Today we are called to trust in God like we have never done before. To follow Him with all our hearts and to trust in His plan for us.
On the plane ride home, I watched the movie, “Indian Horse,” about a little boy who goes to residential school. The boy, Saul, has a real passion for hockey and a natural skill which he develops, becoming quite good, and then loses it all to alcohol. It shows many bad things about Catholics, how some of the priests and nuns were cruel and abusive. Perhaps they thought they were being helpful. One priest was very kind to Saul but we find out at the end he used the boy’s love of hockey to abuse him. The whole thing was pretty hard to see for me, not because it was explicit because it wasn’t, but it is hard to see that a priest would do that. I felt a great deal of shame for what happened.
It would be very easy to condemn that priest for what he did. The act was was definitely condemnable. But what about the person – am I to condemn him, do I have that right? You see, this is one of the greatest problems. I don’t have a temptation to abusing boys. I am not tempted that way so I could waste a lot of time focusing on this man’s sin and how reprehensible it is. How dare he do something like that and I feel pretty safe in condemning something I am not tempted to do, but that my friends won’t help me become a saint. I have to start by condemning my own sins. I have to root out what is reprehensible in my own life. Why? Because there are only two types of sin – ones that cut us off from God and ones that damage our relationship with God. Though we might say that some sins are worse because of the effect they have on others.
I heard a comedian once say that his wife told him to stop smoking. She said it is so simple, just stop smoking. He replied to her to stop getting angry, it is so simple, just don’t do it any more.
It was easy for the Pharisees to brag about how clean their pots were because I am sure they didn’t do a lot of pot scrubbing. It is easy for you and I to find the inclinations of others deplorable so as to avoid what is deplorable in our own lives. It is easy to look on the priest scandal in the States and condemn the souls around it saying, “I would never do that.” I can tell you what we will never do while looking and deploring others sins – we will never grow in holiness. We will never see a vision of heaven looking into the hell of other people’s lives. We will simply sit there smug as a Pharisee and praise ourselves because without virtue we avoid these deplorable acts. Only if you did have these struggles could you judge and I doubt you would because you would know how hard it is.
Let us not focus on things that we can’t change. Instead, what are the deplorable acts in our lives, the breaking of God’s commandments, the mortal sins in our lives that we need to remove? What is God calling us to change? Why should we change it? I call it the vision of heaven. When I was in Spain, walking into a church meant seeing a vision of Heaven. Maybe it was a vision that faded over time or a vision that was not kept up, but one thing was there for certain, there was a vision and the artist or commissioner of the art put that vision down for others to see. In some churches, there were multiple visions of heaven. But it seemed that even a little road side church, if you could see inside, had someone who had seen heaven and built it.
This is why we should follow the law of God because it opens the glory of heaven to us. Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God. The people who fall into despicable acts, that we can all get behind, have fallen because they did not see the vision of heaven. The devils fell because they did not see the vision of heaven. We must renew our desire to see heaven each day. All the disordered desires in the world are actually a desire to see God that has been twisted to think it can only be found on earth and in ways that exploit the soul and the people around us. It was my prayer on my pilgrimage to see God and to love Him with all my heart. Every time I walked by a chapel, I knelt and prayed for that. When my journey was over in Spain it felt anticlimactic. Yet, this very morning, I was given a vision of my prayers and it was like nothing the earth had to offer. It showed me that desires and promises made by the flesh can only be met in heaven. We must seek the vision of heaven so we can put into practice the Law of God in our lives. Without the vision, the Law becomes something we try to get around instead of the glorious pathway to achieve heaven and sainthood. Today, we have a unique opportunity to be disgusted with our own sins, to deplore them, to repent of them and seek a vision of Heaven with the pure hearts that prayer will create.