Aug 1, 2013 Thursday: St Alphonsus Liguori
that time is short, eternity is long.
What good is all the greatness of this world
at the hour of death?
To love you, my God, and save my soul
is the one thing necessary.
Without you, there is no peace, no joy.
My God, I need fear nothing but sin.
For to lose you, my God, is to lose all.
O God, help me to remember
that to gain all I must leave all,
that in loving you I have all good things:
the infinite riches of Christ and his Church,
the motherly protection of Mary,
peace beyond understanding,
joy unspeakable! Amen.
— St. Alphonsus Liguori
With death, our life-choice becomes definitive—our life stands before the judge. Our choice, which in the course of an entire life takes on a certain shape, can have a variety of forms. There can be people who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and readiness to love, people for whom everything has become a lie, people who have lived for hatred and have suppressed all love within themselves. This is a terrifying thought, but alarming profiles of this type can be seen in certain figures of our own history. In such people all would be beyond remedy and the destruction of good would be irrevocable: this is what we mean by the word “Hell”. On the other hand there can be people who are utterly pure, completely permeated by God, and thus fully open to their neighbors—people for whom communion with God even now gives direction to their entire being and whose journey towards God only brings to fulfillment what they already are.
Yet we know from experience that neither case is normal in human life. For the great majority of people—we may suppose—there remains in the depths of their being an ultimate interior openness to truth, to love, to God. In the concrete choices of life, however, it is covered over by ever new compromises with evil—much filth covers purity, but the thirst for purity remains and it still constantly re-emerges from all that is base and remains present in the soul. What happens to such individuals when they appear before the Judge? Will all the impurity they have amassed through life suddenly cease to matter? What else might occur? Saint Paul, in his First Letter to the Corinthians, gives us an idea of the differing impact of God's judgment according to each person's particular circumstances...: “If any one builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw—each man's work will become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If any man's work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire” (3:12-15).
Pope Benedict, Encyclical « Spe Salvi », 45-46 (trans. © copyright Libreria Editrice Vaticana)
