The prayers of every Mass are filled with the thirst for Christ to return and take us to Himself, to the fulfilment of all our deepest longings for life, love and peace. The Christian who is alert to the Lord and His Love knows that here below there is no lasting city, no lasting life. So long as death is part of our life, tears and anguish will be part of it, too. And so, we yearn for that place where death will be no more, where every tear will be wiped away, where holiness and righteousness will be at home, where the love and joy of each will be the love and joy of all, where evil and its destructive spawn will not even be remembered. St. Augustine once famously wrote: “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” We long for heaven, for the Beatific Vision of God. We sense it to be our true home, our final place of blessedness. Our deepest heart bears the hallmark which reads, “made in heaven”, since we don’t really belong anywhere else in the end.

That’s why our exit from Paradise at the beginning of history was such a catastrophe. We chose homelessness, not because the earth is not our home from home, but because without loving communion with God our earth has no hearth, no heart. The universe is freezing cold without God who is Love, and not because He no longer loves us, but because we did not love, choose Him. We listened to the Liar and Father of Lies and chose to believe a lie about God. We fell for Satan’s yarn that somehow God was jealous of His status as God and saw us as a threat because we could be gods too. The truth is that it is only the Evil One himself who is jealous, both of God and of us, whilst God was planning all along to share with us the fulness of His divine life. But we wanted the lie to be true, to be gods without God, before God, in place of God. That is the choice of hell. Hell is the rejection of the loving presence of God; hell is anywhere and anything where God is absent because He has been rejected. Christ sacrificed himself to deliver us from hell, to restore us to heaven, to achieve the eternal perfection of all whom He sanctifies with His Holy Spirit. But we have to want that deliverance, that free grace. He cannot sanctify us without us; we cannot be sanctified without Him. It’s a pact, a covenant of love, an adventure of mutual self-surrender in which all we need do is let Him increase, and ourselves decrease, sloughing off a fake self-sufficiency and becoming like little children.

In offering salvation to all mankind, the Lord does act especially through us, His Church, for we are one Body with Him by His gift of faith and grace. But the Lord also works outside the visible confines of the Church. The Church is more than her visible membership and apostolate. There are millions, if not billions, of people who will never be members of the visible Church, but whose hearts and minds the Lord still reaches, in ways only known to Himself, with the light and warmth of His Spirit. They, like us, will or will not respond in freedom to His loving advances, and will or will not work out their own salvation as they do so. The visible Church is there to witness to the Lord’s Cross and Resurrection before the family of mankind, but She does not contain or exhaust, let alone control, all the workings and channels of grace. The Lord alone is master of the Church; She is not His mistress, but His Bride, His Body.

So, we must not despair or get anxious about the salvation of others or become blinded by our own limited perceptions and understanding of God’s provident love. The Lord’s is the earth and its fulness, the world and all its peoples. He has us all in hand. Our main concern has to be that we each respond as fully as we can here and now to the Christian life we have been given. It is good to make conscious and courageous choices every day for Christ, in the little things and in the big. It is good to examine our conscience frequently to spot where grace is at work in us or where sin is at work, to go with the former and to confess and let go of the latter. The best way to do that is in quiet prayer before the Lord, perhaps with the help of a short passage from the Word of God. It needn’t take long. Think how long it takes you to shave or brush your teeth! If you don’t do these things, stuff accumulates. If you don’t examine your conscience, a lot worse will happen.

Heaven and hell are not surprise final destinations. They are the result of our free choice, a choice we cannot avoid. No-one more than the Lord Himself respects our freedom. No-one more than the Lord wants us to choose Him, to choose heaven. We ought neither to exaggerate nor underestimate our sins; neither to presume upon nor despair of the Lord’s mercy. But, most importantly, we must resolve firmly and seek ardently to know and love Him personally. Look for opportunities and take them when they come to give Him that little bit more of yourself every day. Don’t forget that He is doing exactly the same, for no matter how much and how longingly you desire to experience His most personal love for you, His longing for your most personal love for Him infinitely surpasses it.

We can know all there is to know about the bible, theology and Church politics; we can have visited holy places across the world in their thousands on pilgrimage; we can have gone to Mass five times a day all our life and been members of parish groups, apostolic movements and all the rest: but, as the Apostle says, if I am without love, I am a cymbal clashing or a gong booming. Yes, of course, love must pass through the Cross to be tested and tried as true, but the Cross is the narrow door which leads to life. To embrace the Cross is to embrace Christ, is to embrace Love, is to embrace eternity. Otherwise, we stand, tragically, alone, with our back to God and to the communion of eternal life and love. At the moment of death, just where we stand will be reflected back to us and our destiny will be sealed.

So, in the strength of Christian hope, and seeking the help of all God’s holy ones who have gone before us, let us run the race of love and fight the good fight of the faith. The dawn of eternity beckons us, our merciful Judge awaits us. May our hearts indeed be restless until at last they rest in Him.