Today's Gospel

Are You Looking Towards Heaven?

Is there a word, or phrase, or an idea that jumps out at you today?

This is this reading comes after after the story of Nicodemus, you know, and Nicodemus coming to Jesus in the night, saying, "Rabbi, we know you're a teacher from God, done these great signs, only because God is with you." And then Jesus talks to him and says, you know," Unless a man become reborn—" and then this is, what do we got, four verses here, and of course the second - last verse, John 3:16, is the most famous verse in the Bible.

It is the verse repeated over and over and championed by Protestant evangelical groups for centuries. And very often, you know, you'll see it at a ball game, somebody holding up a sign. John 3:16: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life." Now, let's think about that for a minute today.

Eternal life. Heaven. Home. Destination. Where we're headed, hopefully. But do we think about that? I think we—we don't think about it anywhere near as much as we should. I think we do get fixated with, like, what's right in front of our nose, the here and the now and today.

And one of the powers of, of prayer, of spiritual exercises, spiritual experiences, the sacraments, coming to church on Sunday, is that it encourages us, challenges us, to step back from the day-to-day, to look up. You know, you think about the great cathedrals of the world. I'm headed down to Australia for my mum's 80th birthday in a few days, and I think about St. Mary's Cathedral. It is a spectacular cathedral there in Sydney. You think about St. Patrick's in New York. Think about Notre Dame in Paris. You think about these great cathedrals. What do they all do? They force us to look up. They draw our attention toward the heavens.

And we do tend to live our lives sort of with our heads sort of down, heads sort of focused on the grindstone or whatever is right in front of us right now, and then we step into a great church, and it calls us to look up and to look toward the heavens, to look towards God. And in doing so, what happens? We gain perspective. Perspective is a beautiful thing.

You think about an artist and how important perspective is to an artist. As with our lives, it's easy to lose perspective. We become very focused in on one thing. We can think that thing is the most important thing in the world, or even the most important thing in our life. But then when we step back from that thing, we realize, "Oh, gee, I got carried away with that.

I lost sight of the bigger picture. And so God is constantly calling us to see the bigger picture. And the biggest picture of all is eternal life.

Is God in his heavens forever. And of course, he wants us to be there, and we want to be there. Are we living a life that is oriented toward that outcome? Think about that.

Was your day yesterday oriented toward that outcome? Was your day yesterday focused on some other outcome? Because our lives are just a big old collection of days. And so the way we orient our life toward that outcome of eternal life, with God in his heavens forever, is by orienting our days one at a time toward that outcome.

Let's go out today. Let's live with an eternal perspective. Let's live with a heavenly perspective. Have a great day, and remember, Be Bold. Be Catholic.