All this talk again about the end of the world can seem quite far fetched and far off, unless we put ourselves into it. The Lord has told us that every stable feature of earthly life is suddenly going to become unreliable. Oceans will devour continents and celestial bodies will make strange signs to us. There’ll be nothing by which we can ground and orient ourselves. Into the depth of our profound disorientation from all the cosmic chaos will come the Son of Man. At that moment, there will be such a sense of relief: at last, the Son of Man is here; at last, he puts an end to this trouble; at last, there is a future worth having.
For the moment, we can let that active sense of relief at the Lord Jesus’ glorious presence drive our preparation for him. Just call to mind for a moment what it is that you’ll feel most relieved from when Jesus comes: we can be up against the daily grind, a fractious family, awkward social or work life, sickness, and mortality. The Lord’s coming lifts all of that away; the Lord’s coming brings us peace. Let that desire for peace now shape our desire for the Prince of Peace, because it’s a different thing to want peace than to want its Prince.
There are lots of ways to want God: through toil, hurt, loneliness, pain, and grief. All of them are based in some kind of misadventure, some kind of unwanted experience: busyness, injustice, isolation, suffering, and death. It’s not selfish to want God through those times. In fact, each of these can become a prayer. But we need to be aware that there’s another way to want God which doesn’t depend on our misery.
It’s so important that we want God for the best reasons, for the purest motives. Why? So that we will keep on wanting him even though our circumstances change. We simply must have a desire for God which corresponds with his unchanging essence. He is unchanging, and so ought our desire for him be too. The goal is simply to become the kind of people the Lord tells us to be: in the midst of calamity and chaos, we stand tall and look towards heaven.
The great saints described their desire for God not as a wanting unpleasantness to be over. Some of them embraced tremendous suffering and didn’t seek to evade it. They often described their desire for God as hunger and thirst, constant feelings which never cease no matter how close they came to him. Scripture gives us the sayings, “My soul thirsts for you” and “My body pines for you like a dry weary land without water.” Scripture and the saints had the active sense of relief we know well, but they didn’t think peace came from stopping suffering as much as it comes from receiving God and being received by him.
So, my prayer for you is the Apostle Paul’s: may God confirm your hearts in holiness. May the holiness which God has given you be strengthened, growing more potent in your life to assure you of his unchanging presence through all that life gives. May that holiness, the sure sign of God’s presence in you, make you steadfastly desire him only more and more. We cannot affirm the drowsiness, drunkenness, and distress which blunt our sense of the sacred. Neither laziness about God’s honour nor panic about his judgment will do anyone any good. Life is too short not to want God.
But God’s holiness confirmed in you will make you rise above the changes this life presents. Let there be nothing which prevents you being taken to the Father by the Son of Man, who is not simply coming but coming for us. May he confirm your hearts in holiness. May he assure you that you are his and deepen the sense of relief and peace until you appear with him in his glory. For he is our daily bread, our living water, and our eternal home.
Fr Paul Rowse, OP Parish Priest
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