Will Heaven

This Notebook column was originally published in The Catholic Herald.

When secular heads turn silently towards Rome and listen, the Church reaches a new and important audience. On Easter Sunday, Pope Benedict achieved just this. His message – “that it is urgent to rediscover grounds for hope” – contrasts with the gloom of the financial crisis. And it caught the attention of the non-religious media because, while it offered a new perspective, it also reminded us of the bigger picture.

In Britain, it is easy to forget the developing world when our current mindset is so self-absorbedly bleak. The Pope knows first-hand that this will not do. During his recent trip to Africa, the Pontiff saw that the Church is a main provider of medical care and education there.

But he reminded the G20 leaders in his recent letter to them: “Those whose voice has least force in the political scene are precisely the ones who suffer most from the harmful effects of a crisis for which they do not bear responsibility.” In other words, the Church cannot go it alone – and it shouldn’t have to.

Last Sunday Pope Benedict placed all of this in a truly Catholic context. He called for a “peaceful battle” which would pitch “justice and truth, mercy, forgiveness and love” against all forms of cruelty, conflict and suffering. These words are of immeasurable importance not just for Catholics, but for non-believers as well; for “urbi et orbi”.
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“Can science be used to prove the existence of God?”, a recent Guardian headline asked provocatively. Always eager to hear left-wing secularists fail to explain away religious belief, I read on.

The article turned out to be an interview of the quantum physicist turned Anglican priest John Polkinghorne, conducted by an atheist called Ian Sample. Unsurprisingly, no conversion took place. Sample wanted to know why anyone would believe “extraordinary things for which there is no evidence”. Polkinghorne, try as he might, could not seem to make Sample realise that there was “motivating evidence” for a belief in God.

The most interesting part for me, however, was what upset Sample: “There was plenty in Polkinghorne’s [latest] book I found offensive. In one passage, he says that God hides from us because if we ever clapped eyes on an infinite being, we’d be unable to carry on as we are. We’d be overwhelmed to the point of hopelessness…We’d sort of shrivel up.”

His outrage at this idea reminded me of a passage in John Henry Newman’s poem, The Dream of Gerontius. The soul of Gerontius (who, in the dream, has just died) has been taken on a long and ethereal journey to Heaven by his guardian angel.

On seeing his Judge and Maker, the soul excitedly rushes forward. The angel exclaims:

Praise to His name!
The eager spirit has darted from my hold,
And with the intemperate energy of love,
Flies to the dear feet of Emmanuel;
But, ere it reached them, the keen sanctity,
Which with its effluence, like a glory, clothes
And circles round the Crucified, has seized, and scorched, and shrivelled it;
and now it lies,
Passive and still before the awful Throne.
O happy, suffering soul! for it is safe,
Consumed, yet quickened, by the glance of God.

The soul of Gerontius, injured but made happy by its encounter with the divine, is carried “softly and gently” to purgatory where, nursed and tended to by angels, it lies until ready to rejoin “the courts of light”.

Cardinal Newman’s astronomically beautiful depiction of an encounter with God corresponds to Polkinghorne’s religious belief about being overwhelmed by such an experience. The fact that a non-believer finds this idea “offensive” left me pondering: can the secular world and the Church really be reconciled? As a 21 year-old Catholic, I should hope so.

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