Pope Francis shares a poignant story about his visit to an old man.
"For each one of us the time in which we are able to receive redemption is brief: it is the duration of our life in this world. It is brief. Perhaps it seems long... I remember that I went to administer the Sacraments, the Anointing of the Sick, to a very good elderly man, very good, and in that moment, before receiving the Eucharist and the Anointing of the Sick, he said this phrase to me: “My life flew by”. This is how we, the elderly, feel, that life has passed away. It passes away. And life is a gift of God’s infinite love, but it is also the time to prove our love for Him. For this reason every moment, every instant of our existence is precious time to love God and to love our neighbour, and thereby enter into eternal life." ("Journey With the Pope," Feb. 7.)
If we are Christians, we prove our love for God by living in a personal relationship with Christ. We choose to live the story of our lives through Christ, with Christ, and in Christ. And Christ our Life is the One Whose eternal Life we joyfully enter into when our life story reaches the last page.
We live THROUGH Christ. Christ is the One Who continually prays for all of us, intercedes for us, with the Father. All of our prayers go to the Father through Christ. That is why every great liturgical prayer ends with "through Christ our Lord." If we live through Christ, the Great Intercessor, then our prayers expand to intercession, through Him, for the whole world, for the souls of all the living and the dead, and also for health and renewal for the planet itself.
We live WITH Christ. The story of our lives, that Great Journey, takes us over so many grueling roads leading up to mountains of heady triumph, and down into dark valleys of tragedy and near-despair, through green, pastoral scenes of ordinary days and laughter, and down ice-covered trails of doubt, uncertainty, and grieving inner withdrawal. Christ is with us every moment, walking beside us in companionship, pushing us from behind up steep slopes, shielding us in hours of temptation. He is our Light in the dark valleys, our Water in the broiling deserts, our Nourishment when we are weak with exhaustion, our Shepherd Who tenderly carries us on His shoulder when we are terrified to go further.
We live IN Christ. When we take down the bars in front of our scared, scarred, small hearts, and allow Him to enter into the deepest parts of us, our lives change radically. Suddenly in the greatest of Mysteries, he is living IN us and we are living IN Him. Our lives become, as St. Paul puts it, no longer our own. To live in Christ is to become One with him. As the Church has taught from the most ancient days, to become one with Christ is to become divinized, for He has taken on our flesh so that we can take on His divinity.
To take on Christ's divinity is to Become Merciful Love. To Become Merciful Love in the ordinariness of our lives, in our conversations with and actions toward the people in our lives. Our conversations with and attitudes towards the people we meet on Facebook. Our opinions about the central issues in our Church and in our politics. Nothing in our lives can be separate from our oneness with Christ - His life, His Love, is meant to completely interpenetrate ours.
Love is, in its essence, so ordinary. Just as Jesus chose to be so ordinary. It's the humble glue of empathy that holds everyone and everything together. The woman who makes prayer shawls for the sick. The man who delivers food for Meals on Wheels. The woman who makes phone calls to the lonely. The teen who refrains from making an insulting comment to the person who heckles him on Facebook. The neighbor who walks a child to kindergarten. The one who goes out of his or her way to reach out to someone who is different. As Mother Teresa reminds us, holiness is doing small things with great love. Love that tries to understand lives that don't revolve around his or hers. Love that forgives.
If this sounds sometimes "beyond us," remember that Christ is, above all, our Savior. He is, pre-eminently, the Doctor of our souls. Bishop Robert Barron explains:
"The Gospels are filled with accounts of Jesus’ healing encounters with those whose spiritual energies are unable to flow. Much of Jesus’ ministry consisted in teaching people how to see (the kingdom of God), how to hear (the voice of the Spirit), how to walk (overcoming the paralysis of the heart), and how to be free of themselves so as to discover God.
"Jesus was referred to in the early Church as the Savior (salvator in Latin). The term speaks of the one who brings healing—indeed, our word salve is closely related to salvus, meaning health. When the soul is healthy, it is in a living relationship with God. When the soul is sick, the entire person becomes ill, because all flows from and depends upon the dynamic encounter with the source of being and life who is God.
"We heal the soul by bringing to bear the salvator, the healer, the one who in his person reconciled us with God and opened the soul to the divine power." ("Daily Gospel Reflection," Feb. 7.)
Living through, with, and in Christ opens our souls daily to the Divine Power of God's Holy Spirit. Fr. Richard Rohr describes what life is like when we humbly open ourselves to be instruments of Divine Power:
"There is Someone dancing with us, and we are not afraid of making mistakes....This is a very different experience! We are always and forever the conduits, the instruments, the tuning forks, the receiver stations (Romans 8:26–27). To live in such a way is to live inside of an unexplainable hope, because our lives will now feel much larger than our own. In fact, they are no longer merely our own lives and, yet, paradoxically, we are more ourselves than ever before. That is the constant and consistent experience of the mystics." ("Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations," Feb. 7.)
All of us fear the End of our Story. That's part of being human. Jesus, you remember, knelt and wept for fear in the Garden of Gethsemane. Death is the ultimate Mystery. But, if we fear the End of our Story, it helps to remember the Beginning of our Story. For, our Story begins and ends in God. From all eternity, God our Father and Mother has intended to create each one of us. From the beginning, God has known every page of our story, every twist and turn of our life journey. Every mistake, Every sin. Every love. Every failure. Every success. Every moment of crippling fear, and every time we have overcome fear with love. In spite of all of the sinful and not-so-great parts of our stories, which God foreknew, God still chose to create you and me.
God was and is so in love with us that God wants to live with us for eternity. How can we fear a story that ends in the arms of our Living God?
As Pope Francis reminds us, Life is a precious gift given to us by God - and it flies by: "every instant of our existence is precious time to love God and to love our neighbour, and thereby enter into eternal life."