A few weeks ago, the people
in Hawaii received an emergency alert indicating that a missile attack was
underway. The alert soon was revealed to
have been sent in error, but not before most people endured some anxious moments. More recently, a parishioner told me that for
relatives who had been among the affected, it had been horrible.
My first reaction was
that it would have been less horrible if they had been going to confession
regularly. This seems a bit callous, or
even self-serving, but not really. That
is what confession allows us to do: prepare for death and judgment. If we know our sins have been forgiven and
our soul is prepared to receive the Lord, then we have far less reason to be
anxious about meeting Him. An absence of
anxiety is an absence of fear; how can it be callous to offer that?
However, even having
no fear of death or judgment is not enough to make one welcome death. But might it
help us welcome…life?
In 1922, when asked
what he would do if faced with a hypothetical situation that very nearly
matched what our friends in Hawaii experienced, the author Marcel Proust
suggested: I think that life would
suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love
affairs, studies, it—our life—hides from us, made invisible by our laziness
which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly. But let all this threaten to become impossible
forever, how beautiful it would become again!
Imagine; threatened with the loss of life, we realize how
beautiful it is. Proust realized how in ordinary
circumstances, we miss precisely this ever-present reality. Once no longer threatened with privation of
life, how quickly we would settle back into our indifferent squandering of it: The cataclysm doesn’t
happen, we don’t do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of
normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm
to love life today.
Unafraid of death,
delighted by life; the two seem to be opposed. But clinging to only one or the other is results
in an unbalanced, even unhinged disposition.
We need to cultivate both together, for only that can stabilize us and
satisfy our deepest yearning. We should
not dread death, but neither should we fail to love life, even for a
moment.
This happy balance,
this perfect complementarity, seems impossible to attain. Perhaps to attain it for ourselves is impossible; but to receive it
as a gift is surely possible. For this union
of fearlessness and delight is the fruit of faith. Faith is
the theological virtue by which we believe in God and believe all that he has
said and revealed to us, and that Holy Church proposes for our belief, because He
is truth itself. By faith "man
freely commits his entire self to God." For this reason, the
believer seeks to know and do God's will.
(CCC 1814)
So
yes, faith is a gift (from God) that makes possible a participation (by the
believer). Can it be a gift if it
require participation? By all means; it
is not hard to imagine a gift that is no gift at all unless we use it, and use
it for its right purpose. And the right
purpose of faith is to free us from fear, and fill us with delight. What better gift could there be not only on our
last day, but on our every day?
My heart is steadfast, O God, my heart is steadfast!
I will sing and make melody! Awake, my soul!
Awake, O harp and lyre! I will awake the dawn!
I will give thanks to thee, O LORD, among the peoples,
I will sing praises to thee among the nations.
For thy steadfast love is great above the heavens,
thy faithfulness reaches to the clouds.
Be exalted, O God, above the heavens!
Let thy glory be over all the earth! (Psalm 108:1-5)
Monsignor Smith
