God knows what we want and can help us attain it

(We accidentally published the homily for the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time in the Oct. 25 edition. This is the column that should have appeared. We apologize for the mix-up.)

31st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: Dt 6:2-6
Second Reading: Heb 7:23-28
Gospel Reading: Mk 12:28-34

This Sunday, we pray “that we may hasten without stumbling” to “receive” what God has “promised.”

We call it heaven: the ultimate fulfillment of our deepest longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness. The Bible describes it as life, light, peace, paradise, a wedding feast, the Father’s house, the heavenly Jerusalem. However, “eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has it so much as dawned on man what God has prepared for those who love him.”

Imagine an adult trying to tell a small child the delights of marriage. The greatest pleasure the child knows comes from chocolate. Told that eating chocolate is not part of conjugal pleasure, he characterizes marriage as fasting from chocolate. He is familiar with chocolate; he cannot even begin to imagine a pleasure that overwhelms it.

In heaven, we will see that God himself is “the goal of our desires,” St. Augustine said; “we shall contemplate him without end, love him without surfeit, praise him without weariness.”

In the meantime, God asks us to trust him for our happiness, and he tells us how to prepare for it: “to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbour as oneself.”

Here is how C.S. Lewis explains it.

Suppose you are taking a dog on a leash through a turnstile or past a post. He tries to go through on the wrong side and gets his leash looped round the post. You see that he cannot do it, and therefore pull him back.

You pull him back because you want to let him go forward. He, too, wants to go forward, but for that very reason he resists your pull, or, if he is an obedient dog, yields to it reluctantly, as a matter of duty, in opposition to his own will, although in fact it is only by yielding to you that he will ever succeed in getting what he wants.

Similarly, God not only understands, but also shares, our desire for fullness of life, complete and ecstatic happiness. He made us for no other purpose. However, he knows, and we do not, how we can attain it, really and permanently. He knows that most of our efforts to grasp it actually put it further out of our reach.

For example, take a sin of lust. The overwhelming thirst for rapture is good and even divine. However, lust will not quench it. We must submit to the collar and come round the post to the right side; then God will guide us as quickly as he can to what we really wanted all the time.

God wants to give us what we really desire, and he knows how we can get it. Accordingly, he must, in a sense, be quite ruthless toward sin, even what we call “trivial” sin. It is out of compassion that he says, uncompromisingly, “Thou shalt” and “Thou shalt not.”

God loves us as we are, but he will not be satisfied until he has made us perfect, like him. There is no sin so great that he will not forgive it, but there is no sin so small that he will condone it.

How can he? Sin is disobedience to his commands fueled by lack of trust in his goodness: the suspicion that there is some place apart from him where he forbids us to trespass, something that would delight us if only he would allow it.

God knows that apart from him there is literally nothing. What we desire is either what he wants to give us, or else a false picture of what he wants to give us, a picture that would not attract us for an instant if we saw the real thing.

God knows what we really want, even in our worst sins, and he longs to give it to us.

Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English in both written and YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 7, available on YouTube starting Oct. 24, is “Prayer.”