Selflessness and Purgatory

And then came the time in late adolescence to watch all the TV series that cannot be missed before life comes to an end. Of course the list is subjective and mine goes like this: One Tree Hill, The Wonder Years and Lost. There are others too lest the one’s I mentioned lose their distinctness. These TV series consume a lot of time as they span for an hour or less. I joined the TV series bandwagon very late. For me, it meant finishing a whole season or two in a fortnight if I ever want to finish the six to eight seasons that have lapsed in the month. This meant watching episodes back to back on DVD or on the computer.

My life was filled with The Simpsons or some movie or a TV series. When I observed many others who joined associations and did other work, I didn’t think that they were selfless but rather viewed them of not being passionate about what had got me heating my computer chair. Little did I think any TV series, movie or music of popular fame is enjoyable even to others and perhaps what they do (in their associations) is not their passion that they are gifted with but a much nobler thing like responsibility.

And then one day, I took up responsibilities for myself. Soon, I got so preoccupied with it that I hadn’t time for my TV Series. Formerly, I hadn’t time for anything to do with others but only to know what turn of events will transpire in the next episode? Later, these TV Series turned passé. I couldn’t afford an hour a day much less a week to watch them go on slowly, often dragging along. Sometimes a classic book could be more fun than watching people sleep with each other and break other people’s heart. I also began to detest the whole idea of watching run of the mill TV series. I began to have a sound judgment on things that formerly enslaved me. They got lesser and lesser priority in my life and soon left my life entirely as if an addict had been completely rehabilitated and got the toxics out of his system.

What really happened is the operation of Grace. The sooner I set my mind on things above, that is, eternal; I chose something that will be meritorious for my redemption. Of course, it is no surprise now as it was no surprise then, that my salvation won’t be from watching TV series and having a scholarly idea of who was adulterous in this episode and what was the most uncanny episode of the season.

Watching movies all day isn’t exactly heaven-deserving material to indulge with. But there wasn’t any inclination to understand that anything nobler or richer could be aspired for. I wonder if I could have pleaded ignorance or was it negligence. And of course, God helped me to make that choice. I wouldn’t know that shakily, with less courage and much persuasion to volunteer to teach a few kids, I was choosing redemption. God is slow, only Moses was unlucky. I didn’t even know I was choosing it while I made that choice. I can love God now as God loved me first when I didn’t understand what I was choosing and going to begin loving. How true is St. John indeed!

And that is the operation of Grace. The moment I chose something that is without me, these material indulgences no good to anyone but my lethargic body and shallow mind within me, began to snap one by one. I couldn’t snap them myself as I was too deep into them. It took many instruments of God to ask me to volunteer for a responsibility. It took my own pride to think I am doing something good and in that process, led me to mercy by repenting for that pride and then realize there are so many things worth our life than often our own passing fancies.

The point of this blog is not so much what selflessness can teach you as much as what happens in purgatory. That’s right; this article’s real motive is to explain Purgatory. Mark Shea, an eminent online Catholic Writer writes in Catholic Exchange that we will be cleansed of all those things that kept us from choosing the real Joy, Jesus Christ and the love of God.

Our understanding of Purgatory only pervades to the extent that Confession forgives our guilt and Purgatorial cleansing is a cleansing to purify the soul of all its injury through all the sins that have been committed and that it is only divine justice that we pay for them on our way to Heaven. Somehow, every sin, every act of greed, lust, sloth, envy departs from the true nature of the soul and hence injures the soul. This has to be undone so that we are able to recognize purely what love is.

And this is where the lesson I learned in Selflessness is at the heart of the understanding of Purgatory. Somehow, I can now understand how the testimony of holiness in the Church which the monasteries, convents bear witness to everyday will lead them to suffer less in purgatory. It is because they perhaps have to snap fewer chains tying them to this world. They are in the world and yet already out of it, preparing their journey to the real world. While we enjoy, things of this world, we create so many indulgences tying us down that often the paradox is that our preparation for the world to come is more in snapping those attachments that takes us away from the idea of the Kingdom of God.

It is a paradox because while the nuns and monks sow to reap their treasures in heaven, we first take out the weed that we have sown and the new seed of life gets a chance to grow. And just taking up one responsibility, doing something for the world outside of me taught me to snap a few chains tying me to the passing world of TV Series. At least one, from a host of things for which I may not have to be cleansed in Purgatory but we all have a whole list of items, Haven’t We?

I don’t mean the only way to enter our glory is to keep suffering in the world. I didn’t mention that I enjoyed my responsibility, did I? It made me the person I am today. The choices make us suffer, for our nature is inclined to choose pleasure and rebel against work. All things are created good. We have to sanctify them too and use it for the glory of God. Snapping ties doesn’t mean to have no ties at all but to have those that don’t hurt charity that is due to God and Man. Selflessness helps us untie those attachments that don’t help us transcend. We have to tie ourselves to those things that only help us give glory to God for all the things he has provided that can truly make us happy and truly acknowledge in gratitude, the love that God has showered on his Children.

We are all afraid

I have a friend who is struggling with joining the priesthood. He has had an encounter that makes him echo the same feelings I do often

Amazing Grace how sweet they sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but not am found, was blind now I see

The friend is great with girls. And he often wonders how he could picture himself as a priest without all the love he could have with a girlfriend or a wife. He hasn’t any ill-intentions with women only difficulty in discernment whether God requires him to live sanctity with a family and i.e with women and children or sanctity as a priest, with entire family of God.

What is my friend’s problem really? He is afraid. He is afraid whether he would be happy responding to the call of God, whether he can take a leap of faith, whether he can plunge into the water without knowing if it’s cold. When he pictures himself with a girlfriend, he pictures security and self-assuredness. He is assured of love.

But living in obedience to the will of God is much more than being assured let alone the danger of our own understanding and limitations of assuredness. It is about what is right. How can he ever know if he will be happy? All he can do it trust in God that He will take care of him. Somewhere deep inside he fails to trust God. There is a lacking of faith.

We are all afraid though. My friend shouldn’t be singled out though his problems are more tumultuous in proportions. We are all afraid of not being happy in life. Hence we choose things that fit our ‘idea’ of assuredness of happiness. In doing this, we take refuge in our own limited understanding of scheme of things.

Often we know some things are more right than others or nobler or more righteous. But this world has so skewed our standards of defining happiness that we are afraid of doing now what our hearts are inclined to. When we choose things that fit the ‘understanding of peace’ that this world has to offer, the assuredness, we often abandon the idea that God is really the source of all joy because we have gone with what we already have as opposed to choosing what are struggling with.

We are afraid we may not find joy by our choices and it presupposes a lack of faith in the belief of another world. We choose as if this world is all we got and our choices are not changing us according to our real purpose that finds its fulfillment in another world, the world to come. So we go with what is safe than what is courageous. We go with timidity rather than conviction. We go with natural rather than being supernatural.

The choices we make when we are afraid tell us so much of our real faith in God. It tells us where we stand in the scale of humility. As a child cries in the dark and runs towards his mother, our choices show what we think of ourselves, whether we truly believe we know very little, we are very little and completely depend on God and hence affirm our humility or whether when having to make these decision we run in apprehension to assuredness the world has to offer.

A mother loses her son and wonders if she can continue life without him. A man who is afraid of losing a job or quitting one as it is bereft of meaning. Parents have to live with dissenting children or betrayals. We all have something to be afraid of. We can have faith that this world is not where happiness lies so let us not pretend that we can find it if we try unless God wills to give.

We can go against the currents of this world filled with imperfections and an endless pursuit of self-assuredness. Or we can go with life as if we are sailors trying to rescue the sea of life. We may try to hold everything within our clasp but the nature of this world is such, it is going to perish, the sea will slip away from our fingers. Every choice made for worldly things or purposes will inevitably fade away along with its pleasures, comforts and fancies. But if one makes a choice contingent on faith, the hope that one day knowledge will replace this faith and with trust that is moved with love, these will remain¹

1 Corinthians 13

How God chose Bethlehem over every other civilization

Of course, humility has been the hallmarks of the Gospel message. What with God taking on the form of man and living among them, being born in a manger, allowing his own creation to crucify him. God idea of humility is that he was ready to humiliate himself for the sake of love such. The other places he chooses humility was in choosing shepherds as the first to have a glimpse of Him. Choosing a woman as the first to see him after he resurrected.

We also forget that God chose from all the civilizations in the world, a lowly village of Bethlehem to break into history. This is what Mark Shea says in his article Promise Fulfilled

Consult any history book and the author will point you to the great centers of civilization in antiquity: Rome, Athens, Tenochtitlan, the Indus River Valley, China. Nowhere in any ancient estimation would it be said that the fulcrum of the world was to be found in a hardscrabble little village of washed-up dreams out on the eastern fringe of Augustus’ realm. Bethlehem had had its little moment in the sun, politically, a thousand years before, because it was the birthplace of David (an obscure Semitic monarch who meant a great deal to one of the insignificant little ethnic groups that buzzed like flies somewhere on the borders of Roman political consciousness). But let’s face it: Jewish nostalgia for David had about as much to do with hope as some tribe of Bantus dream of achieving world military domination. So why did the Jews hang on? Because God promised. And tonight, against all hope, the promise came true. The King was born.

Why the Church glorifies God through paintings and sculpture

A snippet from the site, way of the (Church) Fathers

Some Church Fathers called Christmas the Feast of the Incarnation.

Incarnation comes from a Latin word that means “enfleshment.” What sounds to English-speakers like a rarefied theological term is really just a statement of fact: God took on flesh. When that happened, flesh itself became something holy, something to be celebrated with paintings and statues and Christmas cards.

Yet in the eighth century, a faction arose in the Church calling themselves “Iconoclasts,” Greek for “picture-smashers.” The iconoclasts tried to “purify” and “spiritualize” Christian life by obliterating all artistic representations of Jesus, Mary, and the saints. They seized and destroyed most of the religious images in the Eastern Roman Empire, and they cut off the hands of those Christians who would not part with their icons. God, they said, could not be represented in a picture; any attempt to do so was rank idolatry. But this is how St. John of Damascus answered them: “In former times, God, being without form or body, could in no way be represented. But today, since God has appeared in the flesh and lived among men, I can represent what is visible in God. I do not worship matter, but worship the creator of matter Who became matter for my sake . . . and Who, through matter, accomplished my salvation.”

In other words, the Incarnation makes art, too, a holy thing, just as it made the body a holy thing. The artists who have painted the Nativity throughout the centuries were not creating idols. Their visible representations are hymns of praise to the invisible God made visible.

Look at any of the classic Nativity paintings and marvel at the care taken with the tiniest details. Every animal in the stable is an individual creature; every straw in the manger seems to be drawn with infinite care. Of all the biblical scenes artists have loved to paint for centuries, the Nativity is the one that seems to provoke the most thorough delight in the simple pleasure of drawing things. It seems as if God is in every detail.

How celebrating Christmas protected the doctring of the Church of God becoming Man -Incarnation

This is a snippet from the site, way of the (Church) fathers

In the earliest days of the Church, Christmas was not one of the important feasts. Jesus’ life was still a living memory, and His extraordinary resurrection rightly occupied the central spot in the calendar. But as time went on, false teachers began to deny the fact of Jesus’ humanity. They claimed that Jesus’ body had been an elaborate disguise, that, in reality, God had never debased Himself by taking on human flesh. Later heretics denied also that Mary gave birth to the Word: instead, they said, she gave birth to a “vessel” into which the Word was later poured. Still other heretics believed that the Son was a subordinate being — divine, but not coeternal with God the Father.

All these heresies had one thing in common: an unwillingness to face the apparent foolishness of the Incarnation. Arius, the founder of the Arian heresy, was an eminently reasonable man. He denied the doctrine of the Trinity because, he said, three cannot be one; that’s elementary arithmetic. The infinite God cannot become finite man; that’s elementary philosophy. Therefore there could be no Incarnation.

Heretics like Arius wanted to spare God the unreasonable indignity of being corrupted by too close an association with humanity. It was the same problem the Pharisees could not get over: If this Jesus is so good, why does He associate with sinners and tax collectors? In fact, though the heretics would have insisted that they were defending the perfection of the Deity, they were actually denying the perfection of God’s love. Love, after all, can seem unreasonable. Anyone who values another as much as oneself seems entirely unreasonable.

It can hardly be coincidence that the celebration of the literal, historical birth of Jesus the carpenter’s son began to take on more importance just when the true faith was most dangerously beset by these flesh-denying errors. The scandalously human birth of the Son of God was the very thing that separated orthodoxy from heresy. Celebrating that Nativity committed the Church to a clear statement of principle.

Taking Christ out of Christmas

My friend over at Random Thoughts seems weary of the materialism and stripping Christ out of Christmas. I share in her grief. we all have to rechristianize the present times. If we don't non-Christians who love santa claus will paganize it

We have to be leaven in the dough. We are the salt of the earth and if salt loses its taste, what use is it?
I think if each one of us tries, we can in our own way rechristianize the culture. Cakes, Trees, Creches are all important to make this culture christian. It is the popular culture of Santa Claus and red caps that we have to wary of.

This time, I put up a tree for the first time. I put two gifts under the tree for my family.

The whole point is the love that shows through your efforts. You clean your house, you put up a tree, you make a crib, all this because you care about Christmas and to invite Christ into your house. But this is secondary to the grace we ought to receive by preparing all Advent through reflection on scriptures, Regular confessions to make His paths straight as John the Baptist proclaimed.

I think Christmas becomes Xmas when people simply want to drink or party without thinking that Jesus is the reason of this season. When Jesus is the reason of this season, all things fall in place and get a perspective. The tree symbolizes love, goodwill togetherness, guiding star,ringing bells. The star symbolizes the star that guided the kings, the crib helps us contemplate on the nativity. A defenseless baby a sleep in a manager who controlled the stars in the universe. (Archbishop Fulton Sheen)

When Christ is kept in Christmas like you said, all other things are for glory of God. Perhaps the pagan culture we have to take caution of is people simply waiting for Christmas for just another party with Santa Claus, red costumes, snow, snowmen et cetera. But moved with the joy of Christ, Santa can be a great way to gift your family and enjoy a cake ;-)

December 24, 2009 11:27 PM

What makes us Human

I was speaking to some good men on a train. They were speaking about how the terrorists who have killed innocents should be hanged. One of them argued, "Why the formality of having them undergo a trial procedure" We have all seen them shoot people ruthlessly without any sign of remorse or guilt. We can just execute them without the whole thing wasting time in court procedure"

I said to them that "each individual has a right to a fair trial". Some of them looked at me in disbelief. One of them said that they [terrorists] were not humans but animals if they could kill innocents. And animals didn't deserve a trial. These men in my company didn't perceive the terrorist as men like the rest of us. Somehow they are ignorant of the extent of evil. The extent of evil that man is capable of because of the reality of evil and not so much because of the reality of the nature of Man

While I could easily argue the popular defense that if we execute them without determining their motive for their crime and offering them a right to their defense, there is no difference between us and them. If they are animals for taking away something of us without rhyme or reason, we are no different from them who have snatched away their chance to defend themselves because we are angry they have taken away our life without asking us.

Life is very sacred but we are guilty of defiling its sanctity too when we have no value for their lives simply because they don't have any for ours. We can change the way they think but in case if we are unable to, do we believe any less in the value of human life to take their lives away because a few don't agree with us on the sanctity of life and have turned into terrorists claiming many more lives than we will ever be taking by a few executions that we will eventually deem as righteous actions?

And why do their lives still hold any value that we are to respect them and consider them our equals, those that kill without reason while even killing with a reason wasn't bad enough?

Somewhere deep inside this brings up the question: what makes us human? Is it to share? Why even animals in a community often do that? Is it to love? Why even animals love their offspring and caress them. Although animals have a share in this nature to love and share, there is something distinctly radical about what makes us human. And this is the ability to be compassionate, to feel guilty and to repent. It is our ability to ask for forgiveness, mourn for our wrongdoings and seek to make amendments where we depart from animals.

And therefore, a criminal no matter how ghastly his crime can be sentenced to life imprisonment or even capital punishment due to various reasons according to the degree of his crime or his presence as an endangerment to society. But he ought not to be executed on the grounds of ceasing to be a human. Who decides when a terrorist ceases to be human? What is the measure for inhumanity? A thousand lives? Ten Thousand lives? Is it a measure of numbers?

For until the last breadth of his life, there remains a chance for him to repent and to feel human again contrary to what his crime makes him believe. And human as we are too, we cannot extinguish the hope that he may, for all the crimes he has committed, for all the bloodshed, for the torment, for the cruelty, still seek his conscience and repent and establish what makes us human.