Below are two reflections from Richard John Neuhaus’s book, Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross, Chapter 2: Judge Not. To read my reflections from Chapter 1, please click here.
An Approach to Faith
As a 8th grader, attending daily mass, I fell in love with the Lord through the Holy Eucharist. After high school I served one year with the National Evangelization Team, NET Ministries. In that year I learned how to pray using the lectio divina. Following that year, a friend invited me to make a holy hour every day. Throughout college I planned my courses around daily mass and my holy hour. It was a blessed time.
Then came adulthood. In my first year of full time work, I struggled to find rhythm in my prayer life. Then marriage, then pregnancy, then baby, so on and so on. During pregnancy I regained my spiritual strength to pray upon waking, but then baby. “Routine is beauty,” Mark Berchum, founder of NET Ministries said. How to find the beauty when the routine continues to change?
I struggled for a long time with this. The markers I used to diagnose my spiritual life had all changed. With a new vocation I had to look at it with a totally different tool. When I sought counsel, some excused me, some accused me. One day I attended mass, either without my child or with my child asleep. After communion I felt the Lord, I knew that presence, I knew him. “That’s right,” I said, “I love you.”
In the second meditation on Christ’s last words in his book, Death on a Friday Afternoon, Richard John Neuhaus has this to say:
When our faith is weak, when we are assailed by contradictions and doubts, we are tempted to look at our faith, to worry about our faith to try to work p more faith. At such times, however, we must not look to our faith but look to him.
Look to him with whatever faith you have and know that your worry about your lack of faith is itself as a sign of faith.
I learned to stop worrying. Periodically I have glimpses of his light and I am reminded, yes, I know you, I love you. I am the same person and you are the same God and our relationship still exists. Step by step, I will continue to follow his path. I have to remind myself to accuse myself, to confess. Each season I need to seek out ways to pray, to read, to grow. I try to be more merciful towards myself and how far we are from the goals we set for our family prayer.
So this is good advice for me.
Desire all to be saved
As Neuhaus reflects on the interaction between the Good Thief and Christ, specifically Christ’s response to him, “Today you shall be with me in paradise,” Neuhaus considers whether all can or should be saved.
“For paradise we long. Fer perfection we were made.”
“Given the evidence of Scripture and tradition, we cannot deny that hell exists. We can, however, hope that hell is empty. We cannot know that, but we can hope it is the case.”
Some might object to such a notion, and indeed many intelligent minds have. To one objection, Neuhaus reminds the reader of the parable of the workers in the vineyard, called at different times throughout the day, but paid the same wage. In response to the indignation,
“‘What is the point of being a Christian if, in the end, everyone is saved?’ People who ask that should listen to themselves. what is the point of being first rather than last in serving the Lord whom you love? what is the point of being found rather than lost? what is the point of knowing the truth rather than living in ignorance.”
Some would say that since no one can be saved except through Christ, that those without Christ do not know the truth, and thus cannot be saved.
“Everything that is true—in religion, philosophy, mathematics or the art of baseball—is true by virtue of participation in the truth who is Christ. The problem is not that non-Christians do not know truth; he problem is that they do not know the truth they know is the truth of Christ.”
At length, Neuhaus lays the foundation of understanding that God has made us for paradise and wants all men to be saved. So we must pray as the persistent widow.
“Prayer creates space for possibilities that would not otherwise be possible.”
We must care, we must desire that all be saved because this is what God desires.
“A Christian is not saved against the rest of humanity, to be separated out from the rest of humanity. Rather, we are saved, as it were, on behalf of all—to be reconcilers, intercessors, mediators for all.”
And we must make an effort to share that truth. We should not be bashful.
“Many Christians are embarrassed by this claim (that there is salvation by no one else). They are intimidated by a culture that decrees that all truths are equal. Who are you to claim that you have the truth and other do not? That is indeed an intimidating question, unless we understand that we do not have the truth in the sense that is it ours by virtue of our having discovered it; we do not have the truth in the sense of its being possession under our control.”
It is God’s truth, it is he who has made us aware of it. And so we should share it, and share in his desires that all men be saved. This is the way of evangelization. One more piece of the puzzle.
