I ended my last program with the lyrics of a song entitled “The World Ain’t Coming To An End My Friend, the World Is Coming To a Start” in order to signify that no matter what happens, from a Christian standpoint, our response should be the same. Whether the Protestant evangelists who are predicting that we are at “end times” when God will bring down the curtain on human history and rapture those who are saved into heaven or whether God is using our present crisis to challenge us to repent and reform our ways and thereby move another step closer to the Kingdom of God on earth, the message for us from the scriptures is that we should be working in the fields when Jesus, our Master returns. How he returns remains to be seen. God has a way of acting contrary to our expectations. For example, the Jews were expecting a Messiah who would be a military leader that would defeat all their enemies. Instead they received a meek and humble carpenter’s son who preached love and forgiveness and a Kingdom that was not of this world. 

Years ago, when I was active in a Catholic evangelical group called Majestas that did musical concerts, we used to sing a song entitled “God Is A Surprise!” whose theme was that God often did the unexpected. Its words were:

God Is A Surprise

Moses tended sheep upon a mountain top
He hardly noticed when a burning bush said "Stop!"
"Set my people free, take them to my land."
"That couldn't be my God, " he said, "He'd have a better plan."

Refrain:
Well......., surprise, surprise, God is a surprise.
Right before your eyes, It's baffling to the wise.
Surprise, surprise, God is a surprise..
Open up you eyes and see. (Repeat in last refrain).


People of Israel were looking for a king.
If God would save that way then freedom bells would ring.
Along came Jesus a man who's poor and weak.
"He couldn't be our God,: they said, "He nothing but a fake." (Refrain)

Refrain:
Well......., surprise, surprise, God is a surprise.
Right before your eyes, It's baffling to the wise.
Surprise, surprise, God is a surprise..
Open up you eyes and see. (Repeat in last refrain).

Peter and the rest of that scraggly little band....
They all ran away when darkness hit the land.
Whoever heard of a humble bungling boss.
"He couldn't be our God," they said, "He's hanging from a Cross."

Refrain:
Well......., surprise, surprise, God is a surprise.
Right before your eyes, It's baffling to the wise.
Surprise, surprise, God is a surprise..
Open up you eyes and see. (Repeat in last refrain).

So my advice to you is to “hang loose” and be open to whatever way God chooses to have Jesus, His Wisdom return. It could be literally the way that it is described in the New Testament in which God creates a New Earth and Jesus arrives on a cloud to rules it. My brother, who left the Church years ago to become an evangelical Protestant, believes that Jesus will arrive literally and set up a throne in Israel where he will be available for consultation on any matter that is troubling us. And that is an acceptable interpretation.

On the other hand, the Church, which avoids making specific predictions concerning the when, where, and how this will happen, advises us to use Mary as our model who, by humbly opening up her heart to the Holy Spirit of Truth, became impregnated and gave birth to Jesus, the Incarnate Wisdom of God. Thus, by doing the same, we foster the return of Jesus and the establishment of His Kingdom. Like the frog who decided to swim in my last program, we, who choose to live by struggling individually to act wisely, corporately bring about the Kingdom of God. And this too is an acceptable interpretation since much of the description of the end of the world leans towards a figurative interpretation. For example, it says that there will no longer be any darkness or night. Taken literally, this would mean that the earth would stop spinning and the side facing the sun would always be in light while the opposite side would always be in darkness. The physical consequences of this taken literally would be catastrophic since it would upset all the natural forces on the earth. However, light and darkness, when used in the Bible, often refer to Wisdom and knowledge versus stupidity and ignorance. Thus, Jesus, who is Wisdom, is the ruler of the Kingdom of Light and the devil, who is the Father of All Lies, is the ruler of the Kingdom of Darkness. Under this interpretation, Jesus would not arrive physically and set up a throne in Israel. Rather, he would set up his throne in each of our hearts and rule us from the inside. Then, as the scriptures say, a time will come when God will write His laws on our hearts and there will no longer be any need to teach us or our children His Will. We will know it as we know ourselves. 

As far as I am concerned, either interpretation of the “end of the world” is acceptable to me although I do lean more towards the second one because the first one suggest an attitude of passivity as we wait for God to “end the world” while the second one calls for an attitude of activity as God waits for us to “end the world.” It was stupidity and ignorance that got us into this fix and it seems reasonable that it will take Wisdom and knowledge to get us out of it. However, keep in mind that God is often a surprise.

What really matters is how we respond to our present conditions. Should we pack our bags and wait passively for God to rapture us out of the very conditions to which many of us contributed or, should we accept responsibility for our involvement and roll up our sleeves and start to repair the damage that we have caused?  If the scriptures tell us that we should be working in the field when the Lord returns, then it is obvious that the second option is the one we should take because, if this is the “end of the physical world” then we, like St. Francis, should be doing what we were called to do. And, if this is just a continuation of the historical process that God started at the beginning of time that is leading us to the Kingdom of God, then let’s get busy transforming the world according to God’s specifications. It’s a “win/win” situation because either way, we are doing what God expects us to do. So now, let’s turn our attention to some of the specifics of what God expects us to do, which, generally speaking, is to follow Jesus, His Wisdom.
In previous programs I have analyzed and contrasted two economic systems, Capitalism and Communism, that have sought to dominate the world. Both have good points that we can accept and bad points that we must reject and what we need most is the power of discernment to sort out the good from the bad. In recent history we have seen the collapse of Communism because of its intrinsic flaws and now we are seeing the same thing happen to Capitalism. What we need is a third system that combines what is best in both while eliminating their flaws. And, I believe that this third system is Christianity, which, because of its adherence to the Principle of Subsidiarity, involves Capitalism on the macro or societal level and Communism on the micro or personal level. Let me address what is meant by Capitalism on the macro or societal level and Communism on the micro or personal level.

    The Church, while rejecting the concept of some capitalists that “greed is good” because it leads to the exploitation of our fellow humans, accepts the capitalistic idea of freedom and private property because they are consistent with our concept of God and justice. Our God, who is Love, is a great respecter of the individual’s right to choose, so long as it also involves the willingness to accept the consequences of one’s choices. He is also a respecter of justice which requires that each person should “reap what he has sown” and should “do unto others as he would have them do unto him.” Thus each person is entitled to receive only the work of his own hands, both negatively and positively. However, Christian charity requires and justice demands that he freely share with those who are less fortunate. But that is a choice that he must make. Thus, next to the federal government, the Catholic and Protestant churches are the greatest charitable institutions in the world. And they accomplish this with greater efficiency and effectiveness than any government. Almost every time that the federal government tries to solve a major problem by throwing money at it, a large portion of the money disappears or fails to reach those it was intended to help. That’s what happens when we violate the Principle of Subsidiarity by asking those who are most distant from the problem to assume responsibility for it.

But that is not the most serious problem because even if governments were effective and efficient they still create an even greater problem. When the Soviet Union collapsed a Russian man who had lived through the Communist Revolution of 1917 was asked what was the most serious problem that resulted from the adoption of Communism. He said the greatest problem was that charity disappeared. In other words, people no longer took responsibility for the problems of their neighbors. Instead they referred them to government social workers who were employed to dispense assistance from government entitlement programs. There was no love involved in the giving or any gratitude in the receiving. It was an impersonal transaction totally lacking in humanity. This point was made by two Popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who both opposed the giant welfare states for the same reasons.
   
In an encyclical in 1991 on  “The Vatican and the Welfare State” (Centesimus Anjnus)  John Paul II wrote
“ In recent years the range of (government) intervention has vastly expanded to the point of creating a new type of state, the so-called “welfare state”. This has happened in some countries in order to respond better to many needs and demands, by remedying forms of poverty and deprivation unworthy of the human person. However, excesses and abuses, especially in recent years, have provoked very harsh criticisms of the welfare state, dubbed the “social assistance state.” Malfunctions and defects in the social assistance state are the result of an inadequate understanding of the tasks proper to the state. Here again the “principle of subsidiarity” must be respected: A community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.
By intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility, the social assistance state leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies, which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients and are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending. In fact, it would appear that needs are best understood and satisfied by people who are closest to them and who act as neighbors to those in need. It should be added that certain kinds of demands often call for a response that is not simply material but is capable of perceiving the deeper human need. One thinks of the condition of refugees, immigrants, the elderly, the sick, and all those in circumstances that call for assistance, such as drug abusers: All these people can be helped effectively only by those who offer them genuine fraternal support, in addition to the necessary care.”   This Rock April 2006   p. 32




And in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est,  his successor, Benedict XVI,
“ We do not need a state that regulates and controls everything but a state that, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need. The Church is one of those living forces: It is alive with the love enkindled by the Spirit of Christ,. This love does not simply offer people material help but refreshment and care for their souls, something that often is even more necessary than material support. In the end, the claim that just social structures would make works of charity superfluous masks a materialistic concept of man: the mistaken notion that man can live “by bread alone.” (Matt. 4:4; cf. Deut. 8:3)- a conviction that demeans man and ultimately disregards all that is specifically human.”
This Rock April 2006   p. 32

    In other words, the Church opposes the giant welfare state for two reasons. First, it violates natural justice by taking from one man, without his permission, the “fruits of his labor” to give to another man who may or may not deserve it. Second, it undermines the intimate bond between humans by replacing the role that charity should play between them with an impersonal bureaucracy that operates on the faulty premise that “man can live by bread alone.”

    The reason is that from God’s perspective the whole purpose of human existence is for love to grow. Thus, the needs of others are inducements to draw us out of ourselves so that we can learn the art of self sacrifice, which is simply another name for love. The Church’s position is clearly expressed in “The Song of Thanksgiving” written by a music group known as the Damiens consisting of four Catholic priests. It states:
                    Creation tells a story that began so long ago
                     Of a love that longed to share its life in hopes that love would grow
        The sun repeats each morning… The story is retold
        And just in love’s retelling, new chapters yet unfold.
        Love that’s freely given wants to freely be received
        All the love You poured on us can hardly be believed
        And all that we can offer you is thanks…
        All that we can offer you is thanks…

Thus the criteria for all human behavior is whether it causes love, who is God, to grow or diminish. And nobody states this better than St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:1-3. He writes:
“If I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a crashing symbol. And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; (and) if I have all faith so as to move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away everything I own and if I hand over my body to be burned so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing…. In the end faith, hope, and love remain, these three, but the greatest of these is love.”

And the final word is Jesus at the Last Judgment who is portrayed as separating the damned from the saved according to how well they responded to his need to be fed, clothed, or visited in prison in the guise of their fellow humans. In other words, even though they addressed him as Lord, indicating faith, they had failed to learn how to love.

And a strange thing is happening as our country seeps deeper into economic chaos. People are learning and demonstrating how to love. Every night on ABC News, Brian Williams tells of people throughout the country who are responding by reaching out to those in need. For example, one employer decided to continue to fully pay his laid off workers in two dollars bills with the instruction that they were to spend them in the community in order to keep other business alive. He chose two dollars bills so that people could see them circulating and be inspired by the example. Another employer continued to pay his laid-off workers, for whom he had no work, to perform necessary repairs in the community. Meanwhile our government is bailing out banks and investment companies, like AIG, while top executives continue to throw elaborate parties and pay themselves multimillion dollar bonuses. Why is it that those who have so much give so little while those who have so little give so much? Is this what Jesus meant when he said that it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God? There is a greater poverty than that of money.

Years ago I asked an older neighbor who was an adult during the Great Depression what it was like since I was just a young child at the time. He said that economically things were really rough but people were never closer. He said that he and his wife used to invite neighbors to dinner to share a few meager pork chops. They laughed and joked as they pretended that it was turkey and asked their guest which portion of the turkey they preferred. Is there something that we don’t understand here when wealth and comfort drives us apart and poverty and need pulls us together? Do we act counter to our real needs and happiness as we work to acquire things at the expense or relationships? St. Augustine said, “Our hearts were made for Thee, Oh God, and will not rest until they rest in Thee.” And since God is Love, then it is Love and only Love that can satisfy our deepest need. What does it take to teach us this basic lesson?

C.S. Lewis, an atheistic Oxford scholar who converted to Christianity, wrote a great littler paperback entitled “The Great Divorce” in which he describes hell as a place where you get every thing that you want as soon as you want it. At first one thinks that he has it backwards. Heaven is supposed to be the place where you get everything you want. Then as you read his description of hell, it dawns on you that he is correct.

    The book opens with a line of people waiting to board a bus. It is early in the morning because the first glow of the sun can be seen on the horizon. However, as time passes, the sun never appears because this is hell where the sun never shines. An hour later, the line of people waiting to board the bus, has been reduced by half since arguments broke out among the passengers and the offended parties decided not to take a bus with those who offended them. This seems to be a basic problem in hell because when one first arrives he is told that whatever he wishes will immediately materialize. As the new arrival walks down the main street he see beautiful mansion of all size and description. When he comes to an empty lot between mansions, he decides to wish the one in his dreams into existence. However, as time passes, he gets into arguments with his neighbors about their dog barking when he is trying to nap, or their leaves falling into his yard, or over the property line between them. Since no one needs to make any concession or compromise with anyone else, the disputing parties decided to move further down the road and rematerialize the mansions of their dreams. However, the process continues whenever someone moves next to them. Those that have been in hell for the longest time, live far out on the horizon in total isolation because they were unable to adjust their needs to the needs of others. In do so, they had traded off relationships for things. In other words, being focused exclusively on their own needs and desires, they were selfish and were incapable of love, And hell, according to the Church, is the absence of love.

  The people on the bus, we are told, are taking a trip to heaven. When they arrive they discover that their bodies are transparent in the bright heavenly sun. As they leave the bus they discover that everything in heaven is too solid for their transparent bodies which aren’t even solid enough to bend a blade of grass. In fact, the grass, like shards of glass, hurt their feet. To them, a pebble in heaven weighs as much as a giant bolder, and when they try to dip their finger into stream, their bodies aren’t solid enough to pierce the water. Then they see that the bright sunlight is coming from a nearby mountaintop and coming down the path from it are powerfully built solid people with glowing faces. As they arrive, the people from hell begin to recognize people they knew when they were alive on earth. One woman, who had spent her life pushing her unambitious husband George to be a success, is shocked to discover that he is in heaven. She tells of her attempts to make something out of him when they were on earth and of her disappointment when he died just at the point when he was about to become the vice-president of his company.

She and the others are told that they can remain in heavens if they are willing to give up the behavior that placed them in hell. When she tells them that she wants to stay so that she can finish her make-over of George, she is informed that this was the one thing she couldn’t do. Unable to accept this, she decided to return to hell. A minister who, while on earth, gained great fame for his brilliant argument proving the existence of God, also returned to hell when he was told that he could no longer use the argument since God’s existence was not an issue in heaven. He had built his own self worth around his fame and couldn’t give it up.

Those that decide to stay in heaven were told that they would have to go through the initial pain caused by the solid nature of heaven on their transparent bodies. However, as time passed, their bodies would toughen up and would, like those of the people in heaven, become solid and strong.

There are a number of valuable lessons that C.S. Lewis is telling us in this little book.

    First, hell is a place were the love of things replaced the love of people

Second, all relationships require that we make adjustments to differences  
  that exist between us and others. That’s what love is all about, learning to  
  unite with “the Other” while maintaining our own identity.

Third, if heaven is love and relationships then hell is rejection and isolation and just as love and life are integration, separation and death are disintegration.

Fourth, the solid nature of the grass, pebbles, water etc… in heaven is symbolic of reality or truth

Fifth, the transparent bodies of those from hell represent their inability to 
 deal with reality or truth and that is why they found it difficult to function in heaven.

Sixth, the prerequisite for entering heaven was to accept the challenge and suffering involved in facing reality or Truth, that would transform their semi-real transparent bodies into real solid ones. Perhaps, this is what the suffering in Purgatory is all about.

Seventh, to enter into heaven we must be willing to surrender things that are incompatible with it. The woman had to give up her need to control her husband and the minister had to give up his argument for the existence of God since neither one was permissible or necessary in heaven.

Lewis’ story, like the one about the starving people in the banquet hall,  is just another attempt to understand the nature of heaven and hell and both provide food for thought. The common denominator in most of these stories is that heaven involves love and wisdom while hell involves the lack of love and ignorance. And to the extent that we fail to practice love and wisdom in this earth, we create the very environment of hell.

And that is where we find ourselves now. Our present economic condition is the result of selfishness, greed, and stupidity and, like the people in Lewis’s story, the only way that we have of getting out of the hell we created is by going through the suffering of facing the truth, which is the only thing that can set us free. However, it won’t be easy because, like the woman and the minister, there are many habits and activities that have become rooted in our hearts and we are reluctant to give them up because they have become an essential part of our self identity.

Too often we believe that it is the system that has to be changed when in reality it is our hearts. It isn’t democracy or totalitarianism or Capitalism or Communism that determines our happiness and survival. The Church, in its Wisdom, understands that all systems can be beneficial towards our salvation if we input into them our Christian values. As St. Thomas More once said, “The times are never so bad that a good man can’t live in them.’
But the opposite also is true. The times are never so good that evil men can’t ruin them.The best systems can and have been ruined and corrupted by the lack of these values. The human heart, as John Milton once observed in his work, “Paradise Lost”, is capable of turning a heaven into hell. Thus, what we need is a new heart or, as Jesus said, we need to be “born again” so that we can move from the natural to the supernatural level.

And in order to do this we have to first admit that we share instincts, passions, and drives with the animals in the natural world that underlying a lot of our social behavior. For example, we have the need to defend territory that often leads to unnecessary wars. Consider the dispute between the Jews and Arabs over Israel. Reason says that if they cooperated they could make the desert bloom and improve the life for everyone in the area.

We have a need for social ranking, that often lead  to the domination of the weak by the strong or for corporate executives, who already have enough money for any reasonable needs they may have, to seek exorbitant salaries and bonuses. It seems obvious that money has become a way to measure social ranking and power.  This led Marx to try to eliminate this by attempting to create a classless society through the elimination private property.
We have a need to defend our identity, which cause us to reject things and people that are foreign to us, much as our bodies’ immune system rejects foreign invaders. And this is good and necessary. However, like our body we often fail to distinguish between foreign bodies, like a transplanted heart, that are beneficial and those, like invading germs, that are dangerous to our health.  These often blind instincts and mechanisms are natural and necessary in the natural world but they can become extremely dangerous to life itself when they are connected to our intellectual ability to create, invent, and manipulate nature or when we fail to use our rational powers to evaluate them . As the song which ended my previous program says:
Did you ever get the feeling when you read the paper the world is caving in?
That the animal part of the human heart is finally gonna win?
Well, it just may be that what you see is the growing pains of liberty
And the world ain’t coming to an end, my friend
The world is coming to a start… I feel it in my heart.
The world is coming to a start!

Everyone says when you look about you the world has gone insane
That the heavenly goal of the human soul will perish in the flames
Well, it just may be that what you see is the storm before tranquility
 And the world ain’t coming to an end, my friend
The world is coming to a start… I feel it in my heart.
The world is coming to a start!
 
A commentator makes a grim prediction “The world ain’t gonna work”
That the rational line of the human mind has really gone beserk
Well, it just may be that what you see are the dying throes of apathy
And the world ain’t coming to an end, my friend
The world is coming to a start… I feel it in my heart.
The world is coming to… The world is coming to… the world is coming to a start!
 
             

Thus, in my next program, I will start to address how we, as rational beings, violated our rational nature and created the chaos that we now experience.
Well, I see that my time is up.