The Kingdom of Heaven

“From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

Matthew 4:17

Christ’s peace and Our Lady’s love be upon you, brother. As I pondered on what to write to you, my mind wandered to when Our Lord first spoke to the multitudes, after contending with and defeating the devil in the wilderness. Then he preached only two things: Repentance and the Kingdom of Heaven. This battle cry that first was uttered by Christ’s standard-bearer, John the Baptist, is at the very heart of Christendom. It is the motivating force of all Catholic action and thought. It is no wonder that when Our Lord Jesus chose to send forth the apostles on mission, again He ordered them preach only one thing: “And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand.”ⁱ Heaven was in the tongue of the apostles when they preached throughout Judaea. The sweetest of words! The word that was in the heart of St Francis before his death, making him capable of singing with joy and wonder: “Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death, from whom no living man can escape.”ⁱⁱ Who else nowadays sings such praise to Sister Bodily Death, awaiting anxiously for her embrace, so as to reach the pearly gates and his reward? Who will one day again like St Catherine of Siena eagerly run towards the possibility of martyrdom only so she might sooner be with her Beloved in His Kingdom?ⁱⁱⁱ When I read the lives of the saints, these acts of ferver seem mad. Dangerous, even. Unhealthy! Sadly, my instincts are far less healthy than the most trivial impulses of these saints. For what these saints had that befuddles my modern sensibilities is nothing other than a love for the Kingdom of Heaven. As I thought about these things, it became evident what the subject would be of my first letter to you, what subject needed more pressingly to be talked about. The Kingdom of Heaven. Why, that was a good place to start… In fact, it was more precisely the only proper place to start. We must preach the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven.

But what is the Kingdom of Heaven anyway? St. Paul says mysteriously of it: “But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.”^iv A concept, it seems, unreachable to us mere humans. So why even attempt to explain it? Maybe it’s best not spoken of other than in the amiable platitudes we are most used to. But St. Paul himself seems to go against that notion in the very next verse when he says “But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.” So it is through the Church and Her teachings, through the Saints and their testimony, through the Word and His bounty that we may understand the Kingdom. From here we turn then to Pope Benedict XVI, that he may give us some understanding of the concept: “Jesus himself is the Kingdom; the Kingdom is not a thing, it is not a geographical dominion like worldly kingdoms. It is a person; it is he.”^v The Kingdom is therefore more than simply a place, but God himself made manifest before us, first in the flesh, through his Church, and finally in the Beatific Vision, in what we call Heaven. Both are extensions of the Kingdom. To understand the proclamation of the Kingdom of Heaven is thus to understand the very Gospel. It is to understand the end God has for us and the powerful means by which he brings them about. But what does it profit us to speak of this, you might protest. Why is this subject so central that it be the first thing preached by Our Lord and the only thing he asked his apostles to preach in their first mission? And of more relevance: Why does it matter to us today? Peter Kreeft expressed it best when he said “It is surely a Satanic triumph of the first order to have taken the fascination out of a doctrine that must be either a fascinating lie or a fascinating fact. Even if people think of Heaven as a fascinating lie, they are at least fascinated with it, and that can spur further thinking, which can lead to belief. But if it’s dull, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a dull lie or a dull truth. Dullness, not doubt, is the strongest enemy of faith, just as indifference, not hate, is the strongest enemy of love.”^vi Maybe that’s the reason why it’s such an essential concept to grasp. A lot of modern problems can be traced to a loss of the importance of the Kingdom of Heaven in the hearts of the people. The “disenchantment of the world” that Max Weber proclaimed may be attributed entirely to that loss.

Ultimate Reality

“‘Then those people are right who say that Heaven and Hell are only states of mind?’

‘Hush,’ said he sternly. ‘Do not blaspheme. Hell is a state of mind-ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind-is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakable remains.'”

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

The Kingdom of Heaven is the foundation of reality, brother. It is the reason for which we exist. It is the ultimate end of Humanity and our happy fate, if we embrace Christ. It is the Church and Her merry life. It is the beatitude of the saints. Compared to the Kingdom, “Man is like to vanity: his days are as a shadow that passeth away.”^vii We were made for the Kingdom of God like a child in the womb was made to be born into the world. This world of ours, in fact, can be described as no more than Heaven’s womb. A place where souls are made for Heavenly ends.

All things in this world are mere shadows of Heaven, all pleasures mere foretastes of the Celestial banquet. This is because the Kingdom of Heaven is the partaking of God’s divine life. It is not merely a place, but a being. And by being in it, we become like God. So strongly is this association that the process of “going to Heaven” is called in the East theosis, deification. By being transformed through the lifeblood of Being Itself, we become more than we are. We, in a very true sense, become more real.

Why does this matter? Because you need to understand that this world is ephemeral. That the powers and structures of this world are contingent on something much greater than themselves and directed ultimately to its ends. That the Kingdom is not only a promise of future beatitude, but a reality incarnated in this world and the force that guides it into its inexorable conclusion. Through it, God in his Providence directs History and all the cosmos, as Pope Benedict XVI would say: “What is meant is not an imminent or yet to be established ‘kingdom,’ but God’s actual sovereignty over the world, which is becoming an event in history in a new way.”^viii This world exists to serve this greater purpose, not the other way around. A man may have a much clearer and truer view of what this world is if he started walking around upside down. Because then he’d see everything floating above an endless abyss. Hanging by a thread of earth and nothing more. As Chesterton said, “Perhaps St. Peter saw the world so, when he was crucified head-downwards.”^ix

Divine Glory

“The glory has departed. We moderns have lost much of medieval Christendom’s faith in Heaven because we have lost its hope of Heaven, and we have lost its hope of Heaven because we have lost its love of Heaven. And we have lost its love of Heaven because we have lost its sense of heavenly glory.”

Peter Kreeft, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Heaven

Our world, brother, is a finite world. The things within it are contingent and limited. They come into existence, stay for a while and then are gone again. “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”^x Therefore it is the common lot of man to face boredom and disappointment. We get bored because in the depths of our being we know that this world is not enough. We get disappointed because we see the limitations of created beings. And we know, deep within our hearts, that we were not made to reside within these limitations. That is where resentment is planted, dwells and rots. But it doesn’t need to be so, brother… All of us feel this same frustration with the world, but that is only because we were made for something greater. The Heavenly feast is the destiny of Man, and only by forsaking God are we deprived from it. Our Lord paid the ultimate price for our ascension, and through it we become not only greater than ourselves, but precisely the self we were made to be, if only we accept the Kingdom into our hearts and proclaim it to our dying breath. There, in His Kingdom, we will find wonders unfathomable. And there in the end we will see face to face the One that Is through the ages of ages. Then will we come face to face with Eternity. Will it be boring? That’s a common question, one I asked myself. The cut and dry answer is No. It won’t. Because the mystery that we will engulf ourselves in is God Himself, Who is Infinite and Eternal. There will be no end to this discovery, an eternal giving of the Father by the Son through the Holy Spirit to us. An eternal quest to unravel the very nature of Being itself. And here we will wander without being lost, we will track while still being home. We will find true Beauty, true Wisdom, true Light and true Glory.

The Communion of Saints

“All ye holy angels and archangels, Pray for us.
All ye holy orders of blessed spirits, Pray for us.
All ye holy patriarchs and prophets. Pray for us.
All ye holy apostles and evangelists, Pray for us.
All ye holy disciples of our Lord. Pray for us.
All ye holy Innocents, Pray for us.
All ye holy martyrs, Pray for us.
All ye holy bishops and confessors, Pray for us.
All ye holy doctors, Pray for us.
All ye holy priests and levites, Pray for us.
All ye holy monks and hermits. Pray for us.
All ye holy virgins and widows, Pray for us.
All ye holy men and women, Saints of God, Make intercession for us.”

The Litany of the Saints

And in this path, my friend, we do not go alone. We are to be accompanied by all the multitudes of the saints. All those men and women who came before us, who now fight alongside us for the Kingdom and who will come after us, all those that give themselves to God to their last breath, as well as all the Heavenly hosts of angels that surround the Throne of God. They are with us in this pilgrimage we face, guiding us and encouraging us, criticizing us for our own improvement and giving us strength to endure life’s hardships. And one day, when the Kingdom is consummated within us, we will see Our Lady, St. Michael the Archangel, St. Joseph and all the Saints that have filled us with wonder at their piety and goodness and who have helped us through the trek of life. We will meet with people we might not have expected and will know them truly. And when I mean know them, I mean we will truly grasp who they are as a person. In Heaven there will be no more guises, no more secrets, no more opaqueness of meaning and understanding, and through the wisdom and joy of the Beatific Vision we will be able to say to one another without fail, consonant with Our Lord: “Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes.”^xi There will be no more lies, no more fears, no more misunderstandings. We will be as one, in Love with Love itself and with one another. It will be a time in which God will declare: “the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock: and dust shall be the serpent’s meat. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the LORD.”^xii A time of true peace. Not a peace of inaction, but of actual, genuine and unobstructed love.

Eternal Consolation

“Where now are the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the harp on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the deadwood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?”

(J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers)

And here, brother, lies the ultimate prize. Eternal Consolation, Beatitude. That does not merely mean an end to suffering, for that very notion seems more of a punishment than a reward when seen in isolation, doesn’t it? No more suffering seems to mean in our minds no more action, no more challenges, no more growth. And that’s what it would be if it were only an end to suffering. What we get is much more than that. It’s a life of true fulfillment. Here, “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”^xiii This is the answer to the ache that you feel in your bones whenever a fleeting joy leaves you. Whenever you feel happiness and notice that it will not last. Whenever you see something beautiful and wish that it would last forever. Whenever you feel the sadness of things that shouldn’t be, injustices that should be answered to, words that should have been said, things that should have been done. All these anxieties are nothing more than a longing for this final Resolution. This unfolding of the plot of life. This conclusion of the story. This consummation of the Kingdom within us. The things that we lost, the people that no longer are with us, the pain that we feel whenever we remember them. These are all a natural reflex of the longing of our souls for Heaven. There you will find that Golden City, where joy is plenty and all are merry. There we will find the fulfillment of our purpose and the pouring out of our spirit. There we will find true and unadulterated consolation. I wish to see you there one day, my friend. I will keep you in my prayers, that we may meet beyond the pearly gates. Please maintain me in yours.

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