, to the apostolic teaching tradition.

Now, if any of the popes had taught some wild heresy, if any of the popes had said, You know, there are four persons in the Godhead, or said, Jesus really isn't God, well then, the Church's holiness would be compromised.

But the moral failings of our leaders—I mean, it's regrettable, obviously; no one wants it.

It's certainly a counter-witness evangelically, but it wouldn't in itself undermine the holiness of the Church.

In point of fact, the doctrine of original sin leads me to expect that people will go bad.

I'm not really surprised by that; I expect it.

But the Church—why wouldn't the Church be set apart as holy?

Can you think that the Church would be the one place where the devil wouldn't feel so present?

Well, of course!

I'll pick up on that: the devil would be especially interested in trying to undermine the Church if the Church is the privileged means by which God wants to bring everyone to Himself.

Yeah, if I were the devil, I'd go after that; I would try to undermine that.

Now, the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church.

That means, in one way, the Holy Spirit will always preserve the Church in its integrity.

But stay with that image about the gates of hell, because we think of it somehow as, well, the devil won't be able to conquer us.

But the gates of hell—that means we're coming after hell.

The Church is on the offensive, and the gates that protect the walls of hell, they're not going to prevail against us.

And so ultimately, the Church will be triumphant under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Then the Creed says to us, I confess one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.

Now, we could do a whole sacramental theology; I'm not going to do that.

It's a kind of coda to the Creed in a way, because after saying I believe, I believe, I believe, it says here, I confess.

I think it's not talking about, in itself, one of the high doctrines, but rather about a key practice in the life of the Church.

But see how important baptism is.

And mind you, I've said this before: these creeds, like the Nicene Creed, ultimately came from the baptismal process.

When someone was about to be baptized, they were asked, Do you believe in the Father?

Do you believe in Jesus Christ?

Do you believe in the Spirit?

etc. So they're interested in baptism in these creeds.

But here's the one thing I want you to see: baptism—oh, that's a nice little ritual, I suppose, a nice symbol?

No, no, no!

Something much more visceral and existential is going on in baptism.

When a child or an adult is baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, what's happening is this: that person is now being grafted onto Christ in such a way that he or she now begins to share in Christ's relationship to His Father.

So grafted onto Him—not just becoming His follower, His adept, someone who thinks His philosophy is really cool—no, no, much more existential than that.

You are grafted onto Christ so that now you participate in His relationship to the Father.

Now, what did I just say in the last lecture?

I sound like I'm in the luxury.

What did I just say?

Well, the Father and the Son are related in the Holy Spirit.

So when you're baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, you are now introduced into the Trinitarian life.

That's what it means; that's what baptism means.

You're not joining a club.

When people say, I'm going to return my baptismal certificate; I want out of this club, well, it's not a club.

It's an ontological change that happens.

That's why in the Catholic Church we speak of baptism, along with confirmation and holy orders, as character sacraments.

The word character comes from a term in both Greek and Latin, charakter, that means brand.

Isn't that lovely?

A brand brands you on your skin, marks you permanently.

But see, this mark is happening not just on the level of your skin.

No, no, this brand is going all the way down to your soul.

Baptism now brands you with Jesus Christ, marks you forever as being in relation to the Father, grafted onto Him.

See, and that's why Thomas Aquinas calls baptism vitae spiritualis ianua.

That means it's the door of the spiritual life.

You want the spiritual life?

And that means all the other sacraments; that means the Mass; that means holiness—everything else.

Well, the door, the way in, is baptism.

Baptism, and that's why I think we affirm it so powerfully in the Creed.

Bishop, can you say a little bit more about original sin and its consequences, and then what baptism affects in regards to both?

Well, remember I said that the Church, ecclesia, has been called out of something, right?

Into a new mode of being.

What we're called out of is the sinful world.

Original sin is talking not so much about a particular sin of an individual, but rather about this dysfunctional quality of the human family.

That over all these eons and centuries of dysfunction, there's a kind of poisonous atmosphere in which we all come of age.

Think of someone coming of age within the context of a dysfunctional family marked by alcohol abuse or by physical abuse.

Well, that's all the child knows; he's affected willy-nilly by the environment he came of age in.

Well, that's all of us in the dysfunctional family of the human race.

Now, baptism, which is the way into the spiritual life, the way into the Church, ecclesia, we've been called out of the dysfunction into a new mode of being.

Which is why baptism involves the forgiveness of original sin.

It doesn't mean now, Oh, this kid's never going to sin again.

It means in the measure that he or she has been brought into the Church, he or she has been brought into a new world and taken out of the poisonous atmosphere of sin.

Okay?

The very last article of the Nicene Creed: And I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.

I look forward.

You know, we all know this: death haunts the whole of life here below.

Its inevitability, its seeming finality, casts a shadow over the whole of life.

Because we die, it's very easy to see life as finally pointless.

I mean, listen to the atheists today; they'll just say that.

Yeah, ultimately we all die, and that's the end.

And if you want to press it, the Earth is going to fade away one day, be absorbed, I guess, by the heat of the sun.

The whole universe will eventually, you know, give out.

Ultimately, this world that we're in is just passing, evanescent, and destined to fall into non-existence.

Well, we're haunted by that.

You know, atheists and believers alike, I think it's fair to say, are haunted by this.

The Creed, now in light of everything that we've already professed—in light of our belief in God, the Creator of all things; in light of our belief in Jesus Christ risen from the dead; in light of our belief in the Holy Spirit who stands with us, guiding us—we resist this sort of morbid preoccupation.

We resist it and declare our faith in the resurrection of the dead.

What does this mean?

Well, I want to clear this up first, because I think a lot of even Christians, even people formed by the Bible, fall into this trap of imagining that this is something like what Plato dreamed of.

Plato dreamed that one day the soul would escape from the body—this body which is destined for death and is, in essence, passing—but the immortal soul would rise up from that body and live now in a purely spiritual realm.

Well, that might be Plato's dream; it's not the dream of the Bible.

No, no!

The God who made the world, the material world, the God that gave us these bodies, isn't going to give up on them.

In fact, in light of the resurrection—mind you, the bodily resurrection of Jesus from the dead—we look forward to our own bodily resurrection.

Not the escape of the soul from the body, not leaving the matter behind, but rather to a transfigured and elevated corporality.

Think now, perhaps, of the Transfiguration of Jesus.

Jesus doesn't leave behind His body; rather, His body becomes luminous, glorious.

We say He's been transformed, transfigured.

That gives us a clue as to what we look forward to: a spiritualized body, as Paul called it—that's the resurrection from the dead.

Now, what are some metaphors our tradition has proposed for this life on high that we look forward to, this resurrected life?

Well, one image you'll find in a lot of theologians is the image of the beatific vision.

The beatific vision means seeing God face to face.

Now, that metaphor of vision, right?

It's all about knowledge and connection.

If I can see you, I'm connected to you.

When I see an idea, oh, I see it now!

My mind is satisfied.

I'm questioning and wondering, and oh, now I get it; I see it.

Well, don't we realize that for every person we come to know, that awakens in us a desire to know more and more—to know other people, to know them even more deeply?

And that every idea we come to, it doesn't put our minds to rest; it awakens our minds, right?

That the more questions I answer, the more questions I have that I want to answer.

There's a restless quality to our seeing and our knowing, and no matter how much we see and know in this life, we're never satisfied, are we?

We want more and more because finally, we're hungry to see everything.

Bernard Lonergan put it that way, the great Jesuit philosopher—that the mind wants to know everything about everything.

It wants union with all of reality.

The beatific vision—that means the vision that makes me happy.

Beatis means happy.

The vision that makes me happy would be this vision of God and all things in God.

That's the satisfaction we look forward to in the heavenly place.

You know, one thing I think of here in this context—I know it can sound kind of solitary, like just me having a vision—but think of when you're with a group of friends, and together you're exploring ideas or concepts, or you're with your friends and you're meeting new people, and together you're gaining a deeper intimacy.

Maybe that's a better image for heaven: all of us together coming to see and experience being and reality more and more intensely.

That's the beatific vision.

Here's a second image for the life on high, and I love this: the image of the city.

You know, the Bible does have, in some parts, an antipathy towards cities.

Think of Cain, the original murderer, as the founder of cities, and the Bible has a certain, I don't know, dis-ease with cities.

On the other hand, the great culminating vision of the entire Bible is the coming down from heaven of the new creation, Jerusalem, of the new city.

Look for the description of it toward the end of the Book of Revelation—a city.

What's a city like?

Well, it's exciting, isn't it?

Where lots of people are gathered together, where all these different forms of human interaction are on display.

From sports to business and finance and entertainment, and all of it there in this great hustle and bustle.

You know, cities are flawed, and a lot of bad things go on in cities, but at their best, when you're in a city for the first time, you're kind of exploring it and seeing how beautiful and rich it can be.

That gives you a hint of what life on high with our fellow human beings—who've come to this heavenly place and are now exploring life and all of its vitality, hustle, bustle, and variety—might be like.

I wonder, would things like sports and business and entertainment all be on offer in heaven?

Well, I mean, why not?

Not in their fallen, compromised, imperfect form here below, but in an elevated form.

You know, a human being fully alive—those moments in human life when you're just thrilled with whatever you're experiencing.

It's something you're doing, or you're seeing, or someone you're meeting, and you just feel lifted up.

Think of that now in the context of others having that same kind of experience.

But now what's lifting you up?

It's not just an ordinary activity in this world, but it's now union with God.

That gives you a sense of what life in the heavenly city is like.

Now, just one more image I'll share with you, and I'll bring it to a close.

If you look at the Book of Revelation and you see this great description of the heavenly Jerusalem, you find there's no temple in the heavenly city.

Weird, isn't it?

Because Jerusalem, the earthly Jerusalem, that was why you went there.

The temple was everything.

The temple was the kind of economic, political, and obviously religious center of the whole city.

That's why people came.

So why, in the heavenly city of all places, is there no temple?

Here's the answer: because the whole city has become a temple.

What's a temple?

It's the place of right praise, right?

When we have ordered ourselves to God, we give God praise with our whole being.

Well, now think of business, finance, sports, entertainment—all of it.

Ordered to God—all of it now a form of right praise.

That's the liturgy of heaven, and that's my last image.

It's like an eternal liturgy.

Now, I'm a priest; I'm a bishop.

I love the liturgy, but I get how, in the liturgy here below, you might think, Do I want to just be at Mass for all eternity?

No. But it's what the Mass here below, with all of its limitations, is meant to evoke, which is all of us together.

Think of us at Mass, singing together in harmony, together focused on God, all of our energies engaged and lifted up.

That's what it means; that's what the heavenly liturgy means.

That's the heavenly Jerusalem become a temple—a place of communal right praise and vision of that which is most satisfying to our minds and hearts.

That's what we hope for when we say we look forward to the resurrection of the dead and life everlasting.