And let us not grow weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap, if we do not lose heart.

In The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis’ senior demon, Screwtape, explains to a junior demon, Wormwood, why God sends us “dry times:”

He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs — to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual temptation, because we design them for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot “tempt” them to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there, He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

As in water face answers to face, so the mind of man reflects the man.

This image of our ability for self-knowledge is beautifully accurate.  Note that the inspired writer does not say, “As in a mirror face answers to face,” but “as in water.”  Water reflects (to a degree), but water also distorts.  Disturb water just a little and the reflection vanishes.  Disturb the mind just a little and our ability to measure ourselves is gone as well.  This is part of why community and confession are so important in the life of the Christian.  We simply don’t know our own minds nearly as well as we think we do.  Today, take a step toward community and accountability and get away from the rugged individualism our culture preaches.  The Body of Christ has many members.  Draw near to them in love and ask God to give you wisdom through his Church.

He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.

“Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Of course, they were not really inconsistent; but they were such that it was hard to hold simultaneously. Let us follow for a moment the clue of the martyr and the suicide, and take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. ‘He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,’ is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice.

“He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying.” - G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

The ancient Catholic truth about Hell should terrify us. But it should terrify us into our wits, not out of them. It should prompt us to ask “How do I avoid such a thing?” just as a grisly photograph of a car crash in driver’s ed should prompt us to pay attention. And that, in turn, should prompt us to ask “What exactly am I avoiding? What is Hell?”

The Church tells us that Hell is not something that simply happens to you by accident, like a car crash. People in Hell will not be there because they were minding their own business, being decent folk, when suddenly an arbitrary God just stuck them there upon their death. Rather, the Catechism tells us that hell is the “state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed” (CCC 1033).

We don’t live in a universe where we are all trying to do our best but God inexplicably yearns to send some people to everlasting damnation if he can only find a way to make the charges stick. Rather, we are a race trapped in a complex rebellion against a God who has done and is continuing to do everything possible to save us. The truth is, God is eternally exerting his divine power to the utmost, up to and including enduring the horrors of crucifixion, to rescue us from the horrors of Hell. Even now he is endlessly pouring his love and grace out on us to enable us to say “yes” to his offer of salvation in Christ. But he will not make us automatons, because the whole point of salvation is to have creatures who retain their freedom and remain themselves, even as they drink fully of the ecstatic life of the Blessed Trinity.

That means there must always remain the real possibility that a creature can say “No” to him; a real ability for that creature to perform a sort of anti-miracle of free will and turn himself into a thing, a sort of ex-human, who will not have God, who bars the doors of his soul from the inside and renders himself forever incapable of receiving God’s life and love in any way.

That is what Hell is: our rejection of the life of God, our choice to exile ourselves to eternal loneliness and unending pain rather than abandon our pride. It is our decision to experience the fire of God’s love as the flames of endless punishment, to sever ourselves forever from all love, goodness, joy, and beauty. It is appalling. It is terrifying. But to anybody with even a passing familiarity of human history, it certainly is not impossible. The story of our race is studded with examples of men and women whose pride warped them into living nightmares by the exercise of their own free will. Ultimately, Hitler, Stalin, Charles Manson, Mao, Ilse Koch, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and other monsters made real choices that left them as near to being ex-humans as is possible in this life. Such choices cannot simply be explained away purely as the result of heredity and environment. More to the point, our choices to love (or not), which are known only to us and God, will ultimately spell the difference between Heaven and Hell.

This not to say that we can or should suppose we know who is in Hell. Hell is murky, says Lady Macbeth. It is dark there and it is not for us to claim knowledge of God’s mind. Even with somebody as evil as Hitler, we are to hope and pray for the dead and leave them to God. Jesus addresses his warnings of Hell to you , not to that guy who cut you off on the freeway. If you take away the lesson, “I thank you, O Lord, that I am not bound for Hell like that jerk” you may, like the Pharisee in the parable, be in for an ugly surprise when you get to the Pearly Gates and your deepest self is at long last revealed.

The central thing to remember is that when asked “Will many be saved or few?” Jesus answered, not the question but the questioner with eminently practical advice: “Strive to enter by the narrow way.” Don’t waste time trying to peer into your neighbor’s destiny. Focus on the only soul you have power to damn—your own—and hand it over to Jesus’ daily for the help you need to avoid Hell and gain eternal happiness in Heaven. For though you can damn your soul, he is mighty to save it.

If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives to all men generously and without reproaching, and it will be given him.

In most stories, the path to Wisdom lies through the performance of Seven Herculean Feats or by climbing the Nine Mystic Mountains of Zug and finding the Hidden Fleece of the Ram of All Knowledge. The idea is always that wisdom is only attainable through tremendous struggle. In contrast, the way to wisdom in Scripture is almost anticlimactic. Want wisdom? Ask God for it. Period. To be sure, there are a couple of minor caveats such as “Don’t ask out of selfish motives,” but that’s about it. What stands out is the amazing ease and lavish generosity with which wisdom is given by God. Today, ask God for the riches of wisdom and insight that are ours through Christ Jesus.

No man shall be able to stand before you all the days of your life; as I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will not fail you or forsake you.

Having to subdue seven nations and conquer a strange land in bloody warfare, all while trying to manage the life of a nation of ex-slaves who are only in the rudimentary stages of civilization, can make a fella jittery. Joshua, like Moses, did not feel up to the task. But Joshua, like Moses, found he wasn’t being asked to be up to the task. Instead, he found that God was up to the task and that he only had to do the next practical thing as God assigned it. We are in Joshua’s shoes. For the task of the Church is to conquer the world and we can’t do it either. Still less can we face the fact that the blood that is to be shed is ours, if it is anybody’s. But we still have this advantage: God will be with us and will not fail us or forsake us. Those are good odds.

For the LORD God is a sun and shield;
He bestows favor and honor.
No good thing does the LORD withhold
From those who walk uprightly.

Today’s Scripture is the simple truth. It is not, however, the announcement of a Divine Vending Machine. God withholds no good thing from those who walk uprightly. But we do not know what “good things” are. As Oscar Wilde remarked long ago, the gods answer the prayers of those they wish to destroy. Many things we pray for as “good” are things that would destroy us if we got them. Precisely because God is a “shield” we are protected from the folly of our own wishes. But because God is a sun, we receive light from him on how to pray aright. Today, ask your Father, “Lord, teach us to pray.”

Keep your heart with all vigilance;
for from it flow the springs of life.

Years after our culture has absorbed the elementary lessons of hygiene in the physical and environmental realms, we remain perfect babes in the wood when it comes to mental and spiritual common sense. Every fool knows that you don’t drink from wells built next to toxic waste dumps. Not even a moron would say “My belching smokestack is my personal smokestack and has no effect on anybody else.” Nobody says, “I’m strong. So it’s okay for me to jog behind insecticide spewing trucks or eat this mad cow infected meat.” But fools say things like this everyday when it comes to moral and spiritual pollution. They say you can fill your mind with slime from the tube and it won’t affect them because they’re “strong in their hearts.” They say media can belch airwave pollution 24/7/365 and it won’t affect the culture (though 30 second ad cost a million dollars and manufacturers gladly pay this to have “no effect”). They say that we can feed our souls on the toxic waste of sleaze TV, violent and misogynistic music, ugly art, and loveless, soul-dead stories and it will not affect “my personal truth of the moment.” Scripture says differently. “Keep your heart.” Feed it on what is true, good, noble and beautiful and you will become that way. Feed it on junk and the effects on your heart will be as predictable as the effects of a diet of radioactive waste and potato chips on an Olympic athlete: No matter how healthy he was to start with, he’ll die.

What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each.

One common form of idolatry is hero worship. There’s nothing wrong with having heroes, of course. The human soul is made to honor greatness, whether in things like great art or in people like great men and women. The Church acknowledges this reality every time she canonizes a saint. But the greatest hero is what he or she is because of Jesus Christ. All the greatness of the saints is just “treasures in jars of clay” as Paul pointed out. Today thank God for the greatness he has placed in his great heroes and strive to imitate it.

Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

One of the recurring themes in Scripture is the call to be “steadfast” and “immovable.”  This is very counter-cultural.  We tend to praise people these days for being flexible, progressive and willing to change.  A call to be “immovable” sounds like a call to be “neanderthal.”  But immovability is essential if you are in the right place. If your place is faith and you move from it, you are moving toward betrayal. If your place is hope and you move from it, you are moving toward despair or presumption. If your place is love and you move from it, you are moving toward hate.  That is why Paul tells us to stay put.  If you stick with God, you make real progress without wasting time.  If you move away from God, you waste time without making any real progress.