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Why
be so strict? We’re only human, and we all make mistakes. God is love,
so God will forgive everything in the end anyway.
 es, through the ages God has promised
us salvation through forgiveness. And, in the fullness of time, He fulfilled
this promise by redeeming us from our guilt through the life, death, and
resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ. But redemption is one thing, and salvation
is something else entirely.
Redemption
Redemption (sometimes
called justification) is God’s gift to us. It’s a gift,
unmerited on our part, that pays the mystical penalty for our
Original Sin. This penalty, which no man can ever
pay, and which even obedience to the sacred Jewish Law cannot erase, was
paid through the sacrifice of Christ. As Saint Paul said, “Christ died
for our sins in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Corinthians
15:3):
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Through his
suffering, my servant shall justify many,
and their guilt he shall bear.
Therefore I will give him his portion among the great,
and he shall divide the spoils with the mighty,
Because he surrendered himself to death
and was counted among the wicked;
And he shall take away the sins of many,
and win pardon for their offenses. |
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—Isaiah 53:11b–12 |
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Salvation
Christ’s sacrifice of Himself
bought pardon for the sins of the whole world; redemption, therefore, is
given to everyone.
But unless we accept that
gift of our own free will—through
repentance of our sins, through
baptism, and through continued repentence and
confession of sins committed after baptism—and
put that gift into action through a holy
lifestyle, we will suffer the damnation of eternal separation from
God.
Our salvation from eternal
damnation, therefore, depends on our willingly accepting the gift of our
redemption; as Saint Paul admonished us, “work out your salvation with
fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12b). Thus to achieve salvation we
must change our lives accordingly, turning away from our old ways of sin
and faithfully keeping the commands Christ gave us, through His own example,
so as to live as God created us to live: in pure
love and holiness.
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Come now, let
us set things right,
says the LORD;
Though your sins be as scarlet,
they may become white as snow . . .
Let the scoundrel forsake his way,
and the wicked man his thoughts;
Let him turn to the LORD for mercy;
to our God, who is generous in forgiving. |
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—Isaiah 1:18, 55:7 |
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Baptism and
Betrayal
Now, in the early Church, baptism
fully affirmed this radical change in life.
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Or are you unaware
that we who were baptized into Christ were baptized into His death? We were
indeed buried with Him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ
was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in
newness of life. |
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—Romans 6:3–4 |
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But in today’s world, just
about everybody has forgotten the real meaning of
baptism: our death and burial to a life of
sin, and our rising into a life of
holiness. Most of us, however, are baptized as
infants, and then we proceed on a lifetime of
indoctrination into the unholy ways of the
world around us. We live in the world, blind to its
corruption; we live not as exiles in this vale of
tears but as eager competitors for all the material “salvation”
the world has to offer.
And Christ knew it would come
to this. Time and time again, throughout the Gospels, He warned us about
the “weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth” that will occur
on the last day, that terrible day of judgment. Those who, like a fearful
servant, bury the graces God gives them—instead
of burying their lives of sin—and have not increased the value of what
is entrusted to them, will lose everything when the master returns and demands
an accounting (Matthew 25:14-30).
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 One day, on account of some
fault which I had committed, my Divine Master gave me the following lesson.
“Learn,” He said, “that I am a Holy Master and One that teaches
holiness; I am pure and cannot endure the slightest stain. Therefore, thou
must act with simplicity of heart and with an upright and pure intention
in my presence. Know that I cannot endure the least want of straightforwardness,
and I shall make thee understand that, if the excess of My love has led Me
to constitute Myself thy Master, in order to teach and fashion thee after
My manner and according to My designs, nevertheless I cannot bear tepid and
cowardly souls, and, if I am gentle in bearing with thy weakness, I shall
not be less severe and exact in correcting and punishing thy
infidelities.” |
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—Saint Margaret Mary,
Autobiography, 51. |
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So, in the end, just as the fearful
servant of the parable held his destruction in his own hands, your salvation
is in your own hands. You have all the
resources of the Church to assist you, but
if you fail to use them, or misuse them, you have only yourself to blame.
If you fail at your salvation because you aren’t willing to
sacrifice everything for it, out of
pure love and
joy, as in the parables of the treasure
buried in a field and the pearl of great price (Matthew 13:44–46), then,
sadly, you probably don’t desire it that
much to begin with.
Hell
God is love, and God welcomes
us all into His presence. He loves us as we are, despite our
wretchedness—but those persons who do not
recognize and
repent their sins
reject God’s love for them, and those persons
who reject love have no place in the Kingdom of Heaven. Those who separate
themselves from God in this life by persisting in sin
and refusing to repent it will have no choice but to hide themselves from
God in the afterlife—and that “place” of eternal separation
from God, to which the soul’s own sins condemn it, is called
hell. All souls who end up in hell have no one to blame but themselves.
Their only place is hell, because hell, with all its selfishness and hatred,
is the place of those who reject love.
 Saint Teresa of Avila once
had a terrifying vision in which she saw the horrible place the devils had
already prepared for her in hell (The Book of Her Life, ch. 32, nos.
1-7). As she herself says, she hadn’t committed any grave sins; until
that time in her life, she had simply filled herself with vain gossip and
friendships. What was missing from her life, then? Only love. In fact,
she spent 20 years in religious life before she even began to understand
the real love that is the basis for
salvation.
This tells us two important things
about Heaven and hell.
1. |
Only pure love
can gain us entrance into Heaven. |
2. |
Sin
excludes us from Heaven. |
This means that a legalistic
life that meticulously avoids mortal sin is not sufficient to gain entrance
to Heaven; only a person with a humble, loving
heart, free from pride and
hatred, can be admitted to Heaven. Conversely,
a “nice” person who does great, loving
deeds for others can still be excluded from Heaven by unrepentant mortal
sin.
In hell,
then, the fires of God’s love consume all deception, all lies, all
untruth—in short, all that has rejected love—and leave you, for
all eternity, with the dead reality of your own emptiness. When God says,
“Be holy, for I am holy,” this is not just a call out of sin and
a plea for our acceptance of redemption; it is also a warning: all that is
not holy will be left to hell to suffer the pain of eternal separation from
God.
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I tell you, to
everyone who has, more will be given, but from the one who has not, even
what he has will be taken away. |
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—Luke 19:26 |
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That is, to those who have grown
in love because they have opened their hearts to God, more love will be given
them. But to those who lack love because out of fear of
love itself they have buried it—pushed it out of their hearts with
narcissism—so that it can never increase,
everything they have will be lost. A million dollars, a million soldiers,
a million orgasms—all pride and
self will be found to be worse than useless
on that day of judgment before Christ the King.
Brokenness—and
Healing
“I felt myself burning and
crumbling,” she said, “and . . . the worst was that interior
fire and despair.” Thus Saint Teresa describes an experience in which
the soul “tears itself in pieces.” And lacking any real love for
God to save it, the soul is left to its own eternal
emptiness.
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Is it any wonder,
then, that Christ chose the breaking of the bread to demonstrate to
us the brokenness of human reality? And so
we, in the Fraction Rite of the Mass, continually join ourselves to His
sacrifice, as we acknowledge that He alone, through His holy love on the
cross, can bring redemption and peace to our fragmentation. |
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Now, you can experience this
process psychologically by giving up the worldly
identifications which “glue” your sense of “self” together
in an illusory
identity; as these bonds crumble, you will crumble
into your real
despair. And then you will be able to accept God’s
love, for in emptying yourself of your petty
desires you make room for real
love, and in being filled with love is your
forgiveness and salvation.
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God does not
“overlook” our sins—in fact, quite the contrary: He knows
that our sins will condemn us to everlasting separation from Him if we do
not repent them. But if only we do repent
our sins then God will love us as deeply as if we had never sinned at
all. |
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Of course, you can believe in
Zorba the Greek’s “Flap! Swap!” theory of forgiveness if you
want, and just sit back in smug satisfaction and wait for God to “forgive
everything anyway.” But I prefer to listen to a saint who, at least
eventually, knew what she was talking about.
  
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