By Dr. Dencio Acop
‘The end is just the beginning’, said the presider in last Easter Sunday’s Mass at the Saint Francis in Boston. ‘Think of all the emperors or greats as we call them, where are they now? All gone and never heard from again’, he added. At least not in the sense that they continue to live unless they had souls consecrated to the One and Only Living God. ‘Which is why Christians cannot help having happy faces whenever Easter is commemorated’, preached the good father. For the practicing Christian, death actually means life but only in a different form. A better and most fulfilled form. For death is literally just the beginning. That is the Christian’s hope. Which a none does not have by virtue of his own unbelief. Holy scripture is full of Jesus’ promise to His followers that although the body dies, the spirit will live for those that believe. And that He will go forth and prepare the rooms of His followers in His Father’s mansion which has ‘many’ rooms. But while there is life in death, many of us still prefer death. The death of our souls even while we still live. Even after God sent His own Son to be killed just so we’ll live. Even after the Old and New Testament revelations. Even with the Mystical Body still around and very much alive for 2,000 plus years. Even if God is alive. Not dead.
The Christian story being told in a post-Christian world has it all backwards. Tom Holland gave a brutally honest insight when he asserted that some Christians themselves initiated and contributed to the watering down of the path to eternal life. Using that knowledge of divine revelation from the rock-based church, rebellion multiplied and ultimately led to the secularism of the Divine. Interior conflict gave way to a separation of church and state which allowed the secular to appropriate divinely inspired institutions as its own. ‘Good’ values today are taken for granted as such as if they always were. But fact is that there was nothing ‘good’ as we know it today had they not originated from the moral law and order handed over to the chosen people from above before it spread to the Gentiles. And then to interior hearts when Jesus clarified that the temple of God is not the once holy temple of Solomon but Jesus himself who lives in the hearts of all believers through his spirit. As adopted sons and daughters whose brand is the sign of the cross. And whose mark is love. The true kind. Why the world would not know them. As it did not know Him.
The role of the Christian has never wavered since Christ. Why would it? The church is alive because Christ is alive and lives through it. Vatican II was meant to ‘Christify’ the world as Bishop Robert Barron exhorts. It was not meant to modernize the church as it needs no modernizing. Christ is not meant to conform to the world. But the world is meant to conform to Christ. As the good bishop teaches, the hardest thing about faith is obedience. Limited by our sensual nature, we love our ego-drama more than God’s theo-drama, at least for a time. But unless we depart from our egos, we are headed for self-destruction. Only until we find Christ and cling to him like a cliffhanger can we find salvation. Prayer is the only effective answer to the enticements of the prince of this world: wealth, power, honor, and pleasure. The essential battle has always been between these two. Only obedience to the will of God, no matter what, can deliver us since it strikes at the very heart of this fundamental conflict between good and evil. No wonder that the Little Flower is a doctor of the church. The small way who shunned the world of ego but basked in the glory of humility and suffering. I remember lines from a poem: I once ‘prayed for health that I may achieve ‘great’ things, but was given infirmity instead to achieve ‘better’ things’; ‘I once prayed for justice, then I remembered myself and I prayed for mercy’.