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The Monday After | on Purgatory and Waiting with Beatific Vision
00:14:04
We do not like waiting. Well, in any case, we're not good at it, which is obvious; in this age of invention we've all but eliminated the need to wait for anything. There was a time when we waited for the seeds, the rains, the sun. Some still do, but most of us go to the supermarket and still complain about the checkout line. We get frustrated with shipping delays, abhor traffic, and have all but abandoned television for the convenience of binge-streaming. No wonder the suffering of purgatory is so much on our conscience these days, like a punishment the child sees coming while returning home from school. We are full of guilt for allowing ourselves to have become so alienated from the thing happening everywhere else in the natural world, which is essential for growth, namely, waiting. But I wouldn’t want us to think that the waiting we hear so often associated with purgatory is arbitrary or merely punitive. If that antechamber to heaven really is, as the Church teaches, the plac...
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So it's easy for us to think about waiting as merely wasted time of having no value at all. But what if we were to see it with a little more of a beatific vision? What if we were to look at it with Christ and to see it as a gift that the Father gives to us in order to prepare our hearts, To prepare our hearts to see him, the beatific vision. But in order for us to receive so great a gift, he first increases our capacity to receive him by this experience of waiting, where the desire and the longing in our hearts kind of pushes out from the inside, like stretching the wineskins to receive new wine without bursting. And this is the reason why we talk maybe about purgatory as being painful. Because anytime we move from just help me with my work, to save me from my sin, that requires, like, real death to self, death to the pride, death to this part of me that wants to do everything myself. I know for me, for example, canceling my Amazon prime subscription, that's been a good thing for me because I was finding that it was becoming difficult to wait for anything, expecting it immediately. So just having to wait a few days for something is even for me, just a little practice of waiting incorporated into my life, just so that I can remember that life is a gift. So if we allow then the experience of some waiting in this life for us, we. We could be preparing ourselves in every experience of waiting to see God. Looking around the natural world, then we can see examples of waiting. Obviously, in the life of the human person, there's the waiting of pregnancy, where the child grows quietly like a seed in the soil, before we can see the child's face. It's this almost waiting to see the face of God, the beatific vision. You have to wait to see the face of the child. But in the waiting, the longing grows. And the capacity to truly love this child as the gift that he is grows in the heart of this mother and the father as they wait. The gift of marriage itself is a great gift. This extraordinary complementarity and relationship from which comes new life. It's a tremendous gift. It's something of God's own mysterious life. And so the church's counsel to wait for marriage to a younger couple is just so that they would never lose sight of it as the gift that it is, as being a gift, lest they think about marriage as something that they do. This is why I love that couples who marry in the church are able to say to their friends and family, just by coming to the church for the ceremony before going to the reception. We believe that this is a gift being given to us by God. We want to thank him for it. That's why they're marrying in the church. And then also the discipline of natural family planning in marriage, which incorporates into each month a little waiting. It keeps the fire alive, first of all. It keeps the passion alive because the longing is kept alive. It's not just completely and always snuffed out by contraception. It's growing in this waiting. And also I am constantly offered a time to appreciate my spouse as gift and not just something for me to take or to possess. And the gift of the priesthood, which I say humbly as a man who is called to it as a gift for the church and for the world, and not only to the man himself, but it's a gift to be prepared for with waiting. The seminary is years of learning and living in fraternity, but also growing in the capacity to receive the gift of the priesthood by longing with expectation or anticipation of what is to come. And so it helps a man to remain always with a view of this as gift and not just work that God is asking him to do. Right. I've not called you slaves, but friends, I'm inviting you to share in my own life. Christ says to the priest, unless I grow in my capacity through good formation to receive the priesthood as gift, I could grow to resent this as seemingly being just work that he wants me to do. I mean, even the idea of waiting to see your loved one again, maybe God even permits sometimes that we just be separated for a time, so that by waiting to see them again we might grow in our capacity to see that person as a gift. I think people in the past celebrated with more sincerity when they would see one another because they had been waiting so long to see each other. There's no FaceTime. There's no like sending pictures to each other as easily as we do things like that. We used to love television in the 80s. Not despite the fact that we had to wait a week to see the next episode, but because we had to wait a week. A 25 minute episode of Growing Pains was more satisfying than like the seventh episode of of something I'm binge watching on Netflix. You know, there's something about waiting that increases my capacity to appreciate the gift of life. Or think about the difference between eating fast food all the time or just leftovers or whatever, and actually preparing a meal, something I've been trying to do more in recent years, actually make a meal and enjoy it. Yeah, there's a little Waiting, that goes on. But that does enable me to enjoy the meal more and to appreciate that it is a gift. You know, the agrarian societies of old people who used to live off the land, they had to wait. And I think, man, when they sat down to a meal, right, how good that meal was. And this is why yesterday we also mentioned the contrast between Judas and Mary Magdalene. Judas is always taking everything into his own hands, right? Tired of letting Christ act. The fact that he turns him over at the end of his life is because he was tired of waiting. He was. He was delaying. Judas would say, or no more waiting, do it and make the kingdom happen. But Mary Magdalene was always waiting on the Lord, letting him act, trusting his mysterious ways, permitting him. And she stands under the cross even then, to say to God, I trust that somehow, even this is part of the plan. She waits on him, waits on the Lord. She's always at his feet, waiting on him. And after Christ dies on the cross, she makes her way to the tomb to wait on him, even in. In his death. And then he appears to her. He's raised from the dead. And she is, according to the Gospels, the first to see the risen Christ. And then she announces even to the apostles that he has raised everyone else. The apostles and the disciples are all still in need of some waiting before they can see him. And she's given that foretaste of the beatific vision before anyone when she sees the risen Christ. So she had the least amount of waiting to see the risen Christ because of how. How well she waited on him in life. So I hope that that was also an example of how purgatory is like growing from Lord, help me with my work, like Martha, to save me. And how waiting is by its very nature an invitation to allow G D to accomplish that in us. It's so difficult to just let him love us, though we're so slow to believe that that will be enough, that that will be the help that we really need. You know, my aunt, who passed away in her early 40s, 41, she. She died, I think, feeling incomplete and unloved. And she would always say to us, even up to the end, to make sure that the makeup was on and the hair was on, dying of cancer. I remember being a little sad that she, who was so funny, so beautiful, everyone loved going to her house, she was so cool that she also had this kind of mysterious sadness about her and questioned, I think, her own beauty and goodness. And I was concerned for her after she died. I was hoping that she would be happy with God. And then I did have a dream of her where she said to me in the dream, you have to let him love you, you have to let him love you, You have to allow him to act. Let him give you the gift of your life. And I think that's why she was smiling at me the way she was. She sees that my value was. It's so much more than what I had often thought it was when I was with her in this life. Like, what am I wearing to her house? Or you know what, what can I tell her I've been doing lately with my life? She was just looking at me like, you're a gift. You were in my family. You're my nephew. It felt like she was looking at me with the love of God, like looking at me with beatific vision. I mentioned at one of the masses that the word waiter makes more sense to me now and why we probably prefer server over waiter because we just don't even know what to do with the word wait. We don't even like the word waiter anymore. But what is a waiter? And I was a waiter. You have to anticipate what the people of this table are looking for. How do they see going out to this restaurant? So a good waiter is waiting to first learn from these people. Do they want a lot of information about the menu? Do they want you simply to bring them drinks and say very little between? It's like when you're caddying. You first get a feel for this guy on the first tee. Does he want small talk and extra information or does he just want the yardage? So the waiter is really about allowing and permitting, not just doing, but one who truly waits. I mean, even the people of Israel, they are an interesting people, whatever you have to say about the politics of modern day Israel under Netanyahu. But the people of Israel, the Jewish people, they are a waiting people. Now we know The Messiah came 2,000 years ago, but God the Father permits that they still be a waiting people. He always wants some experience of waiting in this world. In the psalm we hear a lot of times at wake services, Psalm 31, we hear, wait for the Lord with courage. Be stout hearted and wait for the Lord. I love that expression. I usually pray that with the hope that the grandchildren hear this. And you know, if you're burying a grandmother, grandfather, you want them to hear, hey, have courage now and wait for the Lord. That word wait for him, you know, wait for him is not just wasting time, but long for him and allow him to act and permit him right. So wait for the Lord with courage, you know, with heart, be stout hearted and wait for the Lord. Stout hearted. Stout has come, I know, to mean the word full. So a beer, that is a fuller body beer is a stout beer, yeah, Means brave or strong or resolute or bold. But then it comes to mean sturdy or thick set, like robust. So it comes to mean full. And that in itself is what Christ wants to accomplish. This is the work he's come to accomplish, to help us to be not afraid, to be brave and strong and resolute, to keep our face, our gaze fixed on Jerusalem with him and directed toward the Father and the beatific vision. And in doing so, to become stout hearted, to become full. Guys, we're growing in capacity as we wait with the Lord. It.