At mass today the readings from Daniel, Hebrews and the Gospel of Mark filled me with awe and holy fear. I brought my family to St. Thomas Aquinas parish in Palo Alto where, for over sixty years, Dr. Mahrt's choir offers up beautiful Latin motets to support worship at Mass. The sacred
music flooded my heart with good memories but in the context of the readings, I also confronted a moment of awe I felt many years before. After college, I would meet up with a group of friends, most of them grad students, who were also members of my parish. We had amazing conversations. One night, we gathered in an apartment and listened to Olivier Messiaen's Quatuor de la fin du temps. As did the readings of Mass and the beautiful music today, I was left in wonder over the manifestation of God's mercy in cataclysm, the mystery of divine judgment in human existence, and how everything passes away but the word of the Lord abides forever.
Written and performed in a prison camp during World War II, Messiaen's piece is difficult to listen to and haunting at the same time. Its first performance on broken instruments brought fellow prisoners and guards to tears. Yet, the music ends on a note, not of terror, but hope. Such is the Christian vision of the end of time - not gloom and doom, but a new beginning awaits those who believe in the Risen Lord and strive to realize his victory of good over evil in their own lives.
This vision fulfills what the prophet Daniel saw in 12:1-3. When the prophet contemplated how the Lord works in overwhelming crisis, he saw a power stronger than death. He pondered how in the mystery of extreme distress those sleeping in death's power will awaken to the truth. This should give us hope even for our loved one's who live as if they were dead. If God can wake even those who have died physical death, might He not, in a time of great distress, awaken those who have made spiritual zombies of themselves? Overwhelming distress is revealed in the Bible as the pre-condition in which God reveals the truth about the heart and sends divine help to save all that is good, beautiful and true. At the end of all crisis and distress there awaits divine assistance and judgment, powers that not even death can hold back.
Divine judgment reveals the truth about what we have made of our lives. For our lives are both gift and a task. To say that it is a gift bespeaks its sacredness and eternal origin in God. Our Christian faith helps us see that the Father lovingly contemplates us in His Son's eternal act of thanksgiving. What He contemplates He deems so good that He ordains it should exist. Thus, from the first moment of our conception to this present moment, every interaction of bodily cells and spiritual powers that make up human life are a decision on God's part that it is good that we should exist. The Bible reveals the specific goodness that constitutes our creation - we are God's very image and likeness, each one an unrepeatable instance of His inexhaustible glory in the visible world, a unique glimpse of the eternal immensity of His love and truth.
To be willed into existence as such an awesome mystery is a gift but it is also a task. The task is to stand in thanksgiving to God for our lives and for who we are, to live this out as an offering of love to Him. Love has its own justice and well before Daniel, the Decalogue revealed that not to give the eternal love that brings us for its due evokes divine jealousy. Daniel understands that if we fall short of this task, the judgment will reveal the horror that we have made of ourselves. If we follow love's justice, we rise to live at last more fully what we were made to be but never quite realized in this short time we are given in this world.
But who will lead us to justice especially when we are under great distress? Is it not true that in times of crisis, the priorities of our hearts come out in ways that shock and horrify us? We seem to lack the courage and patience to stay true to ourselves when everything falls apart around us. We need someone beyond ourselves, someone who knows the way, someone to follow. Here, Daniel percieves the greatness of God who knows our plight and has chosen to take our side and to guard us. Daneil reveals that God sends messengers from heaven for this very purpose when the prophet beheld the coming of the great archangel Michael. "There shall arise Michael, the great prince, guardian of your people"
During a time of unsurpassed distress, Daniel sees many are guided to justice by the wise and by leaders who shine with heavenly splendor. This means that in the limits of this world, God sends us messengers to show forth something greater, more true, more wonderful than the exigency of the moment. Michael is one of these - but, as great as He is, God has myriads and myriads of hosts arrayed to fight the battle for what is good, beautiful and true. He is already unleashing them for His work in this world is being completed.
As it was in the beginning, it is now. When Christ cried out from the Cross "It is finished," he was revealing something about God's work in the world. What God did in the beginning has now reached its completion. The second coming of Christ as Just Judge at the end of time will manifest exactly what has been completed in the cosmos and in the heart. The Book of Revelations 10:5-7 teaches "And the angel, whom I saw standing upon the sea and upon the earth, lifted up his hand to heaven, And he swore by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things which are therein; and the earth, and the things which are in it; and the sea, and the things which are therein: That time shall be no longer. But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound the trumpet, the mystery of God shall be finished."
As it ever shall be, it is now. The idea that Time shall be no more and the mystery of God completed in His creation evokes fear in this pos-Christian era. Just as God rested on the 7th Day, the voice of the seventh angel signifies the new completion of his work realized by Christ. Indeed that voice echoes even now and the first sounds of this last trumpet have begun to ring out across the world. Before the Risen Lord, everything from the foundation of earth and sea is being offered to God through the lifting of angelic hands, in an act of heavenly worship. Heaven, earth and sea, the great work of God above, below, in the depths is being unveiled before the Divine Presence and accepted by Him as an offering that is right and just. Disguised under the distress of poverty and discounted by the mighty and the well fed, the glory of God is nonetheless unfolding unvanquished - in human history, in the public square of ideas, the work-a-day world and in the secrets of our lives. In this great act of praise, everything, even time itself, is passing away before the Mystery of God so that the glory of His goodness and truth might be definitively known here below. This act of praise will be so mighty, time will no longer be able to contain it -- and so will pass away into an eternal now.
The fear comes if we are hanging on to the way things are. We grasp for things and people as if hanging on to them will save who we are and provide purpose for our lives. We indulge selfish desires to distract ourselves from the dawning truth. Yet, these pleasures, even the most intellectual, noble and beautiful, never really satisfy. Only the truth can satisfy. We need a meaningful life filled with love because this is where we came from and where we are meant to go. Not to enter the loving truth of our existence is nothing less than a horror.
We must not allow fear of death or fear of the end to paralyze us or turn our heart to despair. Instead, we must find the courage, the inner strength that comes from Christ, to raise our hearts, even in the face of death. Prayer knows this strength and leads a soul past fear and into hope. In Christ, bound to Him by the prayer of faith, we know a beautiful future, one that has already begun in the secret of faith. As catastrophe and tragic sorrow seem to overtake our lives and we suffer the loss of all that we hold dear, something awesome is happening in the world around us, and God has chosen us to be a small part of his great plan.
We were made for a greater love, a deeper truth than anything passing things or time can hold. There is a glory so resplendent that time is pierced by eternity, born into it. We have had those moments - moments where time does not hold us back. The end of time is where that moment becomes fully realized -- where we are most fully ourselves because we finally fully love as we have been loved from before the foundation of the world. So we battle for prayer, for love of neighbor, for love of God even now: We were made so much more than a world without God can hold.
So the Bible and Messiaen have reminded me today that God, under the completing voice of the Seventh Angel, is finishing the transformation of the cosmos in glory. Those who pray know from what is happening in their own hearts that the world cannot hold back his purpose. What is happening in the secret of the heart at the sound of the last trumpet is also happening in the world around us -- even if the world and the heart have not yet recognized this quartet for the end of time.
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