The posts on hell and mortal sin have generated a lot of comments and some good discussion. I would like to take up two themes that are related. One is to ask how God can be so cruel and vindictive as to condemn someone to hell for a fleeting mortal sin. The other is the question of why we should be obsessed with sex when there are so many other evils in the world.
I think we might like to say to God "Look, this sex thing - you gave me these feelings, it's no big deal. I wouldn't condemn anyone for this." We don't see what harm there is in a little sexual licence here and there (although the daily newspapers could help us out a bit on this.) We want to ask him "Can't you just lighten up a bit?" But he doesn't. Our Lord said that if a man so much as looks at a woman lustfully, he has committed adultery with her in his heart. No compromise.
So we get a little angry at this refusal to budge. We know this just must be wrong. After all, we could be quite understanding about all this. So what is God doing making life so difficult? Surely I could be a better God than that? You're being unreasonable. I will not serve... Whoops - did I say that?
So we should instead turn to God in a spirit of humility and obedience, accepting his teaching in the scriptures (very clear teaching there) and in the magisterium of the Church. We should reflect on how awful sin really is. It is something so dreadful that an almighty and loving God, in his wisdom and despite his infinite mercy, cannot countenance it if a mortal sin remains unrepented in our soul when we die.
Knowing the awfulness of sin, we are motivated to change. We make a heartfelt act of contrition, moved both by the fear of forever losing God, our greatest good, and by our consciousness of his overflowing love that holds out to us the promise of forgiveness. We want to go to confession to bring the life back to the soul that has been lost. The stronger our motivation, the more likely we are to change our lives.
It may be a bit of a laborious process, needing lots of prayer and penance and the help and encouragement of a kindly and understanding confessor. Without a lively sense of the eternal truths of death, judgement, hell and heaven, we will not have sufficient motivation to change ourselves and respond more faithfully to God's grace nor to encourage others to do so.
Fr Thwaites had a good way of explaining what it is like to live a sinful life in this world without a knowledge of the eternal truths. He said that it was like being a dog at a birthday party. The dog is having a great time licking up spilled coca-cola, snaffling dropped sandwiches and bits of birthday cake, yapping excitedly at all the fun - but it has no idea what is going on. If we are not clearly convinced of the reality of our destiny either to eternal bliss or eternal damnation, we really have no idea what is going on.
15 comments:
Scripture says somewhere that with God mercy and justice are alike. To me this explains a lot.
We usually identify with the unrepentant sinner and are horrified at his eternal condemnation, since it could so easily have been- and may yet be- ourselves.
Wouldn't a merciful God give the poor wretch a chance for repentance even after death? After all, we would. But that is really because we are neither so just nor so merciful as God.
Others have pointed out that giving sinners a chance for repentance after death would mean as well giving the saints an opportunity to repent of their holiness and to choose hell after death. Would that be just, since the saints often went to great lengths, even to martyrdom, in the belief that their choice at death was a final choice? Extending the wayfaring state after death would therefore be very unjust of God, since for one thing it would make Him a liar. "Night is coming when no man can work." It would hardly be just to the martyrs, to the ascetics, to all those athletes of God who thought they had crossed the finish line- only to have victory snatched from them and be told that, no, the race is going for a few more laps. Sorry.
So the finality is both just and merciful.
And how just and merciful would it be to those of us who do go to Heaven to come around a corner in paradise and discover that everyone is there, including unrepentant murderers, adulterers, thieves, gangsters, torturers and all those who made life on earth so miserable for so many. Heaven would no longer be Heaven, for all the old fears would be there, the need for policemen and armies and penitentaries, for locks, judges, courts, to say nothing of the judgements of God which are raining down all around us in this life. Heaven itself would prove to have been the greatest lie of all, an eternal betrayal.
So, in His justice and mercy God eternally rewards the just and eternally punishes the evildoer, just as He said He would.
In this light you might say that Hell is what makes Heaven possible. Hell is a mercy God extends to the just, delivering them from evil and evildoers forever...
For which reason, may the Lord have mercy on us, bring us to repentance and keep us on the right way!
Thing is, if what we do doesn't matter, then WE don't matter.
You are absolutely right on the button Fr Tim (with a typically good anecdote about eternal truths courtesy of Fr Thwaites).
The world at large simply put, has NO IDEA whatsoever as to what is going on. The vast majority of people it seems to me, like the dog, are just happy to be wagging their tails, barking excitedly and lapping-up the spilled drinks and dropped crumbs. Of course the devil is very happy with this situation as it nets him zillions of souls.
To an extent their ignorance can be understood if not entirely forgiven, because just about everyone on the planet has heard of the Name of Jesus Christ and it is then up to the individual to seek and find. But again, the devil will find you a zillion distractions to keep you away from eternal salvation, and probably the 'king' of all distractions and the most powerful centres around our 'fallen' human condition when it comes to sex. We see the catastrophic and destructive effects on family life all around us today, so accurately predicted by Pope Paul VI, caused by the 'non serviam' attitude to Church Teaching.
What I have found as a real eye-opener reading the posts on these subjects of sin and hell, over the last few days, and hence a real challenge for the Church, is the depth of 'relativism' among Catholics!
It is as you put it Fr Tim - 'non serviam'! Obedience to the truth of the Magisterium and Church Teaching is obviously seen by many people as some sort of enslavement and infringement of personal freedom and dare I say 'human rights'. In this scientific, instant media and communications age of enlightenment, you can almost hear Catholics screaming 'who is God that He can invade my personal space and tell ME what to do'!
There's the problem as I see it - and I have no idea what the answer is, but a good start would be to study the lives of the Saints. After all, these were ordinary men and women leading ordinary lives but in an extraordinary way. Perhaps it's that 'extraordinariness' that is missing from our 21st Century lifestyle and we will only find it in our obedience to God.
If they like the dog don't know what's going on are they still culpable?
God is so loving, so forgiving, totally faultless. The very thought of Him is way beyond human ability - our brains cannot stretch so far.
We on the other hand have so many faults because of original sin/our fallen nature etc and we ask that God be more reasonable. Seems a bit higly pigly to me.
Perhaps we should beg God - on our knees - to make us more reasonable!!
I dont think its the case its that the Church is obsessed with sex, more that the human race is....
I think the core issue here is that most sins are venial unless of a large magnitude.
There are very few sins which are always mortal unless mitigating circumstances exist, generally the latter category encompass only murder, sexual matters and certain disciplinary offences against the Church deemed grave matters, eg sunday obligation, (the latter of which I will not discuss further here as that is a subject all on its own)
Basically there are many sins that are quite nasty in character that are venial unless to a significant degree.
Eg to steal a small sum of money is a venial sin, to steal a large sum of money is a mortal sin (unless mitigating circumstance). The former can quite easily lead to habit forming causing the latter. Petty stealing can start with taking a trivially valued item from work or a shop and grow
The same is the case with assault. To assault someone and cause minor injuries is a venial sin, to cause grevious injury is a mortal sin (unless mitigating circumstance)
The same can be said of all sorts of activities eg driving dangerously, driving after drinking, insulting or uncharitableness to people, swearing, gossiping about people, gambling etc. etc. All of these are venial unless done to a grevious extent. eg to drive when just over the legal limit is venial, to drive when blind drunk is mortal etc
With sexual sins its different. They are the only ones, encompassing general day to day activities, that are always deemed mortal unless there are subjective mitigating circumstances.
Now (I presume) the Church has good reasons for deciding this. Perhaps this could be discussed further?
I would also make the point perhaps the issue isn't that the Church talks too much about sexual matter, perhaps the real point is that we don't hear nearly enough from the Church about these other things described above with the result that people do these things thinking they are venial or not even a sin, dont confess them and before they know it the whole thing has got out of control and the magnitude grows and grows with habit.
It certainly never occured to me in my younger years that activities such as fighting at school or driving at 60 in a 30 limit were matters that I ought to be confesssing. If you become embroiled in these sorts of sins then it also weakens your resolve vis a vis the Church's sexual norms.
"Why can't God be more reasonable?"
Why can't the stupid humans get the proper perspective?
I was asked this: what about persons who have spent years and years in sin, how can they confess every mortal sin? It would be impossible to remember every mortal sin. Does the Church have any teaching on this? Thanks.
When I was confirmed at 36, I made my general confession and I asked exactly that.
The answer was wise:
"God does not need to rely upon your memory to forgive you."
I think it's a matter of intention. If you have made an effort to examine your conscience and you have been honest in saying everything that needs to be said that your imperfect memory has dredged up, that's the point.
In the olden days, the Church used to tell people that one cannot know the state of one's own soul. St. John Vianney once prayed to know the state of his soul according to the way God saw it. He was told, "I love you too much to do that to you."
The message is that you must do the best you can within your own abilities. Outside that very very tiny thing, there's the atonement of the blood of Christ which is bigger than a universe of sins.
I would think also to deny the seriousness of mortal sin would be to trivialise and diminish Christ's suffering, death and resurrection for us lousy, fallible mortals. If mortal sin wasn't so offensive to God, his only Son would not have been sent to win the possibility of our salvation, surely?
It would be more merciful of God to give unrepentant sinners extinction after death rather than everlasting punishment. I see little point in that. If they are to be punished at all it should be in this life, not the next. That is common justice. Surely many will be saved on the basis of invincible ignorance? For the rest of us, enslaved by inordinate attachments, there is the mercy of purgatory given as a preparation for heaven. Only God knows the secrets of the heart and there are more pure hearts in humanity than any of us can possibly imagine. Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. What is most worrying about the difficulties of getting into heaven is that they make Satan seem more powerful than God, assuming that the majority of the human race are, in the eyes of some, destined for hell. That view is too fundamentalist for me and puts the accuser in the place of God.
The dog's life sounds rather pleasant; perhaps I'd have been happier as an ignorant pagan.
Too late though.
anonymous says ... 'that view is too fundamentalist for ME'....
Who is ME to decide what God should/shouldn't do. It's His universe! We are His creatures!
Typical relativistic, pick'n'mix attitude to the Absolute Truth of the Catholic Faith.
To quote another Fr Thwaites comment on eternal truths - when told by someone that they did not believe in hell, the answer was simple - 'you will when you get there'!
We must remember that God's Justice is not like ours; partial and liable to error: no, He gives us our full due in perfect equanimity, taking into account all mitigating circumstances.
The question, therefore, is: if God is expected, by us, to continually show forth His Mercy, even after death (by annihilating those who die in mortal sin), when will He ever get the opportunity to execute His other Infinitely Perfect Attribute of Justice? And who are we (the offenders) to tell the Offended how He should react? We are, in effect telling God Himself to ‘just get over it! Deal with it, and move on!’
An anonymous person mentioned common justice; so the other question must be: in wanting to deprive God of executing His Justice after our death, are we ourselves being unjust in denying God Himself the common justice we expect? Are we seriously expecting the Almighty God to go without avenging Himself for all the terrible outrages by which He is so sorely offended, when we, the insignificant creatures that we are, demand and clamour to have ourselves avenged of wrongs we have received in this life, however petty? And could the reason why God doesn’t punish us according to our due in this life be the simple fact that He’s being Merciful whilst we still have the time to co-operate with Him?
Well said Jason - it is precisely that. God is being merciful beyond our understanding in giving us TIME, that precious commodity that we flitter away on the most meaningless and banal pursuits.
Precious TIME to say yes to God and at the very least begin to try to pick up our cross and follow Him, while we still have the time.
It's only too late when you're dead!
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