Courage we need - and Compassion.

 

I have never seen a compassionate and charitable man die a bad death

St Augustine

George was a man who was greatly blessed in life. He had good and loving parents and a happy childhood. He had a quick mind and did well at school. He was successful in his work and enjoyed a comfortable income. He married a woman with a happy disposition, who was a topnotch homemaker and saw her husband as the finest man God had ever made. His home was in a pleasant, quiet neighbourhood. In short, George lived in a fairly tranquil atmosphere with few frustrations or tensions. He led a blameless life and enjoyed a well-deserved reputation as a man of virtue.

Joe was a man of different calibre. His childhood was full of insecurity, with parents who argued incessantly and who were constantly threatening to separate. Whether from emotional strain or from lack of learning power, Joe did consistently poor work in school. He was in the principal’s office often, and finally graduated only through the charity of his teachers. He held a routine job that just barely provided enough to pay the bills. With no financial margin of safety, Joe worried about the possibility of losing his job and about the possible disaster of a major illness or accident. He lived in a less desirable neighbourhood, with houses close together and the noise considerable. His wife was a poor manager and a nagger besides. Joe frequently drank too much, had an explosive temper and was much given to profanity; definitely not a candidate for Virtuous Man of the Year.

George and Joe both went to Church regularly. George was a frequent communicant, while Joe received the sacraments at less regular intervals. In due time, both men died and appeared before God in judgment. Both got to heaven, but both experienced some surprises in the process. George’s big surprise was to find that he did not stand as high on God’s roster as he had expected. “Yes you were good,” was God’s verdict, “but why shouldn’t you have been? Your life fell along pleasant lines with very few worries or problems. By nature you were a man of moderate passions with comparatively few temptations. Is it any credit to yourself that your life was virtuous? Really you should have been a great saint.”

Joe was surprised to find that he had made the grade at all. He was even more surprised to find that he was several degrees above George in glory. “You could have done better,” is the judgment he hears, “but you did stay in there, fighting. You didn’t give in to self-pity and make your tough breaks an excuse for surrender. Considering your weaknesses and your handicaps, you didn’t do too badly with the graces which I gave you.”

This little parable of George and Joe is intended to illustrate a truth which we sometimes forget: the truth that there is much more to sin and virtue than appears on the surface. If all men were born with exactly the same endowments: if all men had exactly the same kind of opportunities and faced temptations of exactly the same strength then we could safely make comparisons and say “This man is good. That man is bad.” Life however is not that simple. And so, only God can know the relative virtue of any individual. Only God can know how hard each one has tried, view of his own particular personality and his own particular problems, to use the graces which God has given.

Understanding this, we take courage. Each of us has his own individual handicaps. Few of us come to adulthood with a perfectly balanced personality. Few of us escape all scars in the process of growing up. Moreover, our passions may be strong and our judgment warped. Our living conditions may be harassed and our associates disagreeable. Our worries may be numerous and our tensions constant. God knows all this. Of each of us He asks only that we do the best we can with what we have. He asks only that we keep stubbornly trying, no matter how often we may seem to fail or to slip back. It is not so much a complete victory that God looks for from us as it is a dogged perseverance in our efforts to achieve victory. We might say that it is the trying, rather than the getting, that God judges us by.

It may be that none of this applies to us. It may be that we have enjoyed many advantages in life which make it fairly easy for us to be good. Then depend upon it, God expects more than ordinary goodness from us. He knows our assets as well as he knows our handicaps. We dare not let ourselves rest upon that level of virtue which ‘comes natural’ to us. However, there probably are more of us who need encouragement in our struggle than there are those who need a prick of the spurs. And we do find encouragement in the knowledge that God understands and duly assesses all the influences that enter into our decisions and our deeds.

Along with increased courage in our own efforts to do Gods will, there should be a corresponding growth in our understanding of our neighbour and his problems. This means that we shall be quicker to make allowances for the weaknesses and the mistakes of our fellow man. Words of harsh criticism seldom will be heard upon our lips. We shall remember that , with our advantages, we probably are not doing as much for God as the person who, with his handicaps, seems to do much less. The man(or woman) whom I and tempted to condemn, may stand far higher in God’s eyes than I do.

We do not know all the hidden influences which affect our neighbour’s actions. We do not know the kind of home and parents he may have had, the inadequacies of childhood training or the inner wounds he may have suffered. God knows all these things and takes account in His judgment. I do not know them, therefore I dare not make myself the judge of my neighbours virtue.
 

Certainly I cannot condone, as though they did not matter, the sinful actions which my neighbours may commit. But, with compassion strong within me, my attitude towards the errant one will be that pf pity rather than contempt. It will be a prayer for him, rather than abuse of him, that my mouth shall speak. Compassion is, indeed, a most essential ingredient in my practice of charity towards my fellows. And I easily can measure the degree of my compassion by the frequency of my unkind criticism of others.

Compassion was one of the Lord’s most striking characteristics during His life upon earth. At Jacob’s Well there was His gentle treatment of the Samaritan woman who was living with a man living with a man not her husband. There was his gentle patience towards the reputedly dishonest Publicans. There was His forgiving dismissal of the woman convicted of adultery. There was His compassion towards Mary Magdalen, towards the ambitious brothers James and John, towards the cowardly Peter and the doubting Thomas. The Pharisees were the only ones towards whom Jesus was severe. These were the men who had every advantage of family, training, and high position; yet they condemned and oppressed those less fortunate than themselves. Because He was God and could read hearts, Jesus had the right to judge the Pharisees. We, however , have no such right. When bitter words rise to our lips we remember that we are not God. We cannot read hearts. We can only be compassionate – and silent.

The woman next door is a sloppy housekeeper. Yes, but did she have the training I had? Does she have my mental and emotional health. The man down the street is such a braggart; I get tired hearing him talk about himself. Yes, but what hidden battle is he fighting? From what deep feelings of inferiority does his bragging flow? The woman across the alley is such a bore: she can talk only about her aches and pains and troubles. Yes, but what did she miss in her childhood that makes it so necessary now for her to seek attention and sympathy? The man I work for is so domineering; a slave driver if I ever saw one. Yes, but what twist of fortune left him so inwardly insecure that he must constantly bolster himself up with an overbearing manner? In the compassionate person, it is considerations such as these that quiet the impulse to criticise and condemn.

Courage and compassion! These are twin virtues that can make the practice of our religion a satisfying and joyful experience. We are courageous and cheerful in our own spiritual efforts because we remember that God does not ask of us more than we are able to give. He knows our capabilities, but he knows our handicaps, too. We do our honest best, and are confident that God will be satisfied with that.

Towards our neighbours we are gentle, kindly and understanding. Our compassion makes us ever mindful of their hidden disadvantages, the disabilities and defects which can be known only to God. And in our practice of compassion we discover, perhaps with some surprise, that charitableness is so much more fun than harsh judgment and criticism. In faultfinding and vindictive criticism there is a venom that corrodes and destroys the heart of the one who sits in judgment on his fellows. In compassion there is a constructiveness, a creativity that brings a sense of achievement to the understanding soul; almost a feeling of exhilaration. Because of our compassion we are happier persons – and there are few virtues, incidentally, which will bring us so close to the heart of Christ.

Everyman’s Road to Heaven by Fr Trese

Men and the home

But time and again Odysseus turned his face toward the radiant sun, anxious for it to set, yearning now to be gone and home once more ... As a man aches for his evening meal when all day long his brace of wine-dark oxen have dragged the bolted plowshare down a fallow field – how welcome the setting sun to him, the going home to supper, yes, though his knees buckle, struggling home at last.
 – The Odyssey

(Gilbert! Magazine) - G.K. Chesterton's famous quip – “Ten thousand women marched through the streets shouting, ‘We will not be dictated to,’ and went off and became stenographers.” – has not endeared him to feminists, for whom it smacks of radical sexist reactionaryism. But while I do not question the quip, I do question if it is sufficiently radical. For what, I ask, were those 10,000 men doing, such that they needed those 10,000 stenographers? For as long as the present generations can recall, it has been the norm that a man should leave not only mother and father, but also wife and children, and cleave to his desk. And while the two do not thereby become one flesh, the unity of man and desk at times eclipses that of man and wife. But it was not always so.

In 1820, the earliest date for which I can find reliable statistics, some 2.1 million men in the United States worked in “farm occupations” – that’s 72% of the work force. It is worth remembering that by 1820, the industrial revolution was in full swing, siphoning men off the land and spitting them into the factories, meaning that were we to possess reliable statistics going even a little farther back, we would find a considerably higher percentage of men working the land. A significant percentage of the remainder would have been employed in the trades: blacksmiths, wheel-wrights, butchers, bakers, candlestick-makers. Many of these, especially in the smaller towns, would have worked out of shops attached to their own homes. And while some of those working in “farm occupations” would have been working as hired labor, most would have been tilling the fields of their own ancestral homesteads.

In other words, until quite recently, a huge percentage of men worked – as we now say about a privileged class of telecommuters – “from home.” There are fantastically good arguments in favor of this arrangement. Not least of these are the psychological and spiritual health of the man and the unity and stability of his family. Any man in a happy marriage with children who has had the good fortune (as I have) to work from home will know what I mean: there is a “wholeness” that comes of having the whole of one’s life revolve around that most vital fact of one’s identity: one’s vocation as husband and father. A man working from home is a man with an undivided heart. This is especially true if his spouse is also at home, for there then opens up the possibility of forging an intimate partnership of effort: two souls striving for one goal, united in one mind, one heart, one flesh.
"We are so accustomed to scoffing at the anachronistic arguments against women’s working in what was once the sole domain of men, that we have forgotten to ask how it is that nearly all our men got there in the first place."

Camille Paglia recently complained that, because children are no longer taught the rudiments of history, most people are incapable of conceiving that anyone has ever lived any way other than how we currently live, or that any other way of living could possibly have anything to recommend itself. Our chronological snobbery is such that our forbears are deemed inferior merely because they did not live precisely as we do, not having, for instance, the cleverness to invent air-conditioning, or advertising, or abortion. History is therefore conceived of as a dauntless march to the pinnacle of human progress – i.e., the present.

Most of us are aware of the sexual revolution and the secondary migration of women from the home that preceded it, but no one considers the primary migration that preceded both, and which set the stage. Conservatives are fond of pointing out how an autocratic feminism that urged women to join the workforce at pain of being branded traitors to their sex has fragmented the family. But they are not nearly conservative enough. They have forgotten how the mass movement of men from the household, often under coercive external pressure, drove in the first wedge. If the subject ever comes up, it is assumed that it was necessary, unavoidable. But usually we don't even get that far. Because our historical memory is so short, we cannot conceive that things ever were, or could still be, otherwise.

Perhaps there even is something to be said of the remnants of a “toxic masculinity,” which can think of its women only in terms of the caricature of the 1950s housewife, but which never thinks to turn its critical gaze back upon itself. Some, it seems, still do consider the 1950s housewife the crowning archetype of femininity. This is not so. She, poor creature (and I speak of the collective caricature, and not its individual incarnations) was a freak of nature, a curious experimental specimen cultured in a petri dish. The 1950s housewife found herself squeezed into the airless space between two epochs – between the old economy with its farms and household shops and the new with its steel skyscrapers and computers. She played the part of the housewife as in a pantomime: Hoovering the floors, catching up on her soaps, and donning high heels and a dress to welcome home her man after a hard day’s work flirting with his secretary. What a difference between this evanescent, eviscerated figure and the commanding mistress of the household of old, skillfully managing the myriad details of the lives of her husband, children, and (in any family of means) household staff, whilst often contributing directly and meaningfully to its solvency. It is no wonder that this shadow of femininity yearned for something more and settled upon what appeared from afar to be the more substantial world inhabited by her husband.

Well-meaning Christian wives are sometimes wont to unearth the syrupy advice aimed at the 1950s “good housewife.” Here, for instance, is a brief excerpt of some such advice that has made the rounds widely on Christian blogs: when your husband gets home from work, “Have a cool or warm drink ready for him. ... Speak in a low, soothing voice. Allow him to relax and unwind.” Certainly, don't speak first or complain about your day, but instead “try to understand his world of strain and pressure and his need to unwind and relax.” Much of this advice has the advantage of being deliciously counter-cultural, recommending an ethos of radical self-sacrifice that subverts the excesses of feminism and bears at least a superficial consonance with Paul’s epistolary advice to wives. And yet, while there is certainly something to be said for correcting the swing of the cultural pendulum, there is a sinister side to this Good Housewifely advice: namely, it assumes that the worlds of husband and wife have scarcely anything to do with one another. This is especially true of the husband's world, that higher orbit in which he spins and from which he daily deigns to descend into the nucleus of the home, and into which the wife can only peer uncertainly.

Indeed, it is curious that while the mockery of this caricature of femininity has long been common sport, so little attention has been paid to the equally questionable caricature of the 1950s husband, with his briefcase, brown suit, political cant, thinly veiled misogyny, and tragic cluelessness about the lives of those closest to him. It is here that we find the genesis of that now ubiquitous clown of modern media: the weak and hapless father who is an obstacle and an embarrassment to his children, a man who knows how to manage spreadsheets and his expense account, but little more. If a woman’s choice to self-sacrificially adopt the role of the “Good Housewife” might offer a kind of corrective to the radical individualism of the feminists, we ought still to wonder where we might find the companion “Good Husband” handbook – the one in which men are enjoined, upon arriving home, to resist the temptation to recede into the interior fog of their weariness and to turn on the TV, and instead to be present to their wives and children.

If we simply accept that the industrial revolution drove men into the factories, and from there the technological revolution drove them the cubicles, it is time to expose the hidden cost upon which both were predicated. It is quite simply true, historically speaking, that for the average man to wake up every day and to leave his home and wife and children – not as an exception in time of war or other necessity, but as the universal norm – and to spend the better part of his life in an office working amidst perfect strangers is an anomalous thing.  We are so accustomed to scoffing at the anachronistic arguments against women’s working in what was once the sole domain of men, that we have forgotten to ask how it is that nearly all our men got there in the first place.

Let us at least disabuse ourselves of the notion that it was voluntary. Dickens first memorialized the sufferings and degradation of the first-wave industrial workers, seized by abject want from their farms and crowded into fatally filthy cities and factories. Later Steinbeck, in The Grapes of Wrath, scathingly dramatized the Depression-era travails of American farmers, whose lands were repossessed and turned over to industrialists when they defaulted on their loans. Then, a few decades later, in The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry exposed the federal policies in the U.S. that deliberately drove small farmers off the land in favor of large-scale industrial enterprises. That process continues today. And yet, if the gleam of highly efficient factory farming seemed irresistible in the ’50s, surely it is less so now, when some 1% of our population – and a rapidly aging one at that – is engaged in the one industry that keeps the other 99% of us alive.

While it is true that we oughtn’t romanticize pre-industrialism, which, for all its cultural vitality, suffered rampant warfare, disease, and child mortality, neither must we romanticize the industrial and technological revolutions, with their callous, impersonal, and antiseptic cult of efficiency. We may never be able to return en masse to the farms or workshops, but there is value to be had merely in mourning for what has been lost, which process reminds us of what we might yet be. A man working his own fields was his own master, the sweat of whose brow was poured out directly, visibly in creating a home; his partner was not an impersonal investor, but flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone; and the subordinates alongside whom he toiled were not querulous strangers, but his own children, fruit of his loins. This is what has been lost in the two-century-long transformation of house as home into house as waystation: that luxurious modern repository for food, a bed, and distraction, barely inhabited by a loosely knit community of transients, for the sake of which we shoulder a lifetime’s servitude to debt.

Chesterton was the great champion of the romance of domesticity. For this he has been deemed a sexist reactionary. I would like to rescue him from the charge simply by observing that a great deal of what he wrote about women could and should be applied to men. Consider:

There have been household gods and household saints and household fairies. I am not sure that there have yet been any factory gods or factory saints or factory fairies... The place where babies are born, where men die, where the drama of mortal life is acted, is not an office or a shop or a bureau. It is something much smaller in size and much larger in scope. And while nobody would be such a fool as to pretend that it is the only place where people should work, or even the only place where women should work, it has a character of unity and universality that is not found in any of the fragmentary experiences of the division of labour.

This is a typical example of Chesterton's argument that, by and large, women's lives were impoverished when they “advanced” from the broad and mystical realm of the home into the narrow and mundane world of the office. It seems obvious, however, that if the realm of the office is so narrow and mundane (which, if it is a rhetorical exaggeration, points to the truth), then it must be equally narrow and mundane for the men as for the women, and if it is a terrible impoverishment for a woman to go from being the goddess of the hearth to the purveyor of widgets, certainly there is something equally tragic for man to have gone from being the master of fields to the pusher of pencils.

When it comes to the differences of men and women, Chesterton argues that women are generalists and men are specialists. There is something about men that has tended toward a narrower specialization of effort, and that has always been more outward-looking. The hearth has never been the dominant domain of men. The field and the forge are intimately connected to and draw their life from the hearth, but they are nevertheless apart, in the peripheries of the homestead. Men naturally tend toward the peripheries, and at times, by necessity or innate drive, to the far extremities, as adventurers, statesmen, soldiers, and sailors. Nevertheless, this drive to the extremities has ever been healthy only insofar as it has referred back to the hearth. A man who has forgotten the hearth has forgotten his heart: he is a man adrift at sea, and there is no telling upon what alien shore he may be washed up, or to what mischief he may then direct his powers.

It may not be immediately possible to change the place they work, but it is possible to change the way they work, and live – that is, with an eye always to the locus to which all of their work ought to be referred: the home. Odysseus wandered far, as men are apt to do, and at times allowed his heart to wander with him, as men are also apt to do, but there was that in him which was akin to the sturdy, rooted trunk of the olive tree that formed one of the four posts of his marital bed, a symbol of fruitfulness and permanence in the heart of the home. And that something worked to his salvation, referring all of his wanderings, labors, and sufferings back to the center, and ever enticing back to his rightful place, that rightful place of every married man – in the home.

Originally titled 
 Call me sexist, but a man’s place is in the home 
lifesitenews.com  

This article first appeared in Gilbert! magazine, the official magazine of the American Chesterton Society, and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe to Gilbert!, click here.

How to convert Catholics by Carol Robinson

(https://traditionalcatholicresistance.blogspot.com)  This wonderful article by Carol Robinson from 1947 is included in the strongly recommended, recently published, Breaking the chains of mediocrity available from the excellent publisher Arouca Press. see here

 IT IS HARDER TO CONVERT CATHOLICS than it is to convert other people, but it is very rewarding. As a Catholic Action lecturer once said to me: "Don’t worry about the Protestants; if we could only get the Catholics to be Catholic, the protestants would fall over themselves in their haste to join the Church." I have myself observed the truth of his statement. People are not attracted to the Catholic Church on the basis of average virtue. They do not reckon: "Let's see, taken as an average, ninety per cent of the Catholics I have met have practiced forty per cent more virtue than the Lutherans and eighty percent less adultery than the Unitarians; so I guess I'll join the Catholic Church." No, that's like figuring that if there were 1o,ooo missionaries in China, and if each converted 100 Chinese per year, etc. The truth is, of course, that the job could conceivably be done by one St. Francis Xavier, and might very well fail of accomplishment with 100,000 missionaries.

A man may meet in his life several  thousand "unconverted' Catholics. Let them be virtuous, respectable church-going people; yet our man may never feel drawn to Christ's Mystical Body. On the other hand a man's Catholic encounters may include several first-class heels, along with sundry drunks and murderers. But let him just once meet a man who has allowed Christ's life to transform him, just once see someone in whom God is fleetingly rejected, and his pulse will quicken, his steps will turn in the direction of the Source of that Life. Leon Bloy, in the intensity of his inner life and the miserable conditions of his material life, was such a magnet, The beauty of the Faith penetrated his writings, which were otherwise and literarily no great masterpieces. This was so much so that the impoverished Frenchman could cry out that "there is only one unhappiness, not to be one of the saints!' Jacques Maritain was one of the those who heard his echo of Christ and drew near.

Let us get back to the matter of converting Catholics. The reason it is hard to convert them is that they are suffering under the illusion that they are already Catholic. What then is lacking? From what must they be converted? Well, chiefly from mediocrity and unbelief.

MEDIOCRITY: DIAGNOSIS

As aforesaid, quality not quantity is the measure of the Church's strength. The same Catholic Action leader told me: "It would be better for the apostolate if we had fewer Catholics in the United States and they were better ones. We are weighted down by mediocrity, which throws a smoke screen in front of the faith."

Too many Catholics are wearing the Faith like a comfortable old shoe instead of a sparkling new diamond. They have watered it down to external activities, instead of to a change of heart. They recite perfunctory prayers and sing sentimental hymns, instead of crying out to God from the depth of their being. Religion is something they do in their spare time, instead of the pivot on which their lives revolve.

In the Apocalypse St. ]ohn writes: "And to the angel [bishop] of the church at Laodicea write: Thus says the Amen the faithful and true witness, who is the beginning of the creation of God: I know thy works; thou art neither cold nor hot. But because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to vomit thee out of my mouth. . . ." What does that mean? It means what we dont like to believe, that God may prefer the Bowery bum, perpetually drunk, to the respected citizen and the complacent Catholic Committee woman; and the reason is that the former at least bears testimony to God by his anguish at being separated from God, while the latter fails to catch fire in the very presence of the flame. Holiness does not consist in self-righteousness (this was the pharisees' error and has characterized Protestantism in practice. That is the reason for the widespread revolt against religion today in our post-Protestant country. Let no one say that the contagion has not spread to, and diseased, many a Catholic). Holiness especially does not consist in negative righteousness (I never blaspheme, never look at women - "thank God, I am not like other men, sinners"). It does not even consist in our own virtue. Holiness is the supernatural life, is God’s life, surging through us and pervading us. Our role is to allow it to do so. We get the Life from the Sacraments, and the only predisposing condition on our part is humility. So the drunk in the gutter who cannot help but know his own utter failure, is in a way terribly near to God. Natural despair is very close to supernatural hope, because it is when we know we are nothing that we are ready to admit that God is everything and to cast ourselves on His mercy. This is the key truth discovered by Alcoholics Anonymous. They do not go to fellow alcoholics when they are on the wagon, but when they are in Bellevue alcoholic ward, just having failed utterly for the nth time. They do not say, "Pull yourself together, man," but they do say, "See how persistently and utterly you fail by yourself. Cast yourself upon the mercy of God!

Look at it another way. Christ said that He is the living water, and that if a man drinks of Him he shall no longer thirst. This is the secret that the saints have discovered and the source of their peace. But many a man who is thirsting for the Living Water, not knowing where to find Him, tries to slake his thirst with the firewater of whisky, and finds it unquenchable.

The mediocre on the other hand are those who have neither drunk deeply, nor do they thirst. They are those who sip Coca-Cola and wonder when the new automobiles will be generally available. Mediocrity hangs over America like a pall. That is why Monsignor Sheen can say that God may be more pleased with the Russian people than with us. There is an intensity, a spiritual intensity, deeply imbedded in the Russian temperament. It is hard to imagine any considerable number of Russians falling for an ideal of 'comfort." Asceticism, suffering, intense joy, profound melancholy, wild gaity, are all part of the Russian nature. They incline to hate God or to throw away everything for the love of Him. They are either hot or cold.

MEDIOCRITY: PRESCRIPTION

The essence of mediocrity is that we cling to our lives instead of dying to ourselves that God may live in us. In the case of Catholics it is not usually because they have not received grace in the Sacraments, because many mediocre Catholics are even daily communicants; the difficulty is that they have not died to themselves.   Granted that it is hard to die to yourself in an age which encourages feverish activity and endless concern with what we shall wear and how we shall decorate our houses, and which pyramids committee meetings on top of committee meetings. Nevertheless it must be done. The first step away from mediocrity is to realize that it takes heroism to be a Christian today.

There is no way out of mediocrity which does not involve a conversion from worldliness to other-worldliness. One must cultivate precisely those habits which we tend to overlook, precisely those habits which will make us unpopular, singular, conspicuous, and all those other things which we so long to avoid. It will not always be tough going because in the end we will have maneuvered ourselves into another set, another way of life, far better than the original one. But we might as well face the fact that the beginnings will be difficult.

The essence of the new program will be penance, mortification, intensification of the Sacramental life, development of the interior life, prayer. Start going to Mass instead of to novenas. Turn off the radio and see if you can endure the silence. Drop out of the mad race to be well dressed. Start giving alms at the sacrifice of luncheon desserts. Observe strictly the fasts prescribed by the Church. Try to pray without a book or a rosary. Do spiritual reading. Cut down on the movies. All these things will be the first beginnings of the road which leads to sanctity. You will need a spiritual director to help you along.

Now it is an odd thing about Catholics that it is precisely this conversion they resist with all their might. They will go to more and more meetings, give more and more money, talk more and more; but please do not ask them to about-face. If they did, they would cease to be mediocre.   A conversion means a turning away from something, and a turning to something else. The first conversion (the spiritual life is a series of them) means a turning away from the world and a turning to God. Most converts from outside to the Catholic Church are strikingly aware of this and are quite prepared for their lives to be transformed. They have entered into a new economy, the economy of salvation, and everything they do from there on is a step toward God.

Mediocre Catholics are the people who won’t come in or go out. They shy away from mortal sin, but they won’t turn all the way toward God. That's why they don’t progress in holiness. They mark time, but they can’t mark time forever.

"In our time it is impossible for anyone to be mediocre," said Pius XI. And so it is. These mediocre Catholics are under an ever-increasing strain. Presently they will fall either all the way in or all the way out of the Church.

UNBELIEF

"Yeah, but you've got to earn a living!" This is the theme song of the unbelieving Catholic. The thing he chiefly doesn’t believe in is the Providence of God. If you say to him: "But Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His justice, and all these things shall be given you besides,) he will answer you, in effect, by saying that you have to be practical. Practical means you have to seek first the kingdom of mammon, lest you starve to death, and that is to say that you just don’t believe what Christ says. Some people may not think that it is very important not to believe just some certain things in the Gospel, but as a matter of fact the whole goes together.

Either you believe the Church or you don’t! There are no intermediary stages (although there is a lot of procrastination, ignorance, and vacillation). The people who don't believe that the just man lives by faith will be found upon investigation to be somewhat incredulous about dogmas beginning "Credo in unum Deum...." In my own experience this is more and more borne out. The other night I was discussing her business with a greeting card saleswoman, of Irish descent and convent education. She was trying to explain why you can't have a religious theme on your Christmas cards because that will make them unsuitable for the Jewish trade, and I was telling her, somewhat irritably, that her position just didn’t make any Catholic sense. Later on in the evening it came out that she was, as she put it, "tormented by the Devil with doubts." What she meant was that she had as good as lost her Faith.

There are thousands and thousands of Catholics in the same spot. They still go to church, usually. They still know the Catholic lingo, although they have a distaste for discussing spiritual things. They are still held by the thin thread of sentiment to a Church in which they no longer believe.

Now, we live in a world of middle thinking, but out of it all there comes a certain secular creed, having dogmas like these: "God is unimportant!' "This world is the one we have to make into a paradise' "Science is omniscient!' "Money is all-important!' "Psychiatrists (not priests) know all about the soul!' "You can't live without sex!' Etc. Etc. It comes in over the radio. It's knee-deep in all the mass-circulation magazines. It utterly pervades secular education (I know a major public college in which, as far as investigation can tell, not one single truthful proposition is taught). It is hawked in the movies. It is common gossip. It is the basis of all business. It is so bad that it is almost true to say that "either what the Church says is true, and therefore everything the  world says is wrong, or vice versa, the world is right and the Church out of its mind."

The sad situation of Catholics is this: they want to believe the Church, but they eat up everything the world says and, in effect, order their lives accordingly. How can they do both? They do it by a combination of ignorance and sentimentality. You never catch them reading a Catholic book of theology, even if they are studying secular philosophy. They go in for novenas, partly with the ‘gimme' spirit, but partly too for the emotional satisfaction they get out of it. Emotion does not carry over into daily. Out of this situation arises the curious and sad phenomenon you very often see in the Church: a pious mother (as measured by devotions) who opposes every effort of her daughter to go into Catholic Action, while pressing her to become a worldly and financial success.

The advantage of coming into the Church from the outside is that you already know when you become a Catholic, the secret that is still hidden to the Catholics; the utter bankruptcy of the non-Catholic world. We are in a world which is dying of despair, while Catholics (hastily throwing the pearl of great price under the kitchen stove) sit around and admire it. They think (having been themselves poor for so long) that the rich build country estates and go about on yachts in a delirium of joy. They do not. They keep erecting palaces, making music, laying out gardens, and changing dresses to hide from themselves their internal disquiet, the aching of their own hearts. The emptiness of their godless lives. The last place that they who so need help will look for hope, is among those who keep copying and admiring their own futile efforts.

The pagans keep writing stuff that they themselves do not believe, saying things that have a tinny ring even in their own ears. How we betray them when we believe it! There are thousands of examples. One interesting one is found in psychoanalysis. There are plenty of Catholics ready to find this pseudo-science "very interesting” and containing a number of truths. While we sit by and admire (kicking off into a corner the sword of the spirit which is the word of God and which happens to be lying around), someone like Clare Boothe Luce slashes through its error like a knife.

Does the Freudian say we all secretly desire to return to our mother's womb? All that means, says Mrs. Luce, is that plenty of us wish we had never been born. Has St. Augustine said: "Thou hast made us for Thyself O Lord...."? It is Mrs. Luce who has just fished it up from the dust-heap in the corner and is lost in the joy of knowing it.

The remedy for unbelief is Faith, and Faith is a gift. Don’t be too proud to believe something you haven’t thought up and examined for yourself. Take God's word for it. Don’t think that everything God says has to be examined in the light of opposing errors. Faith increases, and becomes more and more luminous, and makes us sing out that what the Church teaches is true, in proportion to how much we cherish and believe it. Cut out the national weeklies and the national monthlies. Abstain from the radio. Skip the tabloids. Subscribe to a Catholic library. Where was it that you dropped that sword? It ought to be lying around here some place; let it shine it up and gird ourselves with it.

HOW TO HAVE A HAPPY DEATH by F. M. Lee, C.SS.R.

Your Death

Don't turn the page.

Don't run away because of those two words up there. You are only running into its arms. We all are. There was one man who stayed and looked at death, listened to all it had to say, and, for the rest of his life, he never feared it again. Would you like that? Never to fear death again? Well, here is the way it happened for him.

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful queen. Her name was Isabella, and she was ever surrounded by brave, adoring courtiers. Beloved above all to this Queen was a handsome, young nobleman, whose name was Borgia. Francis Borgia. He loved his queen purely and deeply. He had laid his sword at her feet, and he hoped for long and happy years of honour and high position at her brilliant court.

But the queen died, as queens will, and she died very young, as some queens won't. The sad and broken Francis Borgia accompanied her funeral cortege in the long journey across the hot Spanish countryside to the city of Granada. Finally, they arrived at the palace, and a ponderous, legal-looking individual came out and declared that the casket must be opened to make sure it was really the queen inside.

Now, this was all before the days of our modern, clever embalming. And so, when the casket was opened, there was simply sheer horror. The stench, the pockmarked, decaying face, the sight of the milling vermin, struck the young courtiers like a nauseating flood. They groaned, they fled.

All except one. Francis Borgia stayed. There were sudden tears in his eyes, but they were not for the queen. They were the kind of tears that St. Paul must have shed as he rode out to persecute the Christians, and being suddenly struck from his horse by the Almighty, lay, crying there in the dust, a blinded man. But now, Francis is speaking to his queen for the last time.

'Oh Lady, you can take every hope that I ever had for honour and glory and put it beside you in that casket. I see now how death hovers like a shadow over all earthly beauty, mocking it, waiting to turn it into dust again. Farewell, my poor queen, I go to serve a Master Who can never die!’

And he went out to become one of the greatest Saints that God ever had. All because he had the courage to stand and look death full in the face. Let us.

After all, you know that the trees are already growing on the hillside, the trees that will someday cradle you against eternity. That not too pleasant picture - your own coffin. And yet, your pall-bearers are alive today, my friend. The machinery to carry you out of the land of the living is already in motion. Your own heartbeat of this very moment promises you there must be a last heartbeat some day. It cannot just go on. Your dear heart is your guarantee of death.

Shall we grow military for a moment, and plan our little campaign with death? Not against death, for we can never be victors there. We shall die. The curse of death is on us, and even the Son of God felt that curse of death on His cross. But plan our campaign we will, and the first line across our blueprint is bold and definite. It is this. 

Death will come.

Look at your watch for one minute. Do it. During that minute, about two thousand people died. At each second, another one stood before his God to hear the eternal decision, the final judgment on his life. All day, all night, they suddenly appear before Him, like endless millions of leaves, slipping quietly to the ground in the autumn of the year.

Up the polished marble steps goes Death, past the armed guards goes Death, to lay its cold irrevocable hand upon the most important shoulder in the world. And never has it been known to ask, 'How ready, how rich, how old are you?’

We find ourselves uncomfortably remembering the beautiful, glossy-leafed, fig tree that our Lord one morning cursed until it shriveled before the eyes of the apostles. Uncomfortable, not because He cursed it, but because He cursed it for its barrenness, whereas no fig- tree in all Palestine was bearing fruit just then. It was not the season for fruit. Why curse a tree for barrenness in the early spring, when it was supposed to be barren? Why, except to warn us, who put off our complete conversion to God until the autumn of our lives, until we think it is time to turn to God. And find that our shriveled souls, cursed for unproductiveness, cannot turn in their clay sockets.

So we shall die. And the thought of it strikes us with the force of a feather landing on a pink cloud.

We have seen an hourglass. The glass with just enough opening for a grain of sand to pass through at its waspwaist. The bottom and top are closed off, and exactly enough sand is put into the top as will take an hour to pass through the opening. When the hour is over, all the sand is on the bottom. It is no accident. That is all the sand there was.

And down a highway in Queensland, at seventy and eighty miles an hour, two automobiles are recklessly closing up the distance between each other. Four young people in each car, four young drunk people, and the sands of their lives are running out fast. Their clothes and their consciences are badly dishevelled, and in three minutes they will stand before their Creator and give an account of their lives. Meanwhile, we shall be using acetylene torches to separate their poor bodies from the tangle of steel and glass. Death must have seemed so far away as they began that ride. The papers called it an accident. There was no accident. That was all the life they had been given, and it ran out.

If we could only get that picture clearly. The hourglass of our own lives. What is left in the top? How much? Three hours? The papers may call it an accident, but that was all the life that you had. Perhaps you will never get to a confessional again. Never to be absolved again. A blood clot, a stroke, a speeding car- God will get to you no matter where you are. Neither He nor you will add a grain of life. It was all settled before you were born, and it has been running through all these years. Have you an hour left? 

How many people live in mortal sin?

No longer are we drawing bold lines in our blueprint for the campaign with death. Very shaky lines, for death has all the advantage here. It can strike from behind. Forty thousand people will die tomorrow morning, and twenty-five thousand will not even see death coming. They will be as young as you, younger; as healthy as you, healthier; richer, poorer than you, and suddenly their brain will be paralyzed in death and they will be dragged before the judgment seat of God to answer for it all. What if you are standing there with them? You could be, you know.

They are sitting in their homes tonight, quite alive. By two oclock tomorrow afternoon, their bodies will be waiting for identification at some morgue or other. Tonight, they expect death exactly as much as you do. Death is for hospitals and battlefields, and for the old.

Christ died for us, loves us, and yet, because He must judge us, He was almost pleading when He said, 'I will come to you like a thief in the night. As though: 'If there is anyone you don't want Me to find you with, if there is any place, any home, any car wherein you don't want me to discover you, stay out of it! I promise you that I shall come as a thief! No sound, unexpected, unseen. When do you least expect me, married man, when do you least want me? Single man? Woman? I have warned you. Don't gamble that I lie!

If Adam and Eve had not committed their sin, we would not be thinking of death this way. There would be no death to think of. God never meant our souls and bodies to be torn apart in a last agony. Soul and body were meant to be one, as they are in you today. And so we are terrified at the thought of this unnatural separation. No friends return to tell us about another life, all is surrounded with mystery, darkness, fear.

And yet, our own personal, eventual heaven or hell is not a thing suddenly thrust upon us the day we die. There is really no mystery about it at all. If a man keeps crying out to God throughout his life, 'I will not have you, then his fate will have the simplicity of an echo on the day he dies. God crying back, 'And I will not have you! Nobody builds for hell and lives in heaven; no one builds for heaven and finds himself in hell. On the very promise of the Almighty: 'Man shall go into the house of his eternity. Just as you build it today. So the sinner arranges two hells for himself. One on this earth, a mental hell, where he lives without peace of mind; one in eternity, where he lives without peace of mind or body. A two-time loser.

A priest raced through Melbourne in his car, pulled up at a hospital, and rushed for the bedside of his dying uncle. He was carrying the Blessed Sacrament, the holy oils. He came into a little vestibule, next to his uncle's room, and then, strangely enough, sat there for five hours until the man died. You see, his uncle had been living with a divorced woman for twelve years, and the woman was in the sickroom, and violently refused to let the priest enter. Long ago, that man had made his choice, and on this day, he would have to stay with it. The priest had brought his God as far as God would go, and now He waited, ten feet away. Waited for the man to die.

There is a line in the Scriptures, 'I swear, as I am your God, I am not mocked.

There is a line in the Scriptures, 'It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God!

We watch human life, and it becomes a grim thought that these human beings shall die as they have lived. The thought can take practically all the comfort out of lying in bed on a Sunday morning, instead of going to Mass. And the bed can seem like a veritable nest of spikes when we realize the compounded guilt of keeping the children away from the altar, away from the railing. The brooding fear of what it might be like this Sunday morning, to fall into the hands of the living God, maliciously defied, deliberately angered.

And what of the person who has surrendered to some secret sin? He has made a contract with impurity, and death may break into the contract at any minute. All the while, his hope for heaven is just a mockery, a vague waiting for a vague someone who will decide for him whether he wants heaven or hell. In the heart of every sin there is a dark core of unhappiness and its name is death. The soul, dead in sin, and the body ever in jeopardy what if death had been waiting there, what if the last grain of sand had run out, and he had died as he was living?

These are the houses we build, and God has promised us that man shall go into the house of his eternity. As he built it. And the poor soul, who lives down all the years of her life with a concealed sin on her soul. (If only she knew the sheer happiness, the sense of humility, the desire to help ever so kindly, that wells up in the heart of any priest to whom she says, there in the confessional, 'Father, I held something back years ago. Please help me.) Carrying the dead lumber in her heart, knowing only unhappy years now, and an eternity of payment when death shall find her out. Go, dear soul, go to any priest. By the grace of God, go today!

And sometimes, in the abandon of his reaping, death strikes at those who choose to ignore the responsibility that God has woven into the act of human love. They choose to ignore the child, choose an engineered sterility, or when mechanisms fail, choose murder.

The lady stopped the missionary after the last Mass. He had never seen anyone so broken, so despairing, so fearful.

'Oh, Father, what shall I do? My husband and I have prevented children these twenty years. This morning, Father, he was dead. Beside me. Dead. Oh, what can we do?’

Would it have done her and her husband any good to have looked upon the decaying face of Isabella, the queen? I doubt it. They would have simply come to know what death looked like. The courtiers, who fled from the casket of their queen, knew what death looked like. They knew, and they tore it out of their memories as they stumbled back to a life of pleasure. Knowing is not enough, so God said, 'Remember, remember thy last end, and then, thou shalt never sin. That is why you find a skull, a death's head, somewhere in the portrait of the old saints. They were always remembering what death could do to them. They could not stop its invasion of their body, but their whole life was geared to make sure that death would never touch their soul.

Human love is blind. (In much the same order, so is chemical attraction.) One man had about five minutes to live, and the priest begged him to renounce the unlawful wife who stood at his death-bed. But the gentleman rose up in his bed to cry out, 'I'll not tell her to go, I'll tell her that I love her and will love her in hell. And the life blood came pouring out of his mouth. Dead.

In hell he would love her! In hell he would hate and curse her for all eternity as the cause of his own endless agony. There is no love in hell. The peace of mind that you have never known in your bad marriage will not be waiting for you in hell. Aren't you human enough to want happiness and peace somewhere along the line? Dreamer, you haven't it today, and you have made sure you will never have it throughout the eternities.

But perhaps you have grown used to sin. Are you glad, at last? You may find another nugget of comfort in knowing that, quite often, a bad conscience does not trouble folks, even on their deathbed. You can kill off your conscience. One man did, and as he was dying, Cardinal Bellarmine leaned over him to suggest an act of contrition. The man looked up at him.

'Father, what is contrition? He had five minutes in which to tell God that he was sorry for a lifetime of sin, and he did not even remember what sorrow meant.

As a missionary, one often enough meets people who are quite pleasant and blithe about living in sin. It is the nearest, known thing to the peace and beauty of a sepulchre. Christ acidly called it, 'clean without, whitewashed, and the corruption of bones within. One, the prince of the fallen angels, hopes they stay pleasant and blithe. He will never bother them, even on a deathbed. Why should he? They are in his pocket, and there is no struggle. Why take the case to court and argue further? He has the deed, signed, sealed, and delivered. Don't envy them.

For, there is a sentence in Holy Scripture that holds what is about the most dangerous, final, shocking truth that has to do with us creatures of God. It is this: 'Seek the Lord, while He may yet be found. While He may yet be found. So there can come a day when He can't be found. So there are people walking about the streets of our cities, and they are already condemned to hell. They will step from this life into hell forever. Their last chance, their last grace, was turned down, and God will never bother them again. There is a peaceful death for you.

Because you have cared enough to follow these thoughts upon your death, this reading can be all the grace you will ever need. It may be your last, but it is enough, if it will lead you quickly to the confessional, or at least, for this moment, to kneel and make a fervent act of contrition. Start the road back . . . . . . Do that, remembering that on one of these todays, you will look for the first time into the eyes of Jesus Christ.

Bravely look now, and say your act of sorrow deeply, lovingly, to Him. Mercy is marvellous.

Perhaps, on the other hand, you are the one who has made plans for your deathbed. You will come back then. You will give up sin only when you no longer have the strength to commit it. You will snap your fingers, and God will come running. And the poor fool of a God, who demands that we intend to give up sin, will listen anxiously while you admit your transgressions, while you throw him the dregs of your life, and the sop of amendment forced on you by physical sickness.

Have you ever been really ill? So in pain that you cried to die? There lies such a one now, and his mind is growing dim. The pain quiets a bit, and a new anguish arises as he wonders who will take care of his broken wife and children. He wants to rise and protect them, but the sickness has taken the last ounce of his strength. He has never tried to conquer his flesh, and now he has fallen again and again. He is half crazed at the thought of the eternal hell before him. The terrible thing called despair is rising in the depths of his being. He is sick, heart-broken, his will weakened, and now- suddenly he is going to rise up and make a good confession of his whole life, his every bad action all those years; his strength will miraculously return, his mind will clear. . . . It won't. He spent a lifetime putting a different kind of machinery into motion, and now it moves heartlessly on to his destruction.

Mercy is marvellous, and he made a mockery of it, and his fate already lies across the Scriptures, 'I swear, as I am your God, I am not mocked! And this is mockery.

Oh, your priest will run to the bedside with everything the Church has. And your priest will come home to sit in his room, and stare awhile at the wall, and wonder- what kind of sorrow was that- what kind of amendment was that what kind of consciousness was that?

A few days later, the priest will bury that man in consecrated ground, and perhaps wonder where God has really buried his soul.

Too cruel? Oh no. St. Jerome is there to remind us that in all the Scriptures, only one man ever came back to God at the end of his life- the good thief. Just one. One, so we would not despair. But only one, lest we are thinking of trying it ourselves.

But ask the One, Who hung next to the good thief, and poured out His mercy that afternoon.

'Yes, the good thief. He came up out of a childhood of poverty and fear, he came to Me out of his years of ignorance and oppression. He came to Me at the end of the chase. I gave him one chance, and he took it.

'And you? So many years, so many chances, so much mercy.

All the Christian world turns to its God on the cross. Look up confidently, for This is the One Who forgave His murderers. All of us.

 Time Is for Eternity

THE YOUNG virgins have formed a group, now, in the Roman arena. Except for their clothing, they are very much like the senior high school girls, who are shining up that graduation ring every conscious and every unconscious moment, with happy eyes set on the great day in June. But there are no rings, and there will not be any great day in June for the young virgins here in the arena. They were quietly living along their Christian lives, when suddenly time ran out. Time for living their Christian faith ran out. Now they have to die for it. Their faith is no different than the faith of the young high school girls in your parish, but now these young Roman girls must die for it.

Thousands of eyes will watch them die. The people are already there, sitting forward rather eagerly, actually human beings, who have come out to see other, cornered human beings.

And the animals, the other animals, the ones they keep in the cages around the arena enclosure, are watching, too. Starved for two weeks now, but soon they can sink their jaws into this delicate, living human flesh, and the little girls will be quite defenceless against the tearing, drooling jaws. God help them quickly be unconscious.

Of course, they do not have to die. If they just take a bit of incense, and burn it before that marble god, and deny the name of the Jesus who died fifteen years ago over in Jerusalem, they will be as free as birds.

Rosalia is among the virgins. Rosalia, so made for youth and life and love. Maybe God will have some strong Roman soldier die for her. Or, maybe it is lawful to burn a little incense, because her father just did. Her father has gone over to the pagans. And see, the young girl on the edge of the group, she is leaving them, she is accepting the incense . . . she is burning it before the god of marble. Surely, now. Surely, now, it is all right to go along and burn a little incense. Except . . . that this is HER eternal happiness waiting out there on the arena sands, and there never can be anyone to walk out there and bring it back to her. Eternal happiness is out THERE, Rosalia, so walk out . . . look up at your Christ . . . He knows the fears, the human tears walking, walking. ., youth and life and love are sweet, Rosalia, but just keep walking . . . Oh, Christ, take her quickly. Eternal youth, eternal life, eternal love.

And so..We get to try it again.

Or did we try it at all last year? What was it? Incense before which gods? Time ran out on that one Friday, time for just passively being a Catholic ran out, and you had to take a stand on denying yourself meat at that banquet. You ate the meat, you, the strong man, and the little girls in the Roman arena turned themselves into torn, bloody meat for Christ. We, the living, get to try it again. We get a new year, in which to live our faith. The little girls had to die for it. It is the same faith. We are the underlings.

Eastman, the creator of the Kodak empire, sat in his penthouse, atop the Chicago skyscraper. His left hand rested on a series of buttons, electrical buzzers that could demand and produce from the outside world anything and everything to delight the heart of man. But Eastman's left hand was very cold, and Eastman was very dead, and Eastman's right hand held all the story, his own revolver. Before he took his life, he wrote a little note, a curt little autobiography, a piteous paraphrasing of something Christ had said. The note ran: 'I have had everything that life has to offer. Life has no more to offer, so I want no more life.

Christ had said, 'For what doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul? Or what exchange shall a man give for his soul?

In the twilight of the Old Year, we think of trying it again. And we gaze up from this reading to find Christ there, in the shadows. Christ with His scales, to weigh the conduct of our life against His indestructible words, 'What doth it profit? Wherein is the profit, to lie awake at night, hoping not to die before dawn, to die in one's sins? Wherein is the profit to have throttled off conscience, so that, in a blind bravado, we do not care if we die before the dawn? How went the exchange, when we traded out our peace of mind? How went the bargain, when we traded out our soul? Who, then, owns that soul tonight? And would that one take its place in hell? Who would? Who can?

If only you could really die away into nothingness. Then, it might be a trifling thing to hide behind the veils of marriage and turn love into a deliberately unfruitful lust. If only the children did not have to go on forever, if only they were not immortal, then it might be a trifling thing for triflers to deny them the poor, short span of human life. If only it were a trifling thing to walk today without peace of mind, and to lie down tonight, condemned forever. If only you did not have to go on forever. If you did not have to be alive somewhere a million years from tonight, and still go on paying, paying, paying. . . . .

 For a sin that could have been forgiven in two minutes in the quiet of a confessional and a burst of burning sorrow. Here, in the last shadows of the Old Year's twilight, let me study my profit.

So many things seem profitable, so many promise happiness. Throughout the day, we seem to drive on from one little gain to another. A bit more comfort realized. A taste sated, a thirst. Some work passed off to another. A compliment attained and laved in. A thousand little creature things, burning up our time and talent and energy, promising us happiness. Taking up all our day, and all our days, until they have all our life, and yet none of them seems to mention any happiness for the day after we die. They never talk about that. Only God can. Only God can dare mention the day after we die. Only God can talk about the sheer profit of eternal happiness. All the way back to the catechism, then. Know Me, love Me, and serve Me, and I shall so drown you in love and happiness for all eternity that you shall forget the tiny inch of time, the tiny inch of suffering on earth, when you won these endless centuries of bliss.

Here in the quiet, before the world gets at me again, and fools me again, let me plan my happiness. I was born to be happy, and only sin can make me sad. Only sin is sad. Sin is the only sorrow, because it, alone, cannot be turned into joy. Poverty and sickness and heartbreak and bereavement and loneliness are sorrows, but they all can be turned into joy. For Christ and Mary were all those things, poor and lonely, heart-broken and bereaved, and I, so poor and sick and ungifted upon the human scene, can have the quiet happiness of Christ and Mary, if only I do not tear God and His peace out of my heart.

But how about the time to come? Will I still feel this way? Will I still be working at this kind of happiness? I work all year so I can take two weeks off for vacation, and now I am asking myself if I will work at my faith a couple more years so I can take eternity off.

Another thing that worries me. Everybody in hell wanted to go to heaven. Nobody wants to go to hell. Just what happened? Maybe they thought that some priest or nun or mother or angel was standing behind them, and would take care of all that for them. Nobody is worrying about me tonight. Nobody . . . Nobody. And the people in hell wanted to go to heaven just as I do. They just didn't do anything about it. They wanted something else more than heaven, and it turned out to be hell.

The train was an hour out of Melbourne. The litter, human and otherwise, of long travel, lay strewn about the lounge car. We had formed a little tete-a-tete group in one corner of the car. To while away the time, we agreed that each should suggest what he thought the best mental attitude for the next twenty-four hours, if we knew that an atom bomb would destroy us all at the end of that time. Our discussion never got beyond the young man who led off. With a self-assured, sophisticated smile, he flattened us all by this solution:

'I'll worry about tomorrow when it comes.’

At first blush, and last blush, a quite insane answer. Here, we had agreed that we were all to be bombed out of existence the next day, and still, our young hold-out planned to play in the clay of this world till it blew up in his face.

But are we less foolish? Who promised that poor sensual side of us even twenty-four hours, and yet, perhaps we still put off the conquering of temptations till some tomorrow. When will we face the fact that heaven is not a gift, but a reward for DOING something? God had to test us some way, and He decided to leave it up to our body, as to whether the soul would go to hell or not. Cry as we will about being weak, that will not change the facts. There is a test going on. We all want to go to heaven, but we will end up wherever the body drags us to, the heights of heaven, or the rocks of hell.

And who promised that selfish side of us twenty-four hours in which to grow unselfish? Nobody will ever need a prayer more than the selfish. Nobody. Their design for living is 'me first.' The grammar is bad, but the tragedy is fatally worse. Their Poisonous attitude reaches out into every action, every decision. Always planning ahead to have everything come out their way. Always wringing out the last drop of satisfaction from every situation. Their lives are a living denial of, a perpetual challenge to the most basic platform of Christ's doctrine, Christ's blueprint for ever getting to heaven, namely, taking up the cross and denying oneself. How well and how long such a one had better sit in the Old Year twilight, and swear to himself that he shall become selfish for his soul, even as he had been selfish for his body, for his will, for his way. It is a task for giants, or for a weakling with God at his arm.

Of course, there is no tomorrow. There is just a series of todays. On one of those todays, you die.

It is late now. The new day will soon break from out the shadows. The young virgins, the millionaire Eastman, the lad on the train, have all told their stories. And someday your story will be told. In a few years, death will have claimed most of us who read these lines, and people will begin to forget how we looked, how we talked, how we laughed. The inevitable wall will rise up between the living and the dead, between the living and you, the dead. Your wife, your husband, your children must begin calculating how to live without you. They loved you, indeed, but you are out of their plans now. The story never changes. Your own last will, the laws of your state, will take away every penny you had. And you worked all your life for that. Just what did you save for yourself? For YOU?

When it is all over, and the seasons have laughed and wept and sported about the fields above your grave for many a year, what if someone could come upon that last cradle of your body, find that casket, and reach in to take up the handful of dust that was you? Will you care? Will you laugh, as you look over God's shoulder, and then be swept away into the delightful social calendar of the courts of heaven? Will you care about dust when you have God? Or shall it be a cruelly valuable handful of dust? And will you look up a moment from the infinite torture of hell, to know that a flurry of wind has just caught up and spun to the four corners of the earth the priceless handful of dust, once your body? Gone, into nothingness, and you must go on, paying for that, for all eternity. How was the gain? How the profit?

Oh man, look long into the twilight shadows, until you see gazing back at you the burnt, shocked, hopeless eyes of someone who once lived exactly as you are living tonight, of someone in hell, who gambled on a tomorrow, and lost. Ask him what he would give for five minutes back on earth. Ask him what he would do. You have the five minutes. Remember, you could have spent them on your knees. You could have thanked God for letting you live long enough to be making the greatest act of sorrow in your life. It could mean eternal happiness, no matter what has happened in the past. Five minutes. Remember, you are responsible for them. You will know it eternally.

If, tonight, with all authority, you could find your way into hell, and tell some poor damned soul that he is to be freed in fifty years, he might well cry out: 'Fifty years! If your message is true, I don't care if it is fifty-million years. So long as this will end. Do you know the very hell of hell? It is to be without a reason for counting the days and years. There is no calendar in hell. It just goes on. But now I shall count again! Fifty years, and then eternity will be just beginning!

But no such messenger will ever find his way into hell. They can all forget how to count. No wonder that the terrible word ''eternity'' has sent legions of the most brilliant, gifted minds and personalities into monastic cells, despising as dirt whatever the world had to offer, and fearfully readying their souls and accounts for the crack of doom.

And now the New Year is trembling at the threshold. Fifty years! Will you count them as a Catholic, walking out in the New Year to your obligations, to your duties, to your prayer and kindness and love? Will you take your place with the lion-hearted young girls, those other Christians in the Roman arena, who believed as you do tonight, and went out to die for it? And at the end, eternity will just be beginning!

You have the greatest gift in the world tonight- you are alive. Perhaps you can write 'failure’ behind everything you ever tried. Perhaps you are alone in some rented room and nobody knows or cares whether you go on living or not. Maybe the Catholic solution to some problem in your single or married life seems to have beaten you down into the dust, and you crawl and choke and weep and hate the falseness of your position. Or maybe, from your sickbed, life seems a foul, obscene, pitiless joke.

But you are alive tonight, and you can still have it all! Eternal youth, eternal life, eternal love! God made you for it. Reach for it. It is all that anyone will ever need, and you can still have it all. Walk out and clasp it with fingers of steel, and never let it go!

St. Joseph, Patron of a Happy Death, Pray for us.

Nihil Obstat: V. Rev. J. CULLEN C.SS.R.,

Prov. Sup. Imprimatur: NORMAN T. GILROY, D.D., Archbishop of Sydney.

Slightly adapted for space and distributed by https://traditionalcatholicresistance.blogspot.com/