Uh. Uh. Not true. Who makes the decision about whether you go to Heaven or Hell? You do. Because God gave you the gift of free will, the ability to choose to say "Yes, I love God and can't even think of living without God," or "No, I reject God." God doesn't impose God's Will on us, any more than any human being can force us to love or choose him or her to be intimate with. Don't forget - Heaven is our ongoing life of living with God and the rest of creation in relationship. Our priorities, the way we live our lives, is abundant evidence of whether we are already living with God or living without God.
Of course, that doesn't mean that we can't "lose" God or "lose" Heaven (which is living united with God and creation) just as we can lose any relationship by not being attentive to someone, not caring deeply, not orienting our life around that person. When the Someone is God, our best and only response to God is "I love you better then life" and then living that way! God comes first for us in all things and all ways. And what does God desire that each of us chooses to do? To heal the world, as individuals, and as Church. Jesus wants and needs to continue His miraculous work through us - our hands, our feet, our intelligence, resourcefulness, creativity, heart, and, yes, guts. If we are totally involved in continuing the Mission of Christ, through prayer and individual hard work and working with others in community, we catch a glimpse of Heaven - concretely beginning in our own midst as we help people change their lives.
We know that Jesus wants us to serve our neighbors. And the Christian Church has had a great track record at doing just that. Pascal-Emmanuel Gabry gives us a history lesson:
"Christians in the Roman world had longer life expectancies than their non-Christian peers, a fact that can be largely attributed to the church's welfare system, which was the first organized and professionally run welfare system in recorded history - in other words, a radical, world-changing innovation. It is attested by both Christian and pagan sources that Christians in antiquity provided health care lavishly to their own and to others; it is less often noted that in the process they literally invented the hospital, another rather important innovation.
"It is also less appreciated that the era that dawned on the ruins of the Western Roman Empire was an era of enormous technological innovation, incubated and completely powered by the Silicon Valley of the day: monasteries. The historian Lynn White Jr. has shown that monastic innovations in agricultural technology - like the wheeled plow, the horse harness, the nailed horseshoe, and three-field crop rotation - caused an agricultural revolution....
"The agricultural revolution fueled a population boom, which in turn fueled a centuries-long economic, cultural, artistic, and technological boom, including the invention of the university." (from the article "What Catholics Can Learn From Silicon Valley," "America" magazine, December 25, 2017.)
The Church - which includes every Christian - is inspired, empowered, fueled by the Holy Spirit, created to lead and to be innovative, not retreat or regress into being a timid by-stander. Continued attacks on Christianity, coming from all directions, can and probably have given us an inferiority complex. But we need to stay true to the vision and mission of Jesus. And there are examples today of people using Spirit-led, innovative techniques to begin quietly changing and healing the world. Gobry gives us a fascinating example: French Diocesan priest Rev. Patrick Giros, who is using innovative techniques with the ministry he founded in 1981, "Aux Captifs la Liberation" ("Freedom to the Captives") to re-invent social work. Gopbry describes this radical ministry to society's "lepers" like the homeless and prostitutes:
Should secular scientists, businessmen, and investors be taking the lead in how this world - its people and creation itself - is approached and dealt with? Shouldn't the Church still be leading the way - because the Church believes in healing and humanizing and the dignity of the human person as well as the God-ordained value of the planet itself? Can we once again become involved as leaders in the sciences and the arts, and allow the Spirit to rekindle in us the vision and ambition of St. Paul, who set out to change the face of the planet - and did?
We each may feel as tiny and ineffectual as a seed. But do we allow God to feed and water us? Do we see that our one seed is part of a huge garden of fruits and vegetables - the Church? Gobry reminds us, "The point of the parable of the mustard seed is not that the kingdom is a very small thing; it is that it is a positively enormous thing that grows from a very small thing. The 'tree' that can grow from Captifs' miraculous seed is the wholesale reinvention of social work, all over the planet. The Spirit is generous in seeds, but (to mix parables) Catholic complacency and moral cowardice is rocky soil indeed."
What we need to remember is that when we choose to love God, we choose to love all that God loves - with God's boundless caring. Through the Body of Christ we are interconnected with all that is. We cannot go to Heaven alone, for if we love with God's love, our love energy touches and affects a million people and parts of creation in our lifetime, and our love energy continues past our death.
Don't waste too much energy worrying about whether you're going to Heaven or Hell. Instead, say every day "I choose God" and then energetically pour yourself into whatever work to build up the Kingdom that God puts into your life - through the life experiences that happen to you daily. Gobry says,
"We should expect God's grace to lead not only to holiness, but also to greater intelligence, creativity, and resourcefulness in getting the work of the church done. And through the Spirit we should expect, if we follow Jesus, to accomplish absolutely novel and startling things." Yes, you!
And - stay true to who God calls you to be. Perhaps you lead a quiet, hidden life; then do everything and greet everyone with great love. Perhaps you are too weak or sick to accomplish much physically; then heal the world through your prayers.
“I understood that every flower created by Him is beautiful, that the brilliance of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not lessen the perfume of the violet or the sweet simplicity of the daisy. I understood that if all the lowly flowers wished to be roses, nature would no longer be enamelled with lovely hues. And so it is in the world of souls, Our lord's living garden.”
― Thérèse de Lisieux
YOUR JOB: WORLD HEALING!