We also should not concentrate on yearning for heaven so much that we forget to live now.
Oh, we yearn for heaven all right. Eternal rest, eternal peace, free from strain and pain, infinite love and beatific joy without end. Sounds lovely. But that is then, and this is now. God gives me this life, this corporeal life, the here and now, with these joys and these sorrows. It behoves me to be warmly grateful for His having given me life at all, whatever that life brings, and to seek every opportunity it gives me to serve Him and His beloved creatures, my brothers and sisters, as well as the beautiful world in which He has placed us all - in the here and now.
Oh, it is most certainly not easy to love the people around me as I should. Too much of the time they are irritating, tedious and burdensome. (Just as I am to them.)
God, though, loves them and asks me to do the same, although 'Love my neighbour' is no guarantee that my neighbour will stop being irritating, tedious and burdensome. Doubtless, he will carry on being all those things. Thank heaven I am commanded only to love him, and not to like him. I simply can't do that, and it's no good pretending that I can, or even might, some day. Not going to happen.
But liking and loving are two different things, and God does not ask the impossible.
Liking is a matter of personal preference. God does not have personal preferences. Or rather, He does, but His ways are not our ways and God's preferences extend to... all whom He has brought into being because He loved them from all eternity.
Loving means wishing for and often working for the good of the other as other, as himself, not as I would wish him to be. As the tedious and irritating and burdensome so-and-so he has always been. As God does, who loves the unlovely and the loveless and the thoroughly unlikeable. (Like him over there. Hmf.)
I expect that Samaritan was in a hurry to get to his appointment further down the Jericho road. The last thing he would have wanted was delay because of some chap lying in the gutter, beaten up and robbed... and needing him to stop and help. He may have muttered strong words about 'the ****** ******* who did this' as he got off his donkey and went to the aid of the wretch at the roadside. I daresay he'd have looked at his watch, if he'd had one. But love, caritas, for this man he did not know and might even have disliked had he known him, overcame his concern for himself and his affairs, and he abandoned his plans until he had seen to the needs of the wounded stranger. That's love, love for a man he could neither like nor dislike - a stranger. Liking did not come into it.
Sometimes, it is not even easy to love our own life, here and now, either. It is too often full of care and pain. There are days when we could wish it would all just... stop. A very sick woman, close to the end of a long and sorrowful life, said to her priest, 'Oh, Father, I am sick to death of this dreadful life. I believe in God and in his love and in heaven and I pray to go there if He will have me. I so want to go now. Why can't I?'
This question is asked by millions of suffering souls, and we have no comforting answer. Only that God gave us our life and only He has the right to dispose of it, no matter how desperately, on occasions, we may wish it were not so.
On the Cross, the Son of God Himself must have wanted to die, to end the agony. His poor mother must have prayed minute to minute for Him to be released from the pain. But as with our own lives, even Christ had to leave the final moment in the Father's hands and cling only to His faith in the Father's eternal love.
For some of us, our very lives - and the suffering of those we love - can be our crosses.
God our loving Father, give us the grace to see that as the Incarnation gave your own Son a human life, a life which lead to death on the Cross, and let us see that He now takes up our lives, our crosses, into His own, and will transform us as He was transformed, and that we shall be raised to new life as He has been.
Stay with us, Lord Jesus Christ, for darkness is falling and night will soon come, and we cannot live or love without You. Give us the grace to live now as you would have us live and, in your own good time, bring us to you and wipe away our tears for ever.
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