When I became a Catholic many years ago, somehow I got the idea that earthly concerns were not very important in the light of eternity. My instruction in the faith did not teach that, but the very idea of the transcendent reality of God and life someday in the beatific vision led my mind to contemplate this idea.
I soon came down to earth when Mark Zwick, who brought me to the faith, asked me to begin visiting desperately poor families in the inner-city neighborhood there in Youngstown. I began to learn more about everyday realities and to see that my new faith related to the challenging situations so many people face. My understanding of the importance of Matthew 25:31 and the following verses in the Bible (Works of Mercy toward the Lord disguised in the poor and the stranger) took root and has grown over the years.
I became aware that the Lord does indeed ask us to care about what happens here and now in this actual present world. I understood that followers of the Nazarene are expected to do the Father’s will, as he taught us in the Lord’s Prayer, on earth as it is in heaven.
It cannot be the Father’s will that we treat others as if they had no dignity and that our business, industrial, and technological policies contribute to slowly destroying the earth, our air, water, and climate.
Do Christians Hoping in Heaven Neglect People and the Earth?
According to a new article in the journal Modern Theology, the unconcern about the degradation of our environment and even the lack of concern for the dignity of persons and their work may be linked to an overemphasis in Christian eschatology on individual salvation in the Kingdom of God “someday” in the future, which includes our death, the Eschaton, the end of this world.
The author of the article, Gunnar Gjermundsen, suggests that placing all hope in a future heaven is rooted in a misinterpretation of the Gospel. He argues with St. Maximus the Confessor, one of the Fathers of the Church, that “the Christian is not to wait for a cataclysmic in-breaking in the historical future.” Maximus presents an alternative eschatology and an understanding of time and eternity in which the fulfillment of time and the coming of the Kingdom “are understood to be inseparable from the transformation, conversion of heart, of the individual soul—begun, if not completed, in this very life.”
In his article Gjermundsen quotes Norman Wirzba, who contends that many believers see their Christianity as a “massive escape project from location Earth, with the potential effect of coming to regard the planet as a mere backdrop for the soul’s redemptive drama.”
After all, why worry about terrible emissions and chemicals harming people and the earth, when this world is only temporary and the end may be coming soon? Why bother reading the encyclical Laudato Si? Why bother with better conditions for the poorest of the earth?
Popes Teach a Different Way
In Laudato Si Pope Francis presents the challenge to Catholics and others of good will: “Economic powers continue to justify the current global system where priority tends to be given to speculation and the pursuit of financial gain…. Here we see how environmental deterioration and human and ethical degradation are closely linked. Many people will deny doing anything wrong because distractions constantly dull our consciousness of just how limited and finite our world really is.”
Laudato Si also brings out the teachings of other recent Popes on a call to change our lifestyles in order to save our world and our people:
“In I971 Saint Paul VI referred to ecological concern as “a tragic consequence” of unchecked human activity:”
“In his first encyclical Saint John Paul II warned that human beings frequently seem to see no other meaning in their natural environment than what serves for immediate use and consumption…. Every effort to protect and improve our world entails profound changes in ‘lifestyles, models of production and consumption, and the established structures of power which today govern societies.’”
“Pope Benedict XVI proposed eliminating the structural causes of the dysfunctions of the world economy and correcting models of growth which have proved incapable of ensuring respect for the environment.”
“Pie in the Sky?”
A song which has become well known in popular culture mocked the way Jesus was sometimes presented, giving the poor the impression that they should not worry about the harsh daily grind for their survival but rather put their hope in a heaven someday in the far future. Joe Hill, who wrote the song in 1911, was a labor leader at a time before labor unions were legal in the U. S. Here are some of the words from the song:
“From the day of your birth it’s bread and water here on earth,
but there’ll be pie in the sky by and by when I die and it’ll be alright…
He said if I do his will there’s a promise he’d fulfill
And he’s gone now to prepare me a mansion up there
And there’ll be pie in the sky.”
“All the way to heaven is heaven, because Jesus said, I am the Way.”
Dorothy Day’s path was different. Over many years she quoted St. Catherine of Siena in her writings, emphasizing one particular saying: “All the way to heaven is heaven because He said ‘I am the Way.’” This statement was full of significance for Dorothy, as it was for Catherine. It relates to the ancient tradition of Jesus as the Way—the way to life rather than death, the way to redemption and eternal life, the way to love, the way to God, the way of the saints. The quote of Catherine about the Way provided the perspective for daily life at the Catholic Worker:
“Peter Maurin told us to reach the workers by the Works of Mercy. Counseling, consoling, comforting, holding out hope that ‘all the way to heaven is heaven,’ as St. Catherine of Siena said, go with the work of feeding, sheltering and clothing. Getting out a paper is part of this direct action—which is also to make people think.”
Catherine’s emphasis on the joy of living in the present with Jesus as the Way gave spiritual and theological support to the personalist Catholic Worker ideals of not only hoping and praying for heaven someday, but working to create a world “where it is easier for people to be good,” at the same time as living out the precepts of Matthew 25:31 ff. Catholic Worker Catholicism, like the religion of the saints, was not “pie in the sky when you die.”
Dorothy later quoted Catherine about love of neighbor in this life:
“St. Catherine of Siena records our Lord as speaking to her thus: ‘I require of you that you love Me with that love wherewith I love you. I have set you in the midst of others…. You must love them with the love wherewith you love Me.’”
Doing Everything Faster Against Natural Rhythms
Jesus’ way was close to nature and to the lives of everyday people.
In factories of the Industrial Revolution and with new technology, what the Modern Theology author calls “time keeping regimes” replaced living by the rhythms of the natural world and the cosmos and the words of the Gospel. Our whole economy was reorganized in order to quickly manufacture cheap goods.
Workers were driven by clocks and doing everything faster. Enforcement of time-keeping regimens permeated factories, schools, prisons and hospitals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as today.
Peter Maurin criticized what he called the speed-up system in factories.
Today tight schedules and the push for efficiency and profit have even further accelerated the pace in factories and warehouses like Amazon and in doctors’ offices and hospitals. Workers are more efficient than ever, but the large profits from their work do not reach the workers, but rather enrich the people that Dorothy Day called robber barons.
Fast Living: Eschatology in a New Guise
Everything has to be done more quickly in the industrial and technical world, and this carries over into daily life. In some cases this replaces the idea of salvation Gjermundsen quotes Hartmut Rosa, “Whoever lives twice as fast can realize twice as many worldly possibilities. Acceleration becomes a secular substitute for eternity, a functional equivalent for religious ideas of an eternal life and thus a modern response to death.” Rosa argues that our accelerated mode of living is simply eschatology in a new guise, the only replacement secular culture has to offer in place of a lost awareness of the eternal. The fast and efficient manufacturing of goods, however, has had lethal consequences.
Awareness was slow to develop of the harmful effects of industrialization—the pollution of air and water, the changing climate of the natural world, the depletion of natural resources and the decrease in populations of creatures necessary for the world’s food supply (for example, bees who pollinate plants). These effects were not well understood until recent decades. Now that they are, the push in favor of unchecked economic “growth,” continues apace with its devastating consequences on ecology. As Gjermundsen puts it, “West-led global capitalism is resistant to giving up its hopeful vision of progress and slowing down its tempo of production.”
On Not Building Bigger Barns
There seems to be a paradoxical sense that suffering and death and the apocalypse might be avoided by working hard and efficiently and acquiring as much as possible while on this earth. Jesus’ words in the Gospel reveal a very different view:
Jesus said, Do not build bigger barns to hold your wealth. Do not accumulate. Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
“No one can serve two masters. You cannot serve both God and money.”
Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?
“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin.”
Maximus and the Timelessness of God
St. Maximus emphasized that Jesus’ words on the Kingdom ask us for a change of heart, a transformation now in God’s time.
Dorothy Day knew from her spiritual advisors and her spiritual reading that there is no time with God. For example, Dorothy prayed for those who had committed suicide (at a time when a suicide still could not receive Christian burial) because, she said, “there is no time with God”: it is never too late to pray for those who have died.
According to Gjermundsen, Maximus defines the very being of the Kingdom, the Eschaton, not as an event in external space and not in “conventionally agreed upon clock time.” Rather, for Maximus there is no path to eschatology separate from the soul’s path toward theosis (the transformative process toward likeness to or union with God). For Maximus, “theosis and eschaton constitute the same event: when the horizon of the soul’s consciousness merges with the absolute horizon of divine being.”
Practicing Paradise
The Modern Theology author cites Douglas Christie on the idea of “practicing paradise” here and now. Christie draws on the early Christian contemplative monastic tradition of the Desert Fathers “to show how paradise, or the Kingdom, can be understood as an experiential reality fully inhabitable on Earth through the soul’s inner work of purification, simplification and sanctification of heart, senses, and way of life.”
Artist: L. V. Diaz
On this view, the Kingdom “is going-on-being-realized in the lifeworlds of persons who, through inner work and devotion, learn to attune themselves to the always already whole and holy beauty of the created world. Christie argues that such a practice and view is key to countering both the otherworldliness of much Christian eschatological thought, as well as the ‘secular expressions of hope that promised an illusory paradise on earth.’”
Maximus wrote: “The text, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near’ (Matt 3:2; 4:17) does not in my judgment contain any temporal limitation. For the Kingdom does not come in a way that can be observed: one cannot say, ‘Look, it is here’ or ‘Look it is there’ Luke 17:20-21). For ‘the Kingdom of God’, says Scripture, ‘is within you’ (Luke 17:21). The Kingdom of God the Father is present in all believers in potentiality; it is present in actuality in those who, after totally expelling all natural life of soul and body from their inner state, have attained the life of the Spirit alone and are able to say, ‘I no longer live, but Christ lives in me’ (Gal 2:20).
This is not done alone. Gjermundsen reminds also us of the importance of the liturgy for Maximus: “The individual’s inner work of coming to see the true nature of reality with purity of heart is for Maximus never separate from the communal liturgical work of the Divine Liturgy… the enacting of the Kingdom in the communal web of human relations must involve a metamorphosis in the individual human heart, from where ‘will flow rivers of living water.’ (John 7:38).”
Gjermndsen emphasizes that conversion of heart brings healing results for the world today: “From the transfigured hearts and minds, compassionate, righteous and beautiful actions tend to come forth as spontaneous expressions of virtuous divine working, contributing to weaving a world of peace and harmony. So the degree to which one’s being is transformed is the degree to which the motivational source of one’s actions stops being the will of the old self—with its questionable motives and drives, including even some of the altruistic ones—and becomes instead God’s will.”
Hope in God’s Time Today
During his visit to Corsica in December of 2024 Pope Francis reminded us that the Lord is near. Vatican News reported his words:
“There are many reasons for sorrow and despair in today’s world”, he said, listing ‘extreme poverty, wars, corruption and violence.’ Nevertheless, he continued, the word of God never fails to encourage us. Despite the suffering, “‘the Church proclaims an unshakable hope that does not disappoint,’ for the Lord is near, and in His presence, we find the strength to work for peace and justice. Joy in Christ,” the Pope concluded, “remains the source of our joy ‘in every time and amid every affliction.’”
In his talk to the Roman Curia at the end of the year, our Holy Father showed us that as members of the Body of Christ here and now we can help to fill the earth with God’s blessing:
“We can think of the Church as a great river that branches off into a thousand and one streams, torrents, rivulets – a bit like the Amazon basin – to water the entire earth with God’s blessing, flowing from the Paschal Mystery of Christ.”
References:
Gunnar Gjermundsen, “Living on This Earth as in Heaven: Time and the Ecological Conversion of Eschatology,” Modern Theology 404, October 2024 (Open access_).
Pope Francis. Encyclical Laudato Si.
Houston Catholic Worker, Vol. XLV, No. 1.
