In the 1st Reading, Isaiah promised the people who lived in the fringes that a light would dawn for them. Christ has come and He is the Light that guides our path to eternal salvation. Sadly at night, we are hyper-lit that we no longer consider light to be a pollutant. We are kept awake and in general, people sleep either too late or barely. Many stay awake hoping to find solace, mostly through their devices or through entertainment or perhaps waiting for tiredness to claim them. Artificial light even though useful or beneficial is not salvific.
Historically, the regions of Zebulun and Naphtali came to symbolise spiritual darkness and as such they were marginalised, more so because of perceived Gentile contamination. These locations became significant as Jesus chose the areas to launch His ministry. It signalled that the prevailing darkness has finally met its match. He is the Light of salvation that breaks through the darkness of despair.
The Gospel is therefore written for us. Christ has come. Christ called the first disciples to follow in His footsteps. To be the light of virtue to the world. Not the light of gossip, not the light of slander and certainly not the light of misinformation but truly the light that draws people to God. Would that not be great?
Perhaps now, we can address the elephant in the room.
We hunger for the Light. More than we realise. We swing and sway from festival to festival as distractions from our otherwise mundane lives. Malaysian or Singaporean cultural festivities are basically relentless as one follows another. We can be shopping nonstop or eating continuously that barely do we stop to think about that eternity where we will encounter the true Light which we are searching for. Interestingly, in talking about entering the realm of eternal light, a person, the other day, asked me about animals. Since living creatures have souls, should they not go to heaven, like us?
My question to the person was “Should there be animals in heaven?”.
The point is that we all want heaven to resemble earth because we are unable to comprehend what the beatific vision is like. The “Visio Dei” is our ultimate good—it is the summum bonum as it is the view of God for in Him we find our perfect fulfilment. When we have reached the beatific vision we are so complete that we will not have any other needs. In other words, we no longer need animals in heaven. To desire to live with your favourite dog or your beloved cat or any of your previous precious animal is to miss the point. That kind of an aspiration is a statement that says, “I don’t think heaven is good enough and it cannot make me complete, so I might need something familiar to help me ‘survive’ heaven.
In fact, one can even interpret this desire to have our beloved animals accompany us as a kind of hunger for the fullness of the Light, the beatific vision.
To those who love your wife or your husband, I have some bad news for you. For those who do not really love your spouse, this might be good news. Why? Till death do you part is the reason. Every sacramental marriage is a sign of the relationship between Christ and His Church. Heaven is where Christ the Head and the Church, His Body are reunited and therefore, in the presence of the reality, the sign disappears. In the presence of the perfect union between God and humanity, we do not need married men and married women with their imperfect unions to remind us of God’s faithfulness to humanity and Christ’s unity with the Church.
Hence, heaven is not a billion times better than earth. The very desire for what is familiar to us, be it a husband, a wife or a dog is to be trapped in a kind of reasoning which thinks of heaven as a degree, albeit, a better degree of earth. But it is not a step higher and definitely not just an improvement. Moreover, what God grants is never to trap us here on earth or in that kind of a thinking. Listen to three samples of our prayers in our liturgy—they are taken from the Prayer after Communion. In the 1st Sunday of Advent: “… for even now, as we walk amid passing things, you teach us by them to love the things of heaven and hold fast to what endures”. In the 2nd Sunday of Advent: “… you may teach us to judge wisely the things of earth and hold firm to the things of heaven”. On 31st Dec: “… that, with the needed solace of things that pass away, they may strive with ever deepened trust for things eternal”. If only we pay attention, the Eucharistic Liturgy is peppered with such wisdom directing us to look for the Beatific Vision.
Jesus is the Light of eternity that we have been created for. God gives us enoughin this pilgrim journey here on earth so that our hunger for the true light may be intensified or deepened. Earth should be defined by heaven and not the other way around, where we try to conceive heaven in earthly terms. It explains how we often dull our search engine by latching on to the wrong things, being held hostage by passing things forgetting that they are meant to help only in as much as we recognise where the true Light is to be found. In another conversation with a young man, I gave him an analogy which we are familiar with. Say, if you had eaten a meal and you are extremely full and I offer you the most delicious chocolate dessert, chances are, it will not interest you because you cannot pack in anymore. Of course, the glutton in us might reason that there is another compartment in the bloated stomach for sweet dessert. The point is, when we have found the Light who is Jesus Christ, nothing else matters. As St Teresa de Avila reminds us, “whoever has God lacks nothing. God alone suffices”. In eternity, the elephant in the room would be a non-question!
