After a two-month hiatus from podcasting, I’m back in the saddle just in time for Holy Week, and in today’s episode my friend Kale and I continue our discussion of Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical letter on hope — specifically, we read and discuss paragraphs 4 through 12, covering the concept of faith-based hope in the New Testament and the early Church, and the question about what eternal life is.
As I read these paragraphs from Pope Benedict’s letter, I’m reminded of how C.S. Lewis speaks about our longing for our far-off home. In The Weight of Glory, Lewis notices how a future we have never experienced still manages to haunt us by means of some kind of anticipation:
When I attempted, a few minutes ago, to describe our spiritual longings, I was omitting one of their most curious characteristics. We usually notice it just as the moment of vision dies away, as the music ends or as the landscape loses the celestial light. What we feel then has been well described by Keats as “the journey homeward to habitual self.” You know what I mean. For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance. We may go when we please, we may stay if we can: “Nobody marks us.” A scientist may reply that since most of the things we call beautiful are inanimate, it is not very surprising that they take no notice of us. That, of course, is true. It is not the physical objects that I am speaking of, but that indescribable something of which they become for a moment the messengers. And part of the bitterness which mixes with the sweetness of that message is due to the fact that it so seldom seems to be a message intended for us but rather something we have overheard. By bitterness I mean pain, not resentment. We should hardly dare to ask that any notice be taken of ourselves. But we pine. The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory meant good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.
Show notes/resources:
The Still Point in the Turning World – T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton”
The “already/not yet” tension of Christian liturgy and life
“The Sanctification of Time and the Liturgy of the Hours,” Fr. Hildebrand Garceau, O.Praem.
“Demonstrators burn two churches in Chile on anniversary of protests,” October 19, 2020
The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture, Philip Lawler
Dante’s depiction of Judas Iscariot in The Inferno
“I will never lose myself
for that which the senses
can take in here,
nor for all the mind can hold,
no matter how lofty,
nor for grace or beauty,
but only for I-don’t-know-what
which is so gladly found.”
Saint John of the Cross, A Gloss (with spiritual meaning)