TRANSCRIPT
One of the glories of the Catholic faith is its pure simplicity and its simple purity. And this is all that is required of us: purity of heart and a single-minded desire for Heaven. Purity and simplicity share in common with each other the notion of clarity. Everything we need to know in the Catholic Church is very clear.
Purity and simplicity are bound together with clarity. For example, the teaching on the Blessed Sacrament, the Real Presence, is just that. Jesus Christ is really, truly and substantially present — body, blood, soul and divinity — under the appearance of bread and wine.
Simple does not mean not deep. But it does mean clear. You can’t get much more straightforward than that. And don’t make the mistake of thinking that just because something is cloaked in mystery, it isn’t clear. The “how” or “why” or even the “what” of something doesn’t detract from its simplicity or purity.
The Host, which looks and tastes like bread, is Jesus Christ, pure and simple. So too is the Church’s teaching that if a person is to be saved, then he must not die in a state of mortal sin. He must die in a state of grace, meaning, sanctifying grace, having the Holy Trinity living and abiding in him.
This, too, is a pure and simple teaching. Depart from this life without the indwelling of the Holy Trinity, and a person remains in that state forever, without end — this is Hell. At death, the soul experiences an illumination of reality, of the truth that what really mattered was its condition before God.
God does not know a soul without Himself present in that soul at the moment of death. He Himself attests to this in the gospels when He says, quite clearly, to those knocking on the door to get in, “Go away, I tell you. I do not know you.”
God is life. A person that dies in mortal sin has a soul without life, the requisite spirituality of the Holy Trinity. If one dies in that state, then his soul is forever sealed in that state. It’s like a team losing a game because it has fewer points than its opponent when the final gun sounds.
That loss is forever sealed, locked and unchangeable. The competition is unrepeatable. The loss stands forever as a sign of failure to achieve the goal of victory. So many people struggle with the concept of eternal damnation, but salvation and damnation are pure and simple concepts.
It’s a very simple and pure concept, and it’s extremely straightforward. Reject God and His loving commandments in this life and a person is forever sealed in that condition of rejection of God. Likewise, if one lives a life of desire to cling to God in this life by following the commandments of love, then that choice is ratified for eternity.
The Son of God commanded that a person be baptized and eat His Body and drink His Blood. He then underscored that if you don’t do this, then you have no life within you. So how could a soul that departs this life without the life of God suddenly attain the life of God after death? The time for choosing is this side of death, not the next. It’s pure and simple.
A soul must depart this life in a state of grace, with the life of God within. And the surest means to do that is as a baptized receiver of Holy Communion, who has no conscious knowledge of mortal sin on his soul. Everything else for a rational, non-invincibly ignorant person is a gamble in the extreme and, more than likely, a losing proposition.
The line from the psalms is most instructive here: “Deep is calling on deep.” When we stand before Almighty God, what He will search us for is the image of Himself. To the degree that we image Him, then deep calls on deep, and deep responds and goes to deep — like things to like things.
But when God calls out to the soul before Him at the judgment and that soul is spiritually dead — in a state of deadly sin — then there is nothing deep within that soul to respond. Here, we have two things that are not alike, and, as such, the soul with death flees from the God of life and prefers the torments of eternal loss to the even greater torments of being in a state of constant death surrounded by life.
This is why the Church’s members and leaders must never retreat from the truth — from its purity, simplicity and clarity. The Faith is simple because it flows from and back to God, Who is simple in Himself. The Faith is pure because God is one. The Faith is blinding in its clarity because so is God.
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