We look at this world like looking at the bottom of a carpet. We do not see what reality really is.
We see a horizontal materialist world of utility, aimed at minimizing pain and maximizing pleasure. But that’s a lie. This world is vertical, primarily supernatural, for the purpose of saving our souls through suffering.
The Catholic and Christian worldview is radically different than that of the contemporary worldview. The former is the truth, the latter is a lie.
You look out at a sea of telephone poles, billboards, gas stations, and restaurants driving home from work, identifying that landscape as reality. But it is not.
Rather, God, the order of the saints, angels, heaven, purgatory, hell, and this life which the Bible calls a valley of tears, a spiritual battle over souls, this is reality.
How we look at reality is not how the Saints looked at reality. Today’s man wakes up wanting six pack abs, to earn six figures, to have a 3000 square foot house, and to be esteemed wherever he goes.
The Saint wanted nothing to do with worldliness, with the city of man so to speak, with avarice, or with pleasing society. They were glad to escape to a cave, a hermitage, or a monastic cell, not because they loved suffering for its own sake, but because they knew the truths of the Catholic Faith to be real.
The Saint looked inward and upward. What they interacted with outwardly was solely for what they were seeking inwardly and upwardly. And eternally.
We sit at the red light at an intersection in our cars as if there are only cars and humans on their way home, listening to music, taking in the AC, staring forward waiting for the light to turn green, as if that is all there is. We don’t see that for every person at that red light there is an angel and a demon fighting for their soul.
The demon is wanting to cause accidents, sudden premature deaths, and no chance for final repentance. The angel is wanting to guide the driver to be safe, to pray ceaselessly, always in preparation for their death final judgment which can come at any moment. The latter is reality, the former is not.
I read the other day about a young, despairing Canadian woman, quadriplegic, mother of two, who suffers chronically very badly. Because of Trudeau and the Canadian government, she can now be euthanized, which she is scheduled for in a few weeks, spending her last days promoting a faster process to physician-assisted suicide.
Her view of reality is false, diabolical, and will almost certainly result in her being damned to hell, in a matter of days descending into eternal fire and torment, infinitely more agonizing then her current state. She is trying to escape her suffering which is impossible, but would end up after dying in an immeasurably greater suffering, that never ends; whereas, if she would hold on in faith a relatively short period compared to eternity, she could have eternal life. Pray she changes her mind, for her soul.
The truth is, the realty is, her life is still beautiful with intrinsic value. Her suffering offered rightly to God has more value than any successful career or lifestyle. When she simply offers her daily pain to save her soul, and that of others, especially for her children, to accept her state as God’s will, from the point of view of God, that is reality.
But our world will look at this woman’s life purely from the false view that this life is for this life, not purely for the next, or at all, and conclude she has no true quality of life, to encourage her suicide. Suicide is rampant today, pop culture making light of it, or even glorifying it all the time in movies and lyrics.
When society believes the value of life is determined by the pleasure principle, then it has already given up on life because the truth is most of our waking day we constantly suffer in one way or another. Few if any really float by in a psychological state of comfort and practical bliss, including the wealthy and powerful. I would dare say nobody does, that being a myth.
Our society believes falsely that the reality of life is that we are here to live as long as we can, as pleasantly as we can, and that the value of each person’s timeline is determined solely or mainly by achieving those goals before death, in terms of this life. Deep down at times I’ve believed this lie. It’s a hard lie to give up.
But the value of this life is purely and absolutely measured by whether or not we are in the end saved. It is basic math, and math does not lie. Since the afterlife is infinite, but this life is finite, then no matter how great or long a person suffers, how unimaginable that might be, and that includes a quadriplegic patient enduring their condition for decades, that suffering is in comparison to eternity nothing, whether eternity is spent in heaven or hell.
It is impossible to fathom eternity. But consider an analogy. Let’s say God gives you a choice. He says if you will suffer a really bad case of the flu for one week, lying in bed feeling like you are dying, which is how I feel when I get the flu, then you can live in a state of bliss for 1 million years. The other choice is to give up on your life and die, therefore bypassing the week of the flu, but then you’ll burn in a culdren of oil for 1 million years, basic math and common sense dictates the first choice. Even that much more when comparing a finite period of time suffering to infinity.
When you have perfect happiness in heaven, from that point of view, of faith in the truth of heaven, then all crosses in this life are bearable with grace, and of infinite value for what they merit. Yet when suffering leads instead to grave, unrepentant sin, that relatively small suffering earns an eternity of unending suffering. That never ends.
Reality is hard to accept, for me included, which is why I’m writing this post as much for my own reflection reading back on it, as to speak the truth in faith. Reality is reality. When we were born into this world we didn’t create God, He created us. He and His divine order is reality.
The way He created and set up creation is reality. His plan of salvation is reality. No matter how much we would otherwise want the secular, hedonistic, this-world view of reality, that isn’t the reality.
This isn’t a horizontal, materialist reality the purpose of which is for everyone to strive for earthly comfort and then everyone eventually goes to heaven. It is a vertical reality in which we are either walking the false, wide road of this world down into hell, or the true, straight and narrow road upward to paradise.