The Inner Becomes the Eternal

In class a few weeks ago, Father Dunne made the bold assertion that the inner life--the life of the spirit, the life of knowing and loving--is a life that can and does live on through death. He suggested to us that the inner life becomes the afterlife. Take a second and wrap your head around that one.

My gut reaction was one of awe but also one of skeptical doubt. I had always mostly viewed heaven or eternal life and something separate from this world, connected to my current life really only by the soul that animates my being, the soul that God created to be eternal. Now there are "heavenly" things about this life, but I mostly considered those things to be analogs to what will be part of the eternal heaven. Moments of strong love or peace are just snapshot moments of the eternal love and peace that exist in eternal life, perfect union with God.

I also seemed to think that this was kind of a spiritual extrapolation and that there wasn't much grounding for it in Christian spirituality or thought that I knew. I was willing to give some benefit of the doubt because upon further reflection, I really liked the idea that an intentional inner life can continue on into heaven.

In the beautiful synergy that is a Notre Dame liberal arts education/formation centered on theology, I had one of many annual instances of overlap between my courses. In my Theology of Benedict XVI class, we read an excerpt of Truth and Tolerance that included this quote that leaped off the page, "Heaven begins on earth. Salvation in the world to come presumes a righteous life in this world... We have to ask what heaven is and how it comes upon earth." (205)

Turns out my perception of limited heaven on earth was kind of right but far too narrow. Benedict XVI (then Cardinal Ratzinger) exhorts us to be aware of the heaven that is on earth. Creation started as a perfect result of God's hand, but humanity brought sin into the world; The Fall dragged the world away from this. However, we can still find glimmers of the perfection of heaven in Creation. Pope Benedict encourages us to seek those righteous and truly heavenly elements of our lives and our world and cultivate them. Eternal life isn't found on earth, but it surely begins here.

The inner life is something that God's gift of free will upholds beautifully. We have the power of freedom to choose love. In this way, we can cultivate a profound interior sense of love that permeates daily life and transcends to heaven each day and hopefully to the end of earthly life. I know I have recently been tending to concentrate on the negatives and the voids, allowing potent moments of woe to interrupt the love-filled stream of my life. However, with the gift of grace, God has shown me the love already present--just in one day: in the camaraderie of tenors sharing nicknames, some bros watching football, dinner with a friend, and studying/not studying with some knuckleheads.

Happiness is a luminous emotion that enlivens the spirit and brings smiles to faces, but joy is something deeper and more profound. Feeling this joy is being in the presence, in the moment of the will or love of God; the experience of joy happens as a result of being intimately and genuinely in the context of love and vocation being lived out. My (our) call is to align my will with the will of God, just as Jesus did in His perfect freedom. In this way, we can find joy in this life that will continue on into the next, as the next.