I can imagine I am a soul in Hell, and God in His mercy is saying to me, “Return to the world for this year and on your manner of life during the year will depend your returning to Hell or not.” What a life I should lead! How little I should think of suffering, of mortification! How I would rejoice in suffering! How perfectly each moment would be spent!
COMMENT: The thought of Hell is an unpleasant one. Yet the Gospel contains numerous references to the possibility of eternal damnation – if we want to ignore this aspect of the Gospel we would end up deleting quite a lot of the Gospel texts!
The mental exercise in Fr Willie’s quote today is a very valuable one as we start the new year. If we knew this was to be our last year, how differently we might live it!
However, our eternal destiny does not depend on how we live this year, but how we live this moment. We cannot change what we have done in the past, and we are not guaranteed the future – we may not live to see the end of the year! Not even the most powerful or wealthy individuals can prevent death or guarantee that they will be alive tomorrow. Fr Willie always emphasised the importance of the present moment, and of doing our duty well. This is the ordinary discipline and penance that we are all called to follow.
Great call to wake up in the above messages…If we only knew and were totally convinced of God’s personal love for us, we would be different-holier- persons. Our weak recognition of how much God loves and cares for us holds us back from being who He wants us to be. Instead of being who we wish we were in the eyes of man, or who others think we are…rather, who are we called to be by the One Who created us? That’s the key point. If we are striving to do be our best, to be the who God has created us to be, in all the many moments of our day, we should have no feat of being lost. We already belong to God, and when He calls us from this life, we are His, slipping away from this earthly city to the Heavenly one.
Father Doyle, please pray that we remain enlightened with the knowledge of the depth of God’s care and compassion for us as individuals, and to be strengthened in our will to live in the Presence of God, constantly sustained by the awareness that He personally and always, loves us deeply; it is in this awareness that we live with the goal to serve Him, and so in return, to express our love for Him.