Transcript

Imagine for a moment that you are Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and you're running through a thick jungle, chased by angry cannibals.

You stop dead in your tracks as you come to an impassable river and your heart sinks in your chest.

That's the feeling of despair.

You see the good, that which your heart desires, it's on the other bank, but it lies beyond your reach.

You despair of arriving at the other side of the river.

As you look to your left, you see an old tattered rope bridge.

It's suspended above the water.

Your heart jumps in your chest.

Well, that's the feeling of hope.

You see the good and it remains difficult to attain, but at least there's a chance of attaining it.

You can now hope to arrive at the other side of the river.

Well, the theological virtue of hope operates in much the same way.

Faith reveals to us the supreme good of human life, God as the object of our final happiness.

We hope in God.

In faith then, we can see life's goal, Heaven, and begin to move toward it.

But many obstacles lie between this life and the next.

There are difficult hurdles that we have to overcome if we are to arrive at the life of beatitude.

Our sins constitute one kind of hurdle.

The sins of other people constitute another kind.

They can lead us to despair.

The final hurdle that we all have to overcome, the one that presents the most difficulty is death, something we all naturally fear.

The moral virtue of courage is the virtue with which we contend with the fear of death.

The theological virtue of hope, however, offers us more than courage.

In hope, we cling to God as our promised final good while contending with the obstacles that we meet on the way to him.

Although hope regards the difficulty of arriving at Heaven, hope nonetheless looks with confidence towards enjoying Heaven.

As a result, hope prompts us to contemplate our future.

We look ahead in expectation of the glory that awaits us.

Pope Benedict XVI said that this looking forward constitutes a special mark of the Christian life.

He writes this way about it in his encyclical, Spe Salvi.

A distinguishing mark of Christians is the fact that they have a future.

It is not that they know the details of what awaits them, but they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness.

Christian hope is a virtue of confidence in the promises of God.

Christian reflection on our future has traditionally taken the form of a meditation on what are called the four last things; death, judgment, Heaven, and Hell.

Now, while this is hopeful, this meditation is one of the more sobering that the Christian can undertake.

You might say there's a kind of gritty realism that's necessary for our spiritual lives when we think about the four last things.

We examine death and the mysteries awaiting us after death, and while we look ahead confidently to enjoying our final happiness in Heaven, we nevertheless take seriously the possibility of failing through our own fault to arrive there.

So let us look briefly at each of the last things.

As we said before, death constitutes the final earthly hurdle that we must overcome before enjoying our final happiness.

It's not a hurdle, however, that we can run around or jump over.

It's a mystery through which we must pass if we are to arrive at the other side of life.

Jesus Christ is our shepherd and guide through this mystery.

Through His passion, death, and resurrection, Jesus has trod the safe path through death that leads to everlasting life.

Just as we pray to live a good life with Christ, therefore we should also pray to die a good death with the Lord.

That death remains for us a graced pathway to life and not a source of unnecessary fear.

In this regard, we should pray for the grace of final perseverance, that our struggle with death at life's end does not separate us from the love of God.

Judgment is the second of the four last things.

This also sits between this life and the enjoyment of final beatitude.

Often artists and spiritual writers portray the judgment to which God will subject us as something terrifying or overwhelming.

We shouldn't get distracted by that.

This isn't the image that scripture portrays of the judgment.

The accuser, the devil has been cast out according to the Book of Revelation 20, and we now have an advocate, the risen Lord who pleads for us before the Father.

Accordingly, we should have utter confidence in the justice and mercy that will attend our own personal judgment.

Now, none of us should presume an easy entrance into glory.

None of us should fear getting taken unawares by God's verdict either.

If we spend our life now striving to stand transparently before God, especially through confession and asking the mercy of Christ, then-Well, we can have confidence that we will have little trouble standing transparently before the Father after death as we render an account of our earthly life.

You might say it this way, through regular repentance of sins, we can anticipate our final judgment, each of us personally, and prepare to meet the Lord with confidence and hope.

The third of the last things that we consider is heaven, this is the life of beatitude, and it's our great hope.

It's the real end of the Christian life.

The destiny offered us by God in the resurrection of His Son from the dead is the life of heaven.

You might say heaven was, in a sense, created when the risen Lord ascended to His rightful place at the Father's throne.

Because when He ascended, the Lord took our human nature with Him into glory, and thus, He made God's glory a home for mortal flesh.

Humanity's natural place now with Christ is in the life of God.

As co-heirs with Christ in His victory over death, we hope to follow where the risen Lord has gone.

So heaven is man's life in eternal glory, praising and adoring the eternal Godhead together with the Virgin Mary, the angels, and the saints as the Blessed Trinity draws us into an ever-greater and everlasting participation in its divine communion.

Stated simply, heaven is to see God face-to-face for eternity.

This is what theologians call the beatific vision, the vision of God that renders us happy.

It's the deepest longing of our soul.

The human soul is made to know the truth, certainly the truth about other persons, but ultimately, the truth about who God is, the persons of God.

We all have a natural desire to know God, that's fulfilled in heaven, where the soul comes to see God face-to-face and find eternal beatitude, peace, rest, happiness in knowing God perfectly in direct intuition or understanding of the very life of God.

Now, if heaven is everlasting life with God, then hell is everlasting life separated from Him.

Persons subject to hell, in fact, condemn themselves to that state insofar as they die in grave, mortal sin with their wills turned away from God, decidedly away from God and His grace.

You might say in this way, human sin is the author of hell, because it's the act in which we turn away from God.

And angels and men can subject themselves to eternal separation from God by their own fault.

God permits this, or you might even say tolerates it, injustice, insofar as He justly respects our human freedom.

He lets us love Him freely or separate ourselves from Him freely.

At death, a human person's choice against the service of God in this life is confirmed for eternity.

It crystallizes what we begin now, reaches a kind of term.

If we serve God in this life and ask for His mercy, we can serve Him and be subject to His mercy in the next life.

But if we refuse to serve in this life, this can come to a kind of resolution through permanent separation from God.

Now as a result, those condemned to hell suffer an unimaginably miserable existence because they've lost the one great thing that could ultimately satisfy the desires of the human heart and mind.

They remain so fixed in their own wills that they, in a way, hate God or refuse the goodness that is God and the things of God, including God's justice, but also God's mercy.

The condemned also suffer, in some sense, everlasting isolation from other persons because their perverted wills and their friendship with others become a good too unbearable to enjoy.

In a certain sense, for the soul separated from the body and in the human person's state after death, God is everything.

So if you don't share God in communion with other persons, it's very difficult to have deep and real communion with other persons, and the decision to be of one's own, apart from God, ruptures our relationship with others.

So heaven is marked by a communion of divine joy because the souls of the blessed share the life of God together, with each other, and they have that communion as a shared mutual joy.

But hell is marked by isolation, alienation, loneliness, resentment, and even a kind of spiritual hatred.

Purgatory.

Purgatory provides the dead destined for heaven a final time of purification that readies them for the joys and delights of heaven.

It's not time in this body, but it's a kind of duration of the separated soul that undergoes gradual purification from the effects of sin and allows us to embrace the fullness of the life of heaven in a very pure and absolute way.

When human beings die with their minds and hearts fixed on God, but still carrying the effects of their sins, either through a confusion of a dulled mind or because of a disordered affect of the will, they're still wounded in their minds or in their hearts.

Purgatory allows for persons to endure certain purifications and punishments aimed at atoning for their sins and elevating them and purifying them.

The Church prays constantly for the souls in purgatory in order to support and speed along their purification.

These are the final realities then to which the Christian looks forward in hope.

He hopes for a happy death.

He hopes for a just and merciful judgment.

He hopes for everlasting life in the communion of the Holy Trinity.

He hopes to avoid the fires of hell, and he hopes for every help from God to arrive safely in heaven, including the help of purgatory as purification.