Do We Earn Heaven?
A young woman, the newspaper tells us, who had been nothing but heartache and shame to her family all her life, walked away from an automobile crash that killed everybody else in the car. She didn’t “merit” that rescue.
I ran through the pane-glass front of a candy store when I was ten years old despite the fact that I was not to be in that particular store at that particular time. It was an expense that my parents could not really afford at the time. I sat on the living room floor all day long waiting for my father to come home and punish me. But all he said was, “Are you hurt? No? Then good, what did you learn from it?” I didn’t “merit” that love.
And I have an idea that someplace along the line, even you have managed to escape the just desserts of your actions. In fact, if we think about it, we’d all be somewhere else right now if God were a God of arithmetic. None of us have perfect scores. All of us have been saved from ourselves and through no merit of our own. It’s just that most of us manage to keep those times secret.
And that’s the problem: If we have to merit heaven, we’re never going to get it. Because we can’t. We aren’t made to be perfect; we’re made to be us. We’re made to grow slowly. We’re made to begin again and again and again. We’re made to demonstrate God’s justice and exercise God’s mercy, both of which are clearly different from our own.
The Talmud tells us of an old man in the village who kept giving money to ne’er-do-wells. The villagers were aghast at such wantonness. “Why give these people money when you know they’ll only waste it?” they wanted to know. And the old man answered, “Shall I be pickier with them than God has been with me?”
Michelangelo, on the other hand, gives us an insight into what perfection is really all about. He wrote, “The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.” If we’re afraid to fail, it is very easy to be perfect enough to merit a small reward but it is very difficult to become human enough to realize that failure can be its own kind of spiritual director. In fact, God apparently intended it that way or perfection would be a given.
––from the October 2024 issue of The Monastic Way, by Joan Chittister. Subscribe for free here. Subscribers have the opportunity to join a free Zoom call to discuss the current month's issue. Sister Joan Chittister will facilitate October's Zoom. Click here to register for that call.
