"OUR HEARTS ARE RESTLESS UNTIL THEY REST IN YOU!"

St. Augustine (pictured above) famously wrote of our Lord “You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”

Nowadays, so many of us are restless, searching for peace of mind while trying to cope in an increasingly turbulent, and even crazy, world.

And when it comes to acknowledging and following God, many of us are not just restless, but clueless as well, considering that we human beings were made in the image and likeness of God, as reflected in his son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

Nowadays, so many of us are either restless, not seeking God out in loving obedience and prayer, or clueless, oblivious about our need for His help in coping with the turmoil all around us!

Remember that God made each of us to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, so that we can be happy with Him forever in the next, as we read in the Baltimore Catechism.

Instead of longing for God, our creator, many of us make gods of His creations such as gold and silver (Ps 115:4) and wood and stone (Jer 2:27), violating, as many of us do in so many ways, the first commandment, that we shall have no strange Gods before Him. Now we make gods not just of silver and gold, wood and stone, but of silicon and computer chipts as well these days!

Although the Psalmist and Jeremiah lamented man’s selfish proclivities in this regard thousands of years ago, human nature hasn’t changed much since then. Many times people are willy-nilly looking for something to fill a void in their hearts and souls that God was meant to fill.

And He wants to fill that emptiness we all dread with His grace and peace to cope with the challenges and vicissitudes of this life; and in extraordinary ways we can’t fully begin to comprehend, in heaven!

There are accounts from those who have had near death experiences describing that place of Eternal rest and joy beyond our imagination with God and with our loved ones. St. Paul spoke of himself in the third person as having been “caught up to the third heaven, weather in the body or out of the body…into Paradise” (2 Cor 12:2-3).

And indeed he wrote as well that “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor 2:9)

By comparison, in our fallen nature so many of us keep looking for something that's going to transcend the humdrum and contentious aspects of our lives, to give us some kind of heaven on earth, making us feel more powerful, more loved (or loved at all, for that matter!), more everything good and wonderful.

So many people just want more and more stuff, trying to fill their voids with money, sex, power, property, whatever makes them seem more important to others, looking for more, more, more, trying to fill a void in their hearts and souls, as touched on earlier above, that was meant for God to fill.

And herein lies the problem, the tragedy of this whole thing. God wants to give us so much more if we can just hang in there for these seven, eight, or however many decades in our lifespans, when we’re in a kind of probationary period that determines our eternity, hopefully as citizens-in-training for heaven.

And that's all the more pity when in our fallen nature we look for something that's going to transcend the ordinariness of our existence to make ourselves gods, to make ourselves King and Queens of the Hill in some, often nefarious, ways.

And there are those people who allow themselves to be so seduced by the world, the flesh, and the devil, that they are either oblivious to the dangers of falling into Hell for eternity or so willingly blinded to such a possibility by their arrogance in making power over others their be all and end all. They are most in danger of an eternity of total and complete misery beyond any of our wildest, or most dreaded, imaginations.

As mentioned above, we were made in the image and likeness of God. There must be something about us human beings that God values so much that He became the Word made flesh, God becoming incarnate (John 1:14).

Jesus didn't come down to take on the form of a donkey (although we can be very mule-headed) or an elephant (considering how easily we forget things), or even a bird (although so many of us treat our great prayers and liturgies as parrot talk).

And as much as we idolize and wish to deify technology, note the shepherds and kings in the Nativity didn’t rejoice at the appearance of a server farm in Bethlehem. He didn't come down as a piece of technological hardware either. Jesus didn't come down as any of those things just mentioned.

Instead, as we read in the Catechism of the Catholic Church “The Church thus confesses that Jesus is inseparably true God and true man. He is truly the Son of God who, without ceasing to be God and Lord, became a man and our brother” (CCC 469).

Indeed, remember as well that our Lord became incarnate to be born in a cave and die on a cross not just for the salvation of humanity in general but for each one of us, and that includes me and you as well. And He would have done so even if we were the only people in the world!

For the most part we've entertained that “reasonable hope” that Hell is empty, as posited by the Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar, but you can hope for whatever you want. That doesn't necessarily make it so.

Now hope is a very important part of our earthly pilgrimage. It's a crucial component of our lives as Christians and people of faith that we have hope. Part of what makes Hell so Hellish is that there's no hope of anything ever getting any better, and being stuck in eternal misery there!

At the same time, we have to understand this: At death, God immediately judges each one of us, and nothing about our lives is hidden from Him. The truth of both your deeds and your conscience are brought to judgment before Christ.

We have to be looking in this life, in the meantime, to be on the loving side in the battle between good and evil, between God and Satan. It's also the winning side. In His Passion, Death and Resurrection, Christ indeed conquered death, sin and Satan.

No matter how bleak things might look right now, in the end we know Christ will, as we say in the Nicene Creed, “come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and His kingdom will have no end."

So, in preparation as a “citizen-in-training” for heaven, you want to be in that kind of a state where you can look at your life as God can look at it. Yes you can have contrition for what you've done wrong, in humility.

But you don't want to find yourself in some kind of post-death experience, where suddenly you see so many grave sins you committed against God, that you either flee from Him, or perhaps never even see Him at all; as you head literally straight down to an abode of total darkness and misery. And all because you deserted God in making yourself God! You don't want that. None of us should want that!

Part of what makes Hell Hell, of course, is knowing that the gate of heaven will never be open for you. If God is love after all, and where you wind up God isn't there, then there is no love there.

Keep in mind also that, if you wind up in Purgatory, instead of going directly to heaven, you see just how much you want and need God! Think of this amorous feeling, something like the love and longing one may have for a woman or man in this life, only not carnal but that much deeper and more intense!

Think, in this regard, of this line from one of the psalms that reads “like a deer that longs for running streams, my soul longs for you, O God.” That verse appears in Psalm 42:1 (or Psalm 41:1 in the Vulgate numbering used in some Catholic translations, such as the Douay-Rheims Bible).

And, speaking of water, Jesus refers to His “living water” to the woman at the well in John’s Gospel, that He offers us as “a spring of water welling up to eternal life" (John 4:10-14).

If you’re not already doing so if your heart is feeling restless these days, make today the day you turn, or turn back, to God in prayer for His grace and the lasting peace only He can give us!

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