Sometimes, it is not enough to point out all the physical goods God bestows on us. We can easily point to the evils we suffer and ask why they are with us. For some reason, we refuse to believe that we are the cause of those evils. We seem more willing to feel sorry for ourselves than to realize the extraordinary benefits provided in suffering. Is it just to blame God for taking away our pleasure and to call Him a spiteful tyrant because He allows us to suffer pain?
Well, no. What goods truly belong to us? Have we any "goods," any "rights" which are not essentially "gifts"? Have we any right to those same goods when we break faith with the gift-giver and abandon our duty to obey Him? And beyond that―well, things get rather complicated.
Those questions have been answered many times in exactly the same way: We take nothing with us beyond the door of death: all we have has been stored up behind it. We will lose every extraneous thing. We will stand naked before the Eternal Judge to account for every act of ours in this lifetime. None shall stand between you and Jesus, none shall stand beside you except Jesus, and He only as you have stood by Him. This is a frightening thought, and many people rightly shy away from it. It has reduced many great saints to tears; it has caused many to flee in terror, seeking solace in this world instead of repentance for the next. When God reveals His completed Providence at the end of the world, it will not affect us in the same way as when He reveals His plan to each man at the end of his life. The Four Last Things offer a keen image on which to meditate through Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell: my death, my judgment, my everlasting reward or punishment.
I have seen many books on the currency of the end times, many readings of the books of Daniel and Revelation that predict an immediate end to the world. Awaiting the imposition of "the Sign of the Beast" has become some Christians' favourite pastime: they wait to slay the dragon or be slain by it as their ultimate (and sometimes only) act for Christ. Catholics, too, suffer from this disease. They sometimes fear that the Church has become, as Protestants often depict it, the whore of Babylon, the modernist's playground. Unfortunately some of us have not yet accepted that we have been living in the end times since Christ's Ascension. We choose to focus on who or what will cause the Great Return. We construct end-time scenarios that require Christ to act, rather than require us to do so. Such millenarianism implies that someone or something will be to blame for Christ's return, that Christ is waiting for things to get to just the right pitch in order to make a clean sweep of it all and start afresh with the eternal New Jerusalem. In this belief, it is easy to place the blame on someone else. We can always find a sin worse than the greatest one we have committed, or a person we presume is more committed to evil than we are. Surely Christ will come to punish them? Scapegoats are easy to find, but seldom fulfill the demands of repentance. In fact, only one has ever done so, and He chose to bear that burden. Christ does not call us to find and destroy the evilest among our numbers, but to eradicate whatever evil lurks within ourselves as if we were the evilest human living. Then we may call others to do likewise. Most people are burdened by their sins and will not take kindly to those who would add more to their load. On the other hand, concentrating on our own end time, we will find it very difficult to offload our burden of sin onto anyone other than Christ. Remembering our own death should remind us to be grateful to Christ Who added Heaven to the list of Last Things possible for mankind. Remembering His death should dissolve any blame that does not fall on ourselves because He died for each of us!
If we forget His marvelous solicitude for us, we can easily blame others for our suffering. And since we cannot change others, we classify them among the lost who caused Christ's suffering. We make orphans of them, forgetting both our own lost patrimony and the promise God makes never to leave us orphans.
Forgetting that solicitude is the surest means of losing Hope, and as one loses Hope, so hope is lost for him.
True Hope, which is united to Joy, is never lost. We discard it when self-pity forms the bitterest part of loss. When our fields lie fallow, we think it profitable at least to harvest the weeds, rather than uproot them, preparing our fields for the next planting and trusting in God to grant a new increase.
God's love for us is not disproved when He takes away our pleasures; in fact, it is strengthened by suffering. Posit the contrary. If God were truly cruel, He could give us a desire for Joy that would not be fulfilled in this life or the next. But then we must ask: why does He break the illusion before the crucial moment of death? Perhaps He wishes to build the illusion by breaking it once in a while. All right, suppose that is possible. Then why, in the name of all good sense, did Christ come to Earth offering us promises that would not be fulfilled, and suffer a most excruciating death by way of leaving mankind with a certificate of His good Word signed in His own Blood? Could God derive such pleasure from the death of sinners that He would send His only Son to suffer death to entrap them? What folly! What arrogance to think that our sins are so great that God would elaborately disguise this nefarious purpose to effect the death of those He could refuse to create! What device could bring a wrathful God to say
"What pleasure should I find in the death of the sinner...when he might have turned back from his evil ways, and found life instead? . . . The wicked man abandons his wicked ways, and learns to live honestly and uprightly; he wins his life by it. He bethinks himself, and turns away from his evil doings; there is life, not death, for him."? (Ezechiel 18:23, 27-28, Knox)
The wrong answer, of course, lies in denying the entirety of what God has revealed about Himself through Jesus. If God is Goodness, Love, Mercy, Justice, Wisdom, Knowledge, Omnipotence, then we must grant Him a measure of action in some way different from our own. A man may create a thing and do with it as he pleases, regardless of what others wish him to do with it, simply because he made it, and it belongs to him. How can we refuse that same courtesy to God, Who created all things and should be able to dispose of them as He sees fit? Is it a question of rights? Again, what rights do creatures have that are not also gifts?
In fact, I think it safe to say that there are no natural rights before God. Only His magnanimity and solicitude separate us from non-being, only His Son stands between us and death, only His Spirit defends us from damnation. We are not "sinners in the hands of an angry God". What angry God would spare those who had so ruthlessly disowned their parentage?
Jesus brings the sword to Earth to divide those who see God as the eternal despot from those who know Him as our Eternal Destiny. No middle ground exists; we shall all fly to God or from Him at the end of time. So why choose to wallow in the mud? Now, as always, is the time to work! Self-pity is the first and greatest obstacle to self-abandonment. Take heart! The readiness is all. Prepare for the coming of the King!
