Heaven Is Not So Far Away

EWTN, Global Catholic Radio, and St. Joseph Communications proudly present Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. This 50-part series was recorded on phonograph records in the 1960s, and the sound quality is sometimes limited, but the Word of God spoken by Archbishop Sheen is timeless. And now, here is Archbishop Fulton Sheen. Peace be to you. I believe there is a popular song entitled, I'm in heaven when I'm near you. Now that indeed may be a kind of heaven, but it is not the kind of heaven, however, to which we aspire. In order to understand heaven, though it is in eternity, we must nevertheless begin by talking about time. Heaven is outside of time, but we have to use time to get there. It seems almost like a paradox. First of all, why must heaven be outside of time? Simply because none of us would really want on this earth a kind of an endless existence. If it were possible for us to live 400 years with some new kind of vitamin, do you think that we would all swallow them? There would certainly come one moment in our existence when we would want to die. Have you ever been in any one place on this earth that you are absolutely sure would be one in which you would want to spend every day of your life? It is not very likely. The mere extension of time to most of us would probably be a curse instead of a blessing. Can two of you ever notice that your happiest moments have come when eternity almost seems to get inside of your soul? All great inspirations, certainly, are rather timeless, and that gives us some suggestion of heaven. Mozart was once asked, when he received his inspirations for his great music, he said he saw them all at once. There was a great heat, a great warmth, a great light, and then there came the succession of moments, or rather the succession of notes. So it is in writing a speech. When I prepare a talk or a telecast or begin writing a book, there comes a moment when the end is seen at the beginning. One cannot write fast enough. Eternity is in the mind, and time is at the end of the pen. Words do not come out fast enough. Lacordaire, the great French preacher, was once asked if he had completed his famous sermons to be given in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and the answer, yes, I have finished them. All that I have to do now is to write them. Then there comes to everybody, whether he's good or bad, some dim intimations of immortality, which his Wordsworth wrote about, but will happen after death. There are, however, so many men who try to immunize themselves from those thoughts of eternity. They put on a kind of a God-proof raincoat so that the drops of his grace would not get through to them. They shut out eternity. I wonder if anybody has ever described this better than T. S. Eliot, entitled The Men Who Turn From God. It is a poem about those who busy themselves with everything in time and never give a moment to the stranger. The stranger who has been knocking at the gate of their soul almost every day, the stranger who made them uneasy in their sleep, for at night there are dire dreams of immortality. To get to the poem of T. S. Eliot, O weariness of men who turn from God, to the grandeur of your mind and the glory of your action, to arts and inventions and daring enterprises, to schemes of human greatness, thoroughly discredited, binding the earth and water to your service, exploiting the seas and developing the mountains, dividing the stars into common and preferred, engaged in devising the perfect refrigerator, engaged in working out a rational morality, engaged in printing as many books as possible, plotting of happiness and flinging empty bottles, turning from your vacancy to fevered enthusiasm for nation or race or what you call humanity, though you forget the way to the temple, there is one who remembers the way to your door. Life you may evade, but death you shall not. You shall not deny the stranger. The stranger, the one who brings eternity into your soul. Though we live in time, make much of it, think about time only, it is actually the one thing that makes happiness impossible. Simply because you live in time, you cannot combine your pleasures and your joys and your happinesses. You cannot make a club sandwich of pleasures. The mere fact that you are in time you cannot march with Napoleon and march with Caesar. You cannot sit down to tea with Horace and Dante and Alexander Pope. Because you are in time, you cannot enjoy winter sports and the seashore simultaneously. Time demands that you take all of your pleasures successively. And time not only gives them to you, time also takes them away. Thus if you examine your own psychological intuitions and experiences, you will discover that your happiest moments are those when you were never conscious of time at all. When you were in school or perhaps in your office, you look at the clock. You were not enjoying the school, you were not enjoying your work. Maybe you are attending a concert or enjoying a conversation with friends. Possibly you may be reading and you say, time passed like anything. The less conscious you are of the passing of time, the more you enjoy yourself. There is a hint of what heaven must be. It must be outside of time where you can possess all joys at one and the same full moment. Well, that's the condition of happiness. But though it is outside of time, you have to use time in order to get to heaven. Now, we too often think of heaven as being way out there. We draw all kinds of pictures about heaven. Most of them are quite unreal. And because we think of heaven and even hell as something that happens to us at the end of time, we keep on postponing it. As a matter of fact, heaven is not way out there, heaven is in here. Hell is not way down there. Hell could be inside of a soul. There's no such thing as dying and then going to heaven. Or dying and going to hell. You're in heaven already. You're in hell already. I've met people who were in hell. I'm sure you have. I remember once attending a man in a hospital and I asked him to make his peace with God. He said, I suppose you're going to tell me I'm going to hell. No, I said, I'm not. Well, he said, I want to go to hell. I said, I have never met in my life a man who wanted to go to hell, so I think I will just sit here and watch you go. I did not intend, of course, to let the time pass without doing something, but I was absolutely sure that if he had a few minutes to himself, he might change his point of view. And so I sat alone with him for twenty minutes. I could see him going through a kind of a soul struggle. And then I, he said to me, you really believe there's a hell? And I said, do you feel unhappy in the inside? Are you fearful? Is there dread? Anxiety? Are all the evil things of your life coming up before you as a specter, as a ghost? Well, it was not long until he made his peace with God. And so I've seen people with heaven in them. If you ever want to see heaven in a child, look at that child the day of his first communion. If you want to see how much love is related to heaven, just look at a bride and groom at the altar on the day of the nuptial mass. Heaven is there. Heaven is there because love is there. I've seen heaven in a missionary nun. Yes, a missionary nun who was spending herself and being spent among the lepers. Sometimes you see a virtuous young person, and you see heaven there. The beauty of such a person is not put on the outside. It is a kind of an imprisoned loveliness that comes from within, as if it were breaking down the bars of flesh in order to find some outward utterance. So heaven is here, just as hell can be in the soul of some. Now, as a matter of fact, heaven is very close to us because heaven is related to a good life in somewhat the same way that an acorn is related to an oak. An acorn is bound to become an oak. He who does not have heaven in his heart now will never go to heaven. And he who has hell in his heart when he dies will never go to hell. We must not think that heaven is related to a good life in somewhat the same way that a gold medal is related to study, because a gold medal need not follow study. It is purely extrinsic to study. Whether heaven is related to a good and virtuous life in just exactly the same way that knowledge is related to study, one necessarily follows the other. And hell is not related to an evil life in the same way that spanking is related to an act of disobedience, because spanking need not follow an act of disobedience. As a matter of fact, it rarely follows disobedience today. Perhaps there are some people who are listening to me who may have to ask their grandparents what spanking is, but I will tell you what it is. Spanking is a pat on the back which develops character, provided that it is given often enough, hard enough, and low enough. So hell is not related to an evil life, therefore, as spanking to an act of disobedience, but rather in the same way that corruption is related to death. One necessarily follows the other. Therefore, heaven is not just a long way off, and we are not to postpone it. It's here. That is to say, it begins here. Hence, those people who deny hell by saying, well, I believe we have hell in this life, are quite right. It starts here, but it doesn't end here. Heaven starts here, but it doesn't end here. We just get faint glimpses of it now and then. But if we postpone the thought of heaven until the moment we die, we will be very much like the Israelites during their wanderings in the desert. The poor Jews were at one time within about eleven days of the Promised Land. It took only three weeks for them to make the journey from Egypt to the Promised Land, but because of their disobediences, their failures, their backsliding, their rebellions against Moses, it took them about forty years to get into the Promised Land. And that forty years represents a pilgrimage of the life of most of us. We make progress and then we slip back. Thank heavens we have a merciful Lord who puts up with us and forgives us. Seventy times seven. And therefore, time is necessary in order to gain heaven. But the lapse of time itself does not bring me to heaven. What brings me to heaven is how I live, how I die. And we are not to think either that just one particular act is the sole determinant. We are determined by the habits of our life. For example, a great pianist may sit down at a piano and strike a wrong note, but you will say, oh, well, he has the habit of being a very good piano player. If I sat down to a piano to play, I might hit a right note, but you would say, he can't play. I remember once hearing a comedian sit down at a piano and talk to a famous artist, and he said to him, striking one note, if you know so much about music, tell me from what opera is that note? Well, that's the way my playing would be. I would not have the habitus, I would not have the virtue, I would not have the goodness of artistry in my soul. Now we come to what our Lord said about heaven. Oh, he said many things about it, but there is one moment in his life that I think is very precious. It was the night of the Last Supper. Here our blessed Lord gathered about him all of his apostles, poor, weak, frail men. He washed their feet, and he was facing death, the agony in the garden, and that terrible betraying kiss of Judas, and even the denial of Peter himself. One would think that all of his thoughts would be on himself. Certainly when we have trials, that's what we think about. And our blessed Lord, he thought about them. He saw the sadness in their faces, and he said, be not troubled. Do not be sad. I go to prepare a place for you. In my Father's house there are many mansions. How did he know about the Father's house? He came from there. That was his home. He was the kind of prodigal son that left the riches and happiness of the Father's house to come to this earth. And to waste the substance of his life riotously on our salvation. Now preparing to go back home, he tells them about the Father's house, and he said, I go to prepare a place for you. God never does anything for us without exceeding preparation. He made a garden for Adam, as only God knows how to make a garden beautiful. And then when the Jews came into the promised land, he prepared the land for them. He said he would give them houses full of good things, houses which they never built. He said that he would give them vineyards and oil, which they never planted. So he goes to prepare a place for us. Prepare a place. Why? Simply because, well, we actually were not made for heaven, we were made for earth. And man by sin spoiled the earth. And God came down from heaven in order to help us remake this earth the best we could while we are in it. But then after having redeemed us, he said that he would now give us heaven. So we got all this earth and heaven too. Oh, do not say that we work to go to heaven because we're mercenary. Man loves a woman, asks for her hand. Is it because he's mercenary? I love poetry. There's no money in it. I love tennis. I play tennis twice a week. Do I do it because it's mercenary? I do it simply because I love it. Now something that we must remember too about heaven is that heaven is social. It's a fellowship. In some places, heaven is called a country to indicate its vastness. It's called a city to suggest the number of its inhabitants. It is called a kingdom to suggest order and harmony. It's called a paradise in order to tell of its delights. And it's called the Father's house to indicate its eternity and its permanence of love and peace. Now in order to be perfectly happy after the end of the world, we will have to have our body with us. Because our body has done a great deal for the salvation of our soul. There we will meet in the fullness of the communion of saints all of those who were our friends on earth. Husbands who have been grieved in time of the loss of a wife, who find a wife. It's hard to lose friends after a time. Two hearts grow together. And death is not just the separation of two hearts. It's the tearing asunder of one heart. Cicero wrote a book in his latter days entitled An Essay on Old Age. It was a poignant story of his heart at the loss of his daughter, Tullia. He said that after his death on his way to the Elysian fields, if he met someone who would ask him, do you want to go back to earth, he would say no. I don't want to go back to earth because I want to go ahead and converse with Plato and Socrates. And we have many, too, with whom we would like to converse. I would like to see Plato, Aristotle, Moses, Thomas Aquinas, the one on the right. I would like to see you, too. I'd like to see you particularly because you have spent so much of your time listening to me. I cannot tell you what it is. I can only ask you to go back and just think of some great moment in life when you really enjoyed the thrill of living. And then to go back and think of some great moment when somebody told you a truth or you made a study of a great mystery and finally understood it. And then to go to another moment of your life when you had a great ecstasy of love and you wanted it to go on and on and on. Now suppose you could take this moment of life, raise it up to a focal point where it became the Father. Take this truth, lift it to infinity until it became the moment of the ecstasy of truth aimed at the Son. And take that moment of love and eternalize it so that it became the Holy Spirit. Well, that would be some dim suggestion of what heaven is. It's perfect life. It's perfect truth. It's perfect love. I'm not afraid of going to hell. I'm only afraid of losing love. That's all. That's divine love. That's Christ. The reason I want to go to heaven is because I want to be with love. Oh, there will be surprises there. Many of them. First of all, there will be many people there who we never expected to see there. And then there will also be a number of people absent who we thought would be there. And finally, there will be one great surprise. The greatest of all, that you and I are there. I will see you in heaven. God love you. This is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen on EWTN Global Catholic Radio. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © BF-WATCH TV 2021