In Catholic Christian understanding, all of human history is geared toward salvation. Humans are trapped by their own sinfulness in bondage to death, but God became incarnate in Jesus and broke the bondage, allowing those who believe in Christ to be saved from their fate of death. Salvation is a gift from God, given not as payment for good actions but as freely given grace.
Unlike some Christian groups who focus on individual election, the idea that God chose in the beginning of time those persons who would be granted salvation, Catholics believe in corporate salvation. This refers to the belief that God grants salvation through the medium of the Church to all who participate in it. Catholics have long affirmed that there is no salvation outside the Church and traditionally this has been understood to mean that all those who are not in communion with the Catholic Church cannot be saved. More recently, though, the understanding of what is means to be outside the Church has shifted: Catholics believe that the Church is the sign of God's presence in the world, that all those who come to God do so through the medium of the Church even when they themselves do not recognize the Catholic Church's role in their salvation.
Catholics see a close connection between salvation and atonement, which is the way that God comes to forgive human sin through the actions of Jesus the Christ. Many theories have been proposed about how this happens, but the two most influential in Catholic understanding are that Christ paid a ransom to Satan and that Christ offered himself as a substitute to God. A number of writers in the early Church, especially Origen (185-254), talked about the atonement as a ransom; they believed that humans were in bondage to Satan, deserving death because of their sins. Since Jesus lived a perfect and sinless life, he owed nothing to Satan but allowed himself to suffer death anyway, ransoming the souls of all of humanity by breaking Satan's claim to own them due to sinfulness. St. Anselm (1033-1109) gave the classic formulation of the substitution theory. He said that humans owe God a perfect life but are unable to deliver it because of their sinfulness. God became incarnate in Jesus and lived a perfect life, meaning that he owed nothing more to God, but he freely chose to accept death. With this action he created such a surplus of obedience and honor that he repaid to God all that humans had been or would be unable to pay. Thus he substituted his obedience for their sinfulness.
Atonement allows God to grant salvation to humans who are not in themselves worthy of it. Salvation is experienced in this life as a reweaving of the human-divine relationship that was broken with sin, and beyond death as a new life lived in communion with God in heaven.
In traditional Catholic understanding, the human retains individuality beyond death and goes on to experience one of three states of being: heaven, purgatory, or hell. Heaven is the place of perfect peace and joy, a place where humans join the angels in having direct knowledge of God and praising God through eternity. It is the hope and desire of all Catholics to reach heaven and exist in this perfection, but they generally believe that most souls are not cleansed enough of sin in this lifetime to be ready for heaven and instead will enter an interim state called purgatory.
Life After Life: What Do We Do for an Encore?
When I was first ordained, I had to give a homily on the Ascension. I wanted to
say something really new, so I sat down and meditated.
My imagination got me so realistically into that scene I felt the dust between
my toes and smelled the other apostles' sweat. Jesus took us up a hill, said
goodbye, and began to rise—about 50 feet in the air (where artists capture it).
Nothing new there. So something impelled me to let him keep going—up, up, like
a rocket in slow gear.
At that point, the left lobe of my brain (where I stored my reasoning equipment
and knowledge of science) began asking unsettling questions of my right lobe
(where I stored my imagining tools and knowledge of religion).
Did Jesus go through the Van Allen Belt? Was he radioactive? Did he sail through
the endless cold of space till he finally came to the thinnest membrane between
the universe and heaven and go through (boop!) like through a self-sealing tire?
And there he was in this great golden city—like the ogre's castle atop the beanstalk?
Beyond time and space, where do they mine all that gold? (Not to mention all
the coal to keep the hell fires burning.) And if Jesus went "up" to heaven from
Jerusalem, an Australian would go "up" in exactly the opposite direction. And
never the twain shall meet. Back to the drawing board.
What Do We Know?
We know so much more about the cosmos than the scripture writers. We know now
the earth isn't really an island floating on the waters, covered by the great
crystal bowl of firmament, beyond which lies heaven. We know that, if God pre-existed
the universe of time and space, God dwells in a dimension of reality where everything
temporal and physical has no meaning or purpose. God has no genitals and thus
is not male. Angels don't need wings to get about. Devils don't sport tails
and use pitchforks.
But how do we deal with realities like heaven, hell,
purgatory and God himself when the only tools we have are our
space- and time-bound experiences?
Maybe Hindus and Buddhists have the right idea. In their view, the Ultimate
Reality does exist, but in such an unimaginably different way from our existence
we can say nothing true about "It" or Its environs. Anything we say about such
a Being is so far from the actuality as to be closer to a lie than to the truth.
You can't even legitimately use the word "is" about such a Being in any remote
sense like the way we use it about anything else we know.
Still, God gave us complex intelligence for a purpose:
to try to understand things, even if our approximations are "straw,"
as Aquinas reputedly said, compared to the Reality. That's why
God made us symbol-spinners, metaphor-makers, trying to make realities
we can't actually see: tiny solar-systems for atoms, a wedding
ring for commitment, a parchment for intellectual achievement
(or endurance). None of the symbols is the reality (thus Jews
and Muslims forbid them), nor even in the remotest sense much
like the reality. But they're a helpful placebo for the inquiring
mind. And if Jesus used analogies to help explain his message,
we're in good company when we try them, too. They help us understand
a bit better something we don't really understand in terms of
things we do. Symbols are (to use a metaphor) like the Ace bandages
the Invisible Man wrapped around himself to be seen. Like trying
to "explain" color to a blind person. "Red is like the burning
sensation of sucking a hot cinnamon jawbreaker." That's not "it,"
but better than nothing at all.
The Hebrew Scriptures try that in the Book of Daniel (7:9-14), about as close
as they get to a "picture" of God, clad in snow-white clothes on a fiery throne,
sitting upon the clouds of heaven. And the whole Book of Revelation pictures
heaven as "the New Jerusalem," the most opulent city the author could conceive.
On the very rare occasions hell arises, the analogy is to Gehenna, where Jerusalem
burned its trash. Again and again, Jesus used metaphor to describe the Kingdom
of Heaven as a wedding banquet where (presumably) no one has too much to eat
or drink, the conversations are never dull, and everybody dances like Fred and
Ginger.
Literary Afterlife
Unfortunately, because we still carry a reptilian brain stem, hell is much
more interesting than heaven (to say nothing of its usefulness to preachers
to panic us to piety). But we owe our "understanding" of hell far more to the
imagination (and prejudices) of Dante and the fervor of Irish Jansenist preachers
than to the meager evidence of the scriptures. The atheist Jean-Paul Sartre
has, for me, a far better re-imaging of hell than Dante: three people who detest
one another forced to share a hotel room for all eternity, without the possibility
of murder or suicide. I can think of at least 20 people I'd do just about anything
required to avoid sharing that fate.
The best re-imaging of the afterlife I know is C. S. Lewis's series of vignettes
called The Great Divorce. It begins in a Grey Town where everything is
grim and everyone surly. But at any time you can take a bus that lands in a
beautiful meadow, a kind of staging-area for heaven, up in the beautiful mountains.
Each one is greeted by a shining Solid One, someone from their past, who tries
to coax them to jettison their self-absorption, be utterly honest, stop telling
lies to themselves about themselves—and believing them, and yield center-stage
to the only One who deserves it: God. Some do, and for them their sojourn in
the Grey Town has been purgatory. Others cling to their narcissism, get back
on the bus and return. For them, the Grey Town is hell. Not the fascinating
sadistic punishments of Dante, just plain boredom, mean-spiritedness, frustration.
But, as Milton says, "Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven."
Even if the scriptures say nothing much (that I can find) about purgatory,
I think plain common sense dictates there must be such a "place." There must
be some purgation (not fire, but like the slow anguish of self-discovery in
a psychiatrist's office) for those who die incapable of joy. People who have
spent lives insulated from others, self-protective and self-delusive, hearts
as hard and pitted as the seeds of peaches. The cranks, the faint-hearted too
afraid of being hurt to love, those who buried their thousand talents rather
than risk losing them. How disoriented would they be in heaven? Like Laplanders
suddenly transported to the Sahara. And common sense also impels me to believe
there must be a hell, for those who simply don't want to be with anyone more
important than themselves. If heaven were a place of light and music and laughter,
you could set them square in the middle of it, and they'd be wretched. "Stop
those damn harps!" And the saved would be so loving they would drive the unworthy
batty. "Stop hugging me!" Even in heaven, they'd be in hell.
Ah, But What of Heaven?
My mom used to say, "Billy, all I want to do is catch
hold of the edge of heaven with my fingernails." After the life
she led, if that's all Mom got, if she didn't get first-class
accommodations, I'm not too sure I want to go there. An alcoholic
old Jesuit who had failed some godawful exam back in the seminary
and was thus allowed only a kind of second-class—kind-of final
vows said to me once, weeping, "Father, to think after I've tried
so hard all my life, I'll have a lower place in heaven than the
fully-professed." Again, if rule makers have the keys of the kingdom,
I suspect heaven is a rather sparsely populated and sterile state
of being.
In Alice Sebold's wonderful novel The Lovely Bones, the narrator tells
her story from heaven where, if she chooses to frolic in the rain, it rains;
if she wants to cavort in the fields, the sun radiates warmth. But she seems
to have an "inordinate" preoccupation with what's still going on back at home
and the capture of her murderer. In Thornton Wilder's Our Town, the dead
sit placidly in straight-backed chairs in the cemetery, gradually letting go
of the world, as the people they love let go of them. Perhaps that's true, that
the recently dead hover around trying to interfere, but I hope that's not the
way it is.
Whatever it is, I find it hard to accept that heaven is static, that we just
sit there with the fussbudgets fine-tuning the triangle of the Beatific Vision.
God has so conditioned us to growth, to evolution, to looking for something
better, that I have a notion (a hope) heaven will be a place of learning more
and more. I'd really like to be able to do all the things I "never had time
for" here, like understanding classical music. I'd like to learn patience and
shed myself of workaholism in order to just sit and fish. (Perhaps that would
be purgatory.) I'd really like to talk to God (or some trustworthy assistant)
about a lot of mysteries I've spent a lifetime trying, vainly, to erode, like
why God created a world in which innocents can suffer, why the Holy Spirit allowed
the Church to be so manifestly imperfect, why my mother took eight years to
die. And both my Teacher and I will have no impatient rush to closure in unraveling
the Truth.
Ignorantly, I used to think the Eastern understandings of the eternal were
soul-suicidal, that the purpose of life, to them, was to eliminate the self
so totally that it would be ready to be absorbed into the Oversoul. Then I read
a sentence that shocked me. In achieving Nirvana, it said, the droplet is not
absorbed in the All; the droplet absorbs the All! That's getting closer to less
unsatisfying.
Look to the Light
I believe the nearest approximation we can get to the Ultimate, to heaven,
has something to do with light. Science says no reality can be faster than light.
But science delights in playing "what if." What if there were a Reality faster
than light? It would be so hyper-energized, it would be at rest. Like God. So
incredibly fast, it would be everywhere at once. Like God. And if you break
open the tiniest kernel of matter, what do scientists say you will find? Non-extended
energy, like God. When I had my most intense encounter with God, I could describe
it only as "like drowning in light." So many who return from near-death experiences
describe it as seeing some trusted figure incandescent with light.
Perhaps the dead are something like neutrinos, particles with no discernible
mass or electrical charge that whiz all around us, at every moment. They pass
through the whole earth without being slowed down. (This is hard science now.)
If neutrinos were intelligent and caring and full of joy, perhaps they may be
like the dead, zipping around for the sheer zest of it, like children. And if
they now live in a dimension unchecked by time and space, where God dwells,
they can be anywhere they choose—closer to us now even than they were in this
life!
All this is, of course, supposition—imagination working on the facts that heaven,
hell, and purgatory exist. But if Dante and Lewis and Sartre can do it, why
can't you and I?
But whatever heaven turns out to be, it sure isn't going to be some majestic
panoply planned by liturgists or sitting on clouds twanging harps. Whatever
gives the best part of you joy, that's what it'll be. If you love babies, you
can take care of all the new ones who arrive. If you love to sing and dance,
do it and never drop. But what about me? My great joy is to tempt people to
really live. But that'll be all taken care of. Maybe I'll just fish, and dream
up questions to ask God, like why do we have an appendix, and has there ever
been an unkind librarian, and is there a planet somewhere where unicorns gambol
in the sun? Or be a purgatory teacher. I'm equipped.
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