Till the End of Time

I AM the Holy One in your midst.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

One often hears that God has a sense of humor. If He does, it is never a cruel or ironic humor, certainly never at anyone's expense, but always to their good or betterment. In particular, He seems fond of blessing and favoring the humble in order to correct the proud. Consider Moses, who suffered from a terrible stutter, placed as God's spokesman before the mighty Pharoah (Ex 4:10-11). Or consider the lowly donkey who debated eloquently with the pagan prophet Balaam (Nu 22:28). In today's story God selects a lowly, withdrawn girl, reviled within her own family and shunned as an outcast when she entered the convent as a young woman. God singled her out to speak for Him, not to Pharoah or to a prophet, but to chasten a proud generation, even centuries of proud generations, who believed most confidently that they were moving on, consigning God to the dustbin of superstition. We now call these generations collectively, "the Scientific Revolution." But first let us understand the backstory, for we are the ones who have witnessed the endpoint of this narrative.

Where a triumph of human reason had been expected for centuries, our destination instead has been catastrophe. Certainly, we at the Hermitage are old enough to remember when two words stood out in our culture as high above other words as the stainless steel arches and spire of the Chrysler Building once towered over the Manhattan skyline. The first word was science, which promised to cure every human woe. The second word was its near cousin progress, which would relieve every oppression. As recently as the 1950s every human endeavor strove to be ranked as a science: library science, the imprecise and impressionistic fields of sociology and psychology to be called social sciences, and ordinary housekeeping promoted from "home economics" to domestic science.

Churchman scrambled to crown theology the "queen of the sciences." Indeed, it was this unwarranted optimism concerning the triumph of human reason over religion that led the Roman Catholic Church to become embarrassed over her mysteries. For this reason, Padre St. Pio was persecuted during the 1950s for receiving the wounds of Christ. Now, that wasn't supposed to happen! The stigmata?! "They cannot be authentic!" the bishops and their advisors declared. For this holy and miraculous occurrence embarrassed the hierarchy. This did not match the Church's new vision for herself as an ethical culture society offering humanitarian services. Exorcists were no longer to be trained, and exorcism was discouraged as more and more Jesuits earned Ph.D.s in psychology. Vatican II itself was propelled by this new vision, deemphasizing holy mysteries and stripping the Church of her ancient, sacred language and once beautiful liturgies. Science is coming! Everyone must get in line or be mocked!

As for progress, why everyone during the early twentieth century knew that the culture had to make way for progress. Yes, your house might be torn down to make way for the new highway. Yes, your way of life would be discarded as being too old-fashioned. But the new was coming, and everyone trusted in its goodness. The word change came to be equated with better, and no one stopped to question. But the rubble these two shimmering words left behind is now everywhere to be seen. In the once-shining vision for Manhattan — where the greatest university would be raised up, where the largest cathedral would be built, where world's first city would be erected — ... well, plans did not turn out as expected. The Cathedral of St. John the Divine stands as an enduring monument to human folly, never to be completed. And that city of nine million souls fanning out around it in every direction has proved to be ungovernable. Everywhere urban decay eats like a deadly disease at its heart. Crime is intractable, and children are formed in its dog-pack mentality.

In a larger scale, we see the ruin of a world: our broken planet home with its global warming, its ruinous pollution, its fouled oceans, and its absent ozone layer, permitting our children to be burned up under a now-toxic sun.

Watching the newsreels from the 1920s onward with their wild enthusiasm for progress, we see everything now in a new light. For that world with its clean air and plentiful, clean water and pristine oceans and, yes, a sun above that only browned our children during summertime, has been traded away for ..... what? If the answer is the advances of medical science, then I tell you that forever is a long time, and to live a few more months or years in a fouled world bent on divorcing itself from God is not a worldbeater. For you need a worldbeater to equal the value of a world.

Small wonder, the humor we see and hear today is dark and sardonic. As one measure of national despair, suicide has jumped sharply across the U.S. in the most recent seventeen-year period — nearly 60% in one state with more than half of these people suffering from no discernible mental disorder. They were simply disconsolate. Do you say that suicide is tragic though not mainstream in the U.S.? What would you say if I told you that the United States sees twice as many suicides as homicides every single year?

Where did it all begin? This optimism in science and progress? It began in the late sixteenth century when the first sparks of the Scientific Revolution started the fire that burned down the ancient world. These early scientists did not simply believe that they were learning useful things or building helpful technology. They believed they were eradicating a whole world with its ancient wisdom and customs and beliefs. They believed they were uncovering "rock solid" reality and that each generation would continue this work in concert of unveiling truth, unchangeable, solid truth. But the joke would be on them by the early twentieth century when investigators like Werner Heisenberg, Albert Einstein, Nils Bohr, Bertrand Russell reported that there is no truth. They proposed a description of reality that was anything but stable or solid or even measurable. In recent months, quantum physicists have detected sub-particles that threaten to rock the foundations of the latest scientific beliefs. You see, no responsible scientist talks about truth any more. They talk about "what is presently believed," understanding that it will be mocked by a later generation. What began as a quest to excavate down to bedrock has instead revealed an uncrossable abyss of indeterminacy and unknowbability.

The Protestant Reformation was born in this crucible, in this furnace. So-called "modern men," updated men, of the rising Middle Class showed their neighbors that they "knew better" by doubting the Church's truths. In a near frenzy Protestant Reformationists vied with each other to strip one belief after another from the Church's Magisterium. The play Hamlet, written at this time, was composed to set the modern man, the Protestant Horatio (educated at Luther's Wittenberg), against Hamlet, a traditional royalist, who had seen Purgatory (discarded by Protestants) with his own eyes and in the person of his father, the King. Hamlet said, "There are more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy," Horatio.

The Roman Church was determined to win back the enormous percentage of people lost to the Reformation and decided that they, too, must appeal to the biases of the modern mind. So the Church installed, in one example, a new kind of intellectual as their Bishop of Geneva, that hotbed of Reformation belief, Francois de Sales. Together with his his spiritual companion, Jane Frances de Chantal, the wife of a baron, he offered the skeptical world a more acceptable religion. While de Chantal evangelized in the polite salons of upper-class French society, de Sales led people into a spirituality preoccupied more with emotions than saints or traditional prayers. Together they would modernize the Church focusing on compassion and charitable works. As de Chantal was a feminist, de Sales met with stiff opposition from the hierarchy. For she alarmed many with her sizable group of influential women practicing independent ministry. Together they would found a religious order, the Congregation of the Visitation, which suited their purposes exactly, for the Visitation depicts two independent women, St. Elizabeth and St. Mary, who rejoice in their holy vocations making no mention of their elderly husbands, the mute Zechariah and the nearly invisible Joseph.

Meantime, in another part of France, a sad, little girl shied away from her once-prosperous family, who counted themselves among the "better sort." Her godmother after all was a countess, and the little girl's devotions embarrassed the family. When she pressed for convent life, the answer was a definite, "No!" She had set her heart on the Ursulines, where her cousin had made solemn profession. Eventually, the family gave in to her constant begging and nagging. But certainly the Ursulines were out! If she were to enter any religious congregation, it would be the new, up-to-date Congregation of the Visitation. Eventually, the little girl, now a young woman, Margaret Mary Alacoque, did enter that Congregation. Predictably, she would scandalize them, for her old-fashioned, orthodox beliefs just did not match in that society of social and intellectual elites. Her devotions embarrassed them. Yes, she would be clothed as a nun, but a date for solemn profession would be postponed repeatedly.

Finally the stage was set. It was time for God to enter the picture no less gloriously than the day He appeared in the Wilderness of Midian before the humble and stammering Moses. I will leave the details of this marvelous encounter between the outcast girl and the Lord of the Universe to your own reading, The Autobiography of St. Margaret Mary, a little book you might complete in two or three evenings. Two things from this book have always stood out for me: first, the vivid picture of One Who made the world but Who continues to be rejected ... even in a convent. Second, the way that the Lord Jesus insisted on revealing Himself are precisely those details He knew that this world and the Roman hierarchy were trying to erase from human memory. For Jesus displayed His Sacred Heart in such a way that would repulse modern intellectuals of the 1670s: bloody, graphic, terrifying. "This isn't supposed to be happening!" "This doesn't match the new vision of the Church as a society of compassion and charitable works!" "Scientists would never accept this!" And our God has always faced the same problem, from the Garden of Eden unto the destruction of our garden planet. Together with Eve and her exiled children, Man says, "We know a better way, a better way than God and Eden."

Yet, as Jesus reveals to St. Margaret Mary, He will never give up on us. Even as Jesus expresses His anger and frustration concerning unbelief and hard hearts, His Heart burns with love for us. Yet, our hearts continue to be cold toward Him. And as He stood in the silent spaces of St. Margaret Mary's devotions, He could see ahead to where this scientific revolution would lead: the ruin of our planet home; the ruin of the Church; the gutting of human faith in a world of runaway STDs, suicide, and godlessness.

Today, we continue to meet people driven on by the empty promises of progress. And it is not for nothing that we now hear more and more about life on other planets and the ridiculous assumption that aliens have visited the earth. For our end is in sight, and respected scientists petition for planting colonies elsewhere in the solar system. Be assured there is no East of Eden from here. In return for NASA's $600 trillion dollar budget since 1958, the only life we have found in our universe is on this once-blessed, blue dot in space, our miraculous earth, teeming with life, and alone in a void of dead stones spinning in darkness.

Our home is Heaven, pure and clean and good Heaven, where there is no end. For our God's heart will never stop beating for us. And we must never fail to pray to and with Him. He appeared before St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, not Francois de Sales and Jane Frances de Chantal (whom the Church would later canonize). Each of us has been granted a cosmic ship that will traverse boundless time and space without fail and without need for trillions of dollars. It is called the sacred soul, which we call "the heart" (as God's blessings rain down us with this sudden appearance of life-giving rain). Pray before Him, give thanks for His Sacred Love, for it is our only and final planet destination.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.