The Great Hope

by Fr. Roger Landry - May 14, 2010

One of the most memorable events in St. John Vianney's life occurred the first day he was on the job as pastor. He was near the completion of the 20 mile journey from Écully to Ars walking alongside a cart transporting all his possessions, which consisted of a few clothes and the books and bed left to him by Fr. Balley. As he, his former housekeeper and the cart driver were approaching the village Fr. Vianney would one day put on every map, a heavy mist covered the landscape such that they no longer could see where they were going. They stopped, lost. Eventually, Fr. Vianney heard some young shepherds playing in the distance as their sheep grazed. He approached and asked them the way to Ars. One of the boys, eight year-old Antoine Givre, pointed out the direction he needed to go. The grateful priest replied, "My young friend, you have shown me the way to Ars. I will show you the way to heaven!"

47 years later, Antoine Givre testified during Fr. Vianney's cause for canonization that, even though he did not make much of the priest's memorable line as a boy, Fr. Vianney had in fact had in fact spent 41 years in Ars making good on that promise.

Fr. Vianney understood his whole priestly life and work as showing others the path to heaven — and not just indicating it to them, but helping them get on that "narrow, hard way that leads to life" (Mt 7:14) and guiding them to the eternal finish line.

Yesterday, we celebrated the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord Jesus, when he who had come down from heaven in order to make heaven possible for us, returned home triumphantly to prepare a place for us. The Ascension is an occasion when all of us are called to meditate upon heaven, reignite our desires for it, and reorient ourselves definitely toward it. St. John Vianney spent his priesthood assisting his people to "seek the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God" (Col 3:1). He can help us, too, like he helped Antoine Givre and so many others, to find our way home no matter how thick the fog of life or how lost we are along the way.

With the exception of Jesus in the Eucharist, the Curé of Ars preached more about heaven than about any other subject. Even when eternal life was not his explicit topic, he would often conclude his sermons, catecheses, confessions, school visits, home visitations, correspondence and even brief, random encounters with strangers in the village by stating, "I finish by wishing you all the good that heaven contains, which is God himself!"

The reason why references to heaven inundated almost all his interactions was because heaven overwhelmingly inundated his thoughts. "The Christian's treasure is not on earth but in heaven," he said, "and so our thoughts ought to be directed to where our treasure is." His mind was ceaselessly directed to that treasure that rust cannot corrode or moths destroy, and he sought with all his being to help others recognize that they were heirs of that same treasure, one easily worth selling all they had and were to obtain (Mt 6:20; 13:44-46).

He considered that his greatest pastoral challenge was to help people lift up their hearts from material goods, lesser loves and fleeting preoccupations to hunger for heaven and for the things that matter most and last forever. This is the perennial challenge for pastors.

Pope Benedict, in his 2007 encyclical on Christian hope, Spe Salvi, vividly described how earthly attachments constitute one of the biggest obstacles to Christian faith and life today: "The question arises: do we really want to live eternally? Perhaps many people reject the faith today simply because they do not find the prospect of eternal life attractive. What they desire is not eternal life at all, but this present life, for which faith in eternal life seems something of an impediment."

He said that rather than living according to the "great hope" of eternal life with God, we preoccupy ourselves with "lesser hopes" that cannot ultimately satisfy. "Young people can have the hope of a great and fully satisfying love; the hope of a certain position in their profession, or of some success that will prove decisive for the rest of their lives. When these hopes are fulfilled, however, it becomes clear that they were not, in reality, the whole. Our contemporary age has developed the hope of creating a perfect world that, thanks to scientific knowledge and to scientifically based politics, seemed to be achievable. This seemed at last to be the great and realistic hope that man needs, capable of galvanizing — for a time — all man's energies. In the course of time, however, it has become clear that this hope is constantly receding."

Pope Benedict said that these lesser hopes are not all bad, but even the best of them are insufficient. "We need the greater and lesser hopes that keep us going day by day. But these are not enough without the great hope, which must surpass everything else. This great hope can only be God, who encompasses the whole of reality and who can bestow upon us what we, by ourselves, cannot attain."

With his words and contagious yearning for heaven, Fr. Vianney tried to make eternal life attractive. He sought to help his people develop this "great hope" and acquire a deep burning desire to live in an eternal communion of love with God.

He preached about how the joy of heaven will surpass all our longings: "If one interior consolation in this world makes us taste so much sweetness, if it rends our crosses so light, if it makes us forget them, if it even makes martyrs find pleasure in the midst of the cruelest torments, what will heaven be like?"

He described how eye has not seen, ear has not heard, and mind has not even imagined the joy of heaven (1 Cor 2:9). "We can never form a true idea of Heaven until we shall be there," but he tried to help them, both negatively and positively, to grasp some formulation. First, negatively: In heaven all the evils that can make man's life on earth burdensome will be absent; there will be "no more death no more sickness, no more sadness, no more pains, no more grief!" Second, positively: There will be total happiness because the "love of God will fill and inundate everything Our heart will be lost, drowned in the happiness of loving God."

It seems as this positive image of heaven had a deep influence on Pope Benedict, who himself in Spe Salvi said that eternal life is "like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time — the before and after — no longer exists."

The thought of heaven would often send Fr. Vianney into near ecstasy in the pulpit. He would begin to contemplate that in heaven we will see God face to face and then he would get caught up, for up to 15 minutes at a time, in joyously and repetitively exclaiming, as too good to be true, "We will see him! We will see him! O my brothers! Have you ever thought about it? We will see God! We will see him who is totally good! We will see him as he is, face to face! We shall see Him no longer through the darkness of faith, but in the light of day, in all his Majesty! We will see him! We will see him!"

Most happy of all, he added, is that we will see the good God forever, without any risk ever of losing him, without any danger that that happiness will ever be taken away.

Helping his people develop this burning yearning for heaven was the first part in his plan to show them the way there. The second stage was to guide them along that path by inspiring them to seek it concretely, day-by-day, in a holy life. That we'll take up next week.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.