MAN IS A BEING-FOR-ETERNITY
Man is not a being-for-death but a being-for-eternity. After death, for undying ages, for ever and ever and ever he will continue to live.
But his eternal existence will have been determined by his ever so fleeting existence on Earth. If he has accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior and the Truth of the Catholic Faith (at least implicitly in the case of those who through no fault of their own do not belong to Christ’s Mystical Body, the Catholic Church) he will be saved unto eternal life in Heaven where, in the Beatific Vision, he will find utter joy. If, however, he has rejected Our Lord Jesus Christ and His Truth in this life, then he will be damned for undying ages in Hell, as Christ Himself stated:
„When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him,then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left….Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.“ (Mt 25:31-33,41)
THERE ARE NO ORDINARY PEOPLE
„A cleft has opened in the pitiless walls of the world, and we are invited to follow our great Captain inside. The following Him is, of course, the essential point. That being so, it may be asked what practical use there is in the speculations which I have been indulging. I can think of at least one such use. It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.
„It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.
„It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.
„This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.“ (C. S. Lewis, „The Weight of Glory“)