With everything that is going on in the world today you might think that the end is nigh. Every news report and weather forecast seems designed to make us all very frightened. But every age has had its wars and crises, and there have always been those who have claimed special knowledge about the end of the world or some coming disaster: mankind has always lived in the shadow of some uncertainty about what the future holds.

As we end one liturgical year and begin Advent once more, the Church has us turn our hearts and minds to the end-times. The Lord made a considerable number of predictions of the future in the Gospels, and many of them involve death and disaster. They fall roughly into two: predictions about the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem, and predictions concerning the end of the world. Jerusalem and the temple were indeed to be destroyed in AD 70 by the Romans under Trajan, and not one stone stood upon another. Often, however, in the Gospels we find predictions of the end of Jerusalem and the Temple mixed up with predictions about the end of the world. Our Lord says that there will be many earthquakes, plagues, famines, wars: for these will inevitably occur. Almost every age of the world has experienced its ample share of these things. But maybe that’s exactly the point. The end of the world is always nigh.

Because it is not the end of this physical world — the earth, and all it contains — that should concern us, but our own end. From the standpoint of our own death, what will we regard as being the most important in our lives? Probably not our careers, or politics, or economics, or our bank accounts, or our carbon footprints, but probably our families, those we have loved, and how we have lived during the time given to us. And of course our own end will be in judgement, for we will have to render an account to our Creator. And that judgment will come down to the question — which we must be constantly asking ourselves — whether God and our neighbour have been the principal concerns of our life. Scripture constantly emphasises these questions. Remember Our Lord’s summary of the Law: You shall love the Lord your God, and your neighbour as yourself. Heaven and Earth will pass away, but his words shall not pass away.

Our consolation is, of course, that while war, disaster and death are inevitable, hell is not. We have the strength and consolation — and great hope — of our faith, with all the assistance that our faith gives us, to avoid the fate worse than war, disaster and death. As Christians we need to accept that assistance and use it regularly — the Mass and Holy Communion obviously, but also Confession, and prayer and fasting and penance and good works. That is how we ensure that God and our neighbour are our principal concerns, and our primary anxieties. If we are trying to live a good life, with the help of God’s grace, trying to help others and love others, and put right those things that are wrong in us and in the world, then we have no need to fear our own apocalypses, and the judgment of the one who loves us more than we could ever deserve. He is the one, as St Paul says, who does more for us than we can ask or even imagine. Or in his own words, the one who came not to condemn the world, but so that through him the world — and that means you and I — might be saved.

We are not all of us going to be a “morning person”. Some people do seem to be able to jump out of bed bright and cheery and full of beans; I remember being told that it was because of such people that breakfast was eaten in silence in religious houses. The fact is that for some of us it takes us rather longer to begin the day and start functioning as a human being. And yet there is something so glorious about the morning, with its silence and its sunrise. Even during those awful times when waking from sleep comes with dread — even then there is a great promise which dawns with the rising sun, when as the darkness gives way so gently and so quietly to light, God says to us all again, “Behold, I am making all things new.”

And for the Church her day begins anew too. By the time this reflection goes out to the world from the gates of 25 Woodstock Road, the Mystical Body of Christ has been long awake and doing Her Master’s work. In this city the religious brothers and sisters of various flavours have already taken our prayers and praise, and that of the whole Church, and sung them in the offices of Matins and Lauds. The houses of God will have opened their doors and gates so all who pass near can “come and see” and begin the day with God. In our own Oratory church the Fathers and Brothers will have made their meditation as Fr Manni tells us:

Each of the brethren, as best he can, pours out his soul to God, and with silent lips but clamorous heart pleads the cause of his salvation with God, with all the piety of a devout soul, by means of prayer, supplication, asking for the bestowal of gifts and praising the bounty of the divine spirit with all his heart.

Meanwhile souls in need of the mercy of God have been into the confessional and out again, having sought the mercy of God and found it again. The altar is set and Christ comes down to this Bethlehem, this House of Bread, to feed his people once more with food for the journey — with his grace and his charity — that this day, which could be the last for any of us, may be lived with him in whom all find life. 

Whatever or whomsoever the Lord may send us this day, we begin with him anew, offering to him all that is and has been and ever shall be, begging him the grace that this day, please God this day, his brilliant light may dawn upon us, upon those whose names he has written on our hearts, and on all his children, that all might walk in his grace. It is only his light, his dawn, that can bid the clouds and pangs of dread or fear to depart and give way at last to his day, his morning both excellent and fair.

Monsignor Benson writes so wonderfully of the Church’s ceaseless action in the service of her Lord:

For I see through her eyes, the Eyes of God to shine, and through her lips I hear his words. In each of her hands as she raises them to bless, I see the wounds that dripped on Calvary, and her feet upon her Altar stairs are signed with the same marks as those which the Magdalene kissed. As she comforts me in the confessional I hear the voice that bade the sinner go and sin no more; and as she rebukes or pierces me with blame I shrink aside trembling with those who went out one by one, beginning with the eldest, till Jesus and the penitent were left alone. As she cries her invitation through the world I hear the same ringing claim as that which called, “Come unto me and find rest to your souls”; as she drives those who profess to serve her from her service I see the same flame of wrath that scourged the changers of money from the temple courts.

As I watch her in the midst of her people, applauded by the mob shouting always for the rising sun, I see the palm branches about her head, and the City and Kingdom of God, it would seem, scarcely a stone’s throw away, yet across the valley of the Kedron and the garden of Gethsemane; and as I watch her pelted with mud, spurned, spat at and disgraced, I read in her eyes the message that we should weep not for her but for ourselves and for our children, since she is immortal and we but mortal after all. As I look on her white body, dead and drained of blood, I smell once more the odour of the ointments and the trampled grass of that garden near to the place where he was crucified, and hear the tramp of the soldiers who came to seal the stone and set the watch. And, at last, as I see her moving once more in the dawn light of each new day, or in the revelation of evening, as the sun of this or that dynasty rises and sets, I understand that he who was dead has come forth once more with healing in his wings, to comfort those that mourn and to bind up the broken-hearted; and that his coming is not with observation, but in the depth of night as his enemies slept and his lovers woke for sorrow. Yet even as I see this I understand that Easter is but Bethlehem once again; that the cycle runs round again to its beginning and that the conflict is all to fight again; for they will not be persuaded, though One rises daily from the dead.”

(From ‘Christ in the Church’)

It is morning. We begin again. Behold, he is making all things new.

As the Church nears the end of another liturgical year — there are only two more Sundays before Advent begins — the readings at Mass take on an apocalyptic character. We begin thinking about the end; our Lord tells us to be watchful, to stand ready, and to change our ways. November, with the Masses for the dead and Remembrance events calling to mind those who died in war and conflict, can make us think a lot about what we miss — about those we miss. Such things can make us think about the end times in a more serious way than we usually might. But, of course, in the Christian life the end is just the beginning. If we are ready for one we must be ready for the other.

In all those apocalyptic readings there is a sense of the “now” and the “not yet” in terms of the end times. This is true also of heaven. We are all acutely aware of the ways in which we are not in heaven at the moment, but it is also true that heaven is right here with us, egging us on to glory.

In a letter to one of his friends, a great French abbot who died in 1937, Dom Paul Delatte, wrote:

I don’t think that there is a single [suffering] that submerged in him, does not turn into joy. He is faithful. We are his; he is ours. Our eternity has begun. On the surface it appears that the years change, that they succeed one another; but we are already carrying our portion of eternity in the treasury of of our faith and our charity… We are travelling toward eternal love. A Dieu (to God).

Letter to Emilie Butruille, 1898

It is the sort of thing one can only write with the most profound and saintliest of hearts — totally trusting and full of faith. But he is on to something: we carry our portion of eternity in our faith and in our charity. If we want to know how to respond to the changing times, painful memories, the fear of difficulties ahead, we must give ourselves over more to acts of faith, live in faith, and look at things through the eyes of faith to understand them from the point of view of heaven. We must give ourselves over in charity to others more and more, strive to see the good in them, try to do little acts of love for others, and pray hard for those in our life. These are heaven’s actions, and the more we do those, the closer we are to bringing heaven about in our life now. Dress for the job you want, not the job you have (so the saying goes) and the same is true of our life. Live for heaven now and we will be well suited to it when our turn comes.

It is not, however, just about getting ready for the future, but being happy now. “We are his; he is ours,” Dom Delatte wrote, and on account of this fact, “I don’t think that there is a single [suffering] that submerged in him, does not turn into joy.” What we have the assurance of is the greatest and most lasting friendship of all time. He is ours. The more we submerge ourselves in him, the more our burdens become light and with that lightness comes the joy of knowing he is carrying them with us. Such a new start begins with the simplest and smallest of acts, and it can begin today.