The Stakes of Fall and the Fate of Souls

Fall is a season of high drama and high stakes.  The air carries its first chill, and the leaves make their vivid goodbye.  Hunting and harvesting characterize our participation in the natural cycle, where nourishing and growing were our priorities not long before.  Halloween, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day set the tone of our celebrations.  Our children run around dressed like skeletons or sugar skulls or even little horror-movie murderers.  Everything speaks to us, if we dare to acknowledge it, about the nearness of death.  It’s actually a thought especially worth keeping in mind as we Americans face fall’s other great drama–that of our elections.

Memento mori is a familiar Catholic concept: the idea that meditating on the relative briefness of life is a healthy tool for perspective.  The troubles of this world do not seem too overwhelming, nor its pleasures too important, when we remember that the moment when we will each account for our lives to Our Lord is near.  It is that moment which will determine our happiness eternally, as opposed to any fleeting happiness here.  However, more and more, we Catholics tend to act as if our eternal fate were somehow distanced and detached from our individual daily actions.  It’s that, my friends, that has me more scared than any halloween villain.

To mitigate this worry, it’s safer to face facts now than to have to account for ignoring them later, and fall brings up an unavoidable one.  When we vote, we bear responsibility for the agendas we helped put in place.  That means if voting for a politician helps institute an evil, whatever other positive qualities that politician might have had, we still just helped institute an evil.  There is no evil quite comparable to the murder of defenseless children, and yet, a shocking proportion of Catholics are clearly voting for politicians with pro-abortion and even blatantly pro-infantacide platforms.  Even our president claims his Catholic identity and promotes these goals, so it is clearly an issue of confusion.

How is this happening?  My guess is that a number of Catholic voters, if they genuinely have some remaining faith in the realities of heaven and hell, are saying to themselves, “What’s the real harm?  I’m sure God couldn’t possibly punish innocent babies.”  Yes, I’m absolutely sure of that too, but this reduction may still have real, tragic consequences for the souls of those victims and for our own souls.  I’m concerned because the saints teach us that the eternal outcomes of heaven and hell are not only a pass/fail issue of reward and punishment.  They are indeed that, but besides the infinite separation between the two, heaven and hell also involve multiple degrees within, each reflecting the delicate involvement of our desires and our wills.

St. Teresa of Avila, for instance, tells us that once we reach heaven, we will realize that we would gladly have endured "all the trials of the world until the end of it," just to have risen a single degree higher.  However, after our deaths, our ability to make the choices that lead to our eternal fate comes to an end.  Thus, this life is but the briefest opportunity to, with the exercise of our free will, demonstrate to God just how much we desire Him and His will or how much we prefer ourselves and our own.

I think of us in this life a bit like puppies at a pound.  If I were choosing a puppy to adopt from a litter, I wouldn’t arbitrarily stuff one in a sack.  I would let the litter play freely.  The puppy who, when given the option to do whatever he willed, consistently ran to me with waggly tail, happily obeyed when I gave a command, and made mighty efforts to plant slobbery kisses on my nose, would naturally be the first puppy I would take home.  He’d sleep closest to my bed at night because that’s what would make him happiest.  To the one who wanted less of my company, I would give the freedom to have less of it, and perhaps that puppy would prefer sleeping in the kitchen.  To the one who growled at me and bit, I would allow the freedom to reject me, though that would meant that, sadly, I could not adopt him.  It seems that God does something similar.

St. Therese, the little flower, reminds us that this life is our opportunity to show God how much we love Him.  After that, she tells us, He says, “now it is My turn!”  He showers us with the infinite and eternal joy of Heaven when we do so little in our finite lives here.  The real joy of heaven, we will realize when we’re there, is not the beauty of the beaches or excellence of the cocktails (at least that’s what I imagine), but our nearness to the presence of God.  Like the puppy at the foot of my bed, the closer we’ve desired to be to Him, and the more we’ve demonstrated that desire, the closer we will be.  That’s the nature of the degrees of heaven.  It is a loss not to realize that in this life, when we can consciously make and act upon our choice.  

This understanding, or its lack, both impacts our souls and should affect our logic with regard to the souls of the unborn.  How did we get to this point of confusion?  First, with regard to our souls, those of adult voters, I suspect we accept a narrative something like this: “If I’m basically a good person, even with my foibles, I’ll end up in heaven in the end, because between heaven or hell, I’m generally more deserving of heaven, and it’s a pass/fail question.”  This narrative does a good job of ignoring what heaven actually is–friendship, intimacy, and union with God in His presence–and the role of our desire and will to have any part in it. 

 This perspective is, basically, “aiming for purgatory.”  With it, we accept sin in our lives.  To be perfectly clear, we are all sinners, and the girl writing is an absolute prime example!  However, there is a difference between being a sinner, repenting as many times as necessary, and striving, with God’s grace to constantly improve, and being a sinner and deciding that a certain kind or degree of sin is acceptable, presenting God with it, and saying He’ll have to accept it in you too.  God is wildly, inconceivably merciful, but we can’t forget that His mercy requires repentance.  This is another way in which He lets our free will unveil what we truly desire.

Yes, it may very well be the case that even dying in some degree of unrepented sin we ultimately reach heaven after whatever purgation we may need, but why aim for purgatory and not heaven?  Purgatory is there in case we aim for heaven and miss, but when we make purgatory our goal, what is left when we miss?  I’m an avid archer, and I’d never aim outside the bullseye.  The secondary rings on a target are there as a safety, not as a goal.  I get very afraid when I see my brothers and sisters, who I love, gambling with eternal stakes by taking a shot at the “secondary ring” of purgatory.

This exploration also leads me to consider how the thinking behind of the exclusively pass/fail reduction of heaven and hell might affect unborn souls when we tell ourselves that we do them no eternal harm by endorsing their murder.  Again, those who say that God in His justice can’t possibly punish such perfectly innocent souls are absolutely right.  They forget, however, that heaven and hell are not places of equal degrees of reward and punishment.  They are places in which we choose our standing through our actions here.  

Now, there is a great mystery to how God’s deals with the souls of the unborn in His immense mercy, and I don’t pretend to know what we cannot.  However, there are some things we do know about heaven, and they’re worth taking into consideration before we assume that aborting a child does him or her no eternal harm.  We know that heaven isn’t the same for everyone, so merely asserting that aborted souls go to heaven can still mean some loss.  Heaven is a different place for each soul according to the degree they chose, in this life, to love God and to demonstrate their love for Him in their actions.  Aborting a child denies him or her the opportunity to make these choices.  

Yes, an aborted child dies in perfect innocence, and thus deserves no punishment.  In fact, they must deserve some recompense for the injustice of the violence done to them and the life they were denied.  However, what reward do they deserve?  What unique place would they have earned in heaven had they lived the life they were meant to have, free to choose God or reject Him, and made choices to love Him?  How does God treat a soul when it never showed Him what it wanted and He, in his astounding love for us, is so reticent to impose His own will of intimacy upon us?  This is one of the mysteries with which we must wrestle.

One of the great wonders of God’s mercy is that He ensures everyone in heaven is as completely happy as they have developed the capacity to be.  No one is unhappy, and certainly not beautiful, innocent victims of violence.  What breaks my heart is that the souls of the unborn may have had a capacity that was never developed to fullness because they were denied the exercise of their free will.  If this is true, they do not suffer in the least because of it.  However, we who take that potential from them, still, I fear, commit an eternal injustice against God, robbing from Him what would have greatly pleased Him.  We do the same when we fail to reach our own potential in love by ignoring the consequences of our choices now.  This fall is a time to reflect on the fate of souls indeed.