Letter #39, 2024, Thursday, October 17: St. Ignatius of Antioch and Eternal Life
Among the great sadnesses of life in this world is the sense of loss which comes from the reality of our mortality.
Readers may recall that I wrote on October 1, 2018, of the death of my mother, Ruth, and again on March 28, 2020, of the death of my father, William.
And other dearly loved friends have since passed away.
***
As I held my mother’s hand, after she died, in 2018, and the hand became cold — she was on a small bed we had set up for her on the first floor of our home in Storrs, Connecticut, where the University of Connecticut is, where my father was an English professor — I recalled a conversation I had had with my parents the first autumn we were in that house, after it was built, in haste, in the summer of 1961.
One evening, I think perhaps in September, sitting between my parents on the sofa in the livingroom at the age of just 7, I began to cry.
“Why are you crying?” asked my mother, who was then still in her 20s.
“Because… because… because I know that someday, someday, you… you are going to die. And not only you… but Dad too…”
And I sobbed.
And my father put his arm around me.
“And nothing can be done about it,” I told them. “It’s… inevitable.”
And my mother put her arm around me.
“And even if you put your arms around me, I still know,” I said, and cried uncontrollably.
“I know,” she said.
I stopped crying to listen.
“Our lives are a mystery even to us,” she said. “We live in time, and as creatures in time, and of time, our time will have an end. But there is another way of being, a way of being outside of time, beyond time, called eternity. And that is where God is. In heaven. And after we die, we will go there to be with Him, and with each other, once again and forever.”
Then I started to cry again, all the harder, wailing and unconsolable, though my parents were by my side.
But 60 years later, as I held her hand while it grew cold, and I said good-bye to her, I remembered those words she spoke to me, and held onto them, and hold onto them now, in my heart.
***
I received a message today from a friend. It is a brief passage from J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings.
This is what Tolkien said:
“There is a place called ‘heaven’ where the good here unfinished is completed, and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued. We may laugh together yet.”
***
We call this life an “exile” from a life we do not have, but long for.
***
And we refer to this life as “a valley of tears” — we say we are living our whole lives “in hac lacrimarum valle” (literally, “in this of tears the valley”).
And we long for a life in “another” valley, where all the tears are wiped away…
***
A few days ago, I visited a young Italian cardiologist, Dr. Stefano, to check my heart.
He listed, then put some jelly-like ointment on my chest and started to observe my heart with an ultra-sound reader, the same instrument doctor’s use to observe babies in the womb.
“How does my heart look, Doc?” I asked.
“You can see for yourself,” he said. He turned the monitor toward me.
To my surprise, I saw my heart beating.
Still more to my surprise, I saw… light.
Flashes of light…
And not just flashes of white light. There were flashes of of white light, but also red light, blue light, orange light.
The flashes shot from one part of my heart, across an empty space, to another part of my heart.
“What am I looking at?” I asked.
“That is your heartbeat.”
“But,” I said, “what are those lights, the red, the orange, the yellow, the blue?”
“The electrical action in your heart. The machine picks up the heartbeat and displays it with those flashes.”
“But,” I said, “it seems impossible… is there really light in my heart, flashes of red, blue, orange, white…?”
He said, “Yes. That is how the machine displays the different strengths of your heart beats… Your heart is perfect, there is no problem, but the beating is a bit irregular. And the different colors pick that up.”
“Then,” I said, “I am not made of simply flesh, and blood, and teeth, and hair, but also… it seems… also… of light…”
“Yes,” he said. “All of us are.”
***
When St. Anthony came in to Alexandria from the Egyptian desert, St. Athanasius wrote on his biography of St. Anthony, the citizens of Alexandria marveled, because his face “shone with light.”
***
Perhaps we, in the early 21st century, in the very technologically proficient but spiritually impoverished world of the “post-Christian” age, have forgotten who we truly are, what we are truly made of, and where is our true and final home.
—RM
An Essay by Maestro Porfiri on St. Ignatius of Antioch
Some of these questions are taken up in another marvelous essay by my friend, Italian composer, organist and author Maestro Aurelio Porfiri — who lives in Trastevere — on the life and death of St. Ignatius of Antioch, whose feast day is today, October 17.
I urge all to consider subscribing to Porfiri’s Substack, Cantus, at this link.
The Primacy of Eternal Life and St. Ignatius of Antioch
By Aurelio Porfiri
October 17, 2024
In recent years, with a Jesuit Pope, much has been said about St. Ignatius of Loyola, who was certainly a great saint. But there is another great Ignatius, whom the Church celebrates on October 17th in the renewed calendar: St. Ignatius of Antioch.
This holy Bishop of the first century, Peter’s successor on the chair of Antioch, has always inspired in me a natural sympathy, because he has constantly reminded me of a fact that is scandalous to the mentality of the world but not to Christian eyes: life on this earth is not everything.
If it were everything, as a speaker I listened to many decades ago once said, then were the martyrs fools?
Why did they sacrifice their earthly lives for something they considered much more precious—eternal life?
Of course, we do not see this eternal life with our earthly eyes, so it is natural for us to seek joy in worldly things.
It is not wrong to rejoice in the things of the world, in the gift of life, but only when we understand that it has value and must be defended only when it is ultimately oriented toward God.
Ultimately, it all comes down to priorities: if we place first what we know will one day vanish, we are doomed to fail.
Ignatius of Antioch reaches us through his Letters. In his Letter to the Ephesians, he speaks of the importance of the necessary union between the clergy and the Bishop using a beautiful musical metaphor:
“You should be in agreement with the bishop’s mind, as you already are. Your highly regarded presbyterate is worthy of God and is united to the bishop as strings to a lyre. Therefore, let your unity and your harmonious love sing to Jesus Christ. And let each of you become a choir, so that in your harmony and unity, taking God’s tone, you may sing with one voice to Jesus Christ to the Father, that He may hear you and recognize you by your good deeds, as members of Jesus Christ. It is necessary for you to remain in inseparable unity to always be partakers of God.”
A well-known passage, but it does not call for blind obedience and must be read as a consequence of what precedes it:
“I will not command you as if I were someone important. Though I am in chains for His name, I have not yet attained perfection in Jesus Christ. I am only beginning to learn and I speak to you as fellow disciples. I need to be anointed by your faith, encouragement, patience, and magnanimity. But since love does not allow me to remain silent, I want to exhort you to communicate in harmony with the mind of God. And Jesus Christ, our inseparable life, is the thought of the Father, just as the bishops appointed to the ends of the earth are in the thought of Jesus Christ.”
Only those bishops who are “in harmony with the mind of God” and present His teaching through Sacred Scripture and Holy Tradition represent the true Catholic bishop. The others are just “someone.” In the final analysis, all bishops, even the Bishop of Rome, whoever he may be, must give an account to God, Father of all.
In St. Ignatius of Antioch’s Letter to the Romans, there is this famous passage:
“I write to all the Churches and announce to all that I die willingly for God, if you do not hinder me. I beg you not to have an inappropriate benevolence toward me. Let me be food for the beasts, through which I can reach God. I am God’s wheat, ground by the teeth of beasts to become the pure bread of Christ. Rather, encourage the beasts so they may become my tomb, leaving nothing of my body behind so that I may not be a burden to anyone. Then I will truly be a disciple of Jesus Christ when the world will no longer see my body. Pray to the Lord for me so that I may be a victim for God. I do not command you as Peter and Paul did. They were apostles, I am a condemned man; they were free, I am still a slave. But if I suffer, I will be united with Jesus Christ, and I will rise free in Him. Now, chained, I am learning not to desire anything.”
How this clashes with the world’s mentality!
To invoke martyrdom, almost showing kindness toward those who cause it (though unknowingly, like beasts), for the love of a greater good.
Shortly before bidding farewell, he states:
“I no longer want to live according to men. This will happen, if you allow it. Please allow it, so that you may also be willed by Him. I ask you in a few words. Believe me, Jesus Christ will show you that I speak sincerely; He is the infallible mouth through which the Father has truly spoken. Pray for me that I may reach Him. I have not written according to the flesh, but according to the mind of God. If I suffer, you have loved me; if I am rejected, you have hated me.”
It is certainly difficult for us to live according to the mind of God. This is why reading and rereading the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch is more important than ever for us.
Let us conclude with a beautiful meditation by Divo Barsotti from La fuga immobile on May 30, 1944:
“Immersion into the Glory of God.
The soul has lost itself in Him.
A vivid sense of a pure Fullness:
Light before which, and within which, every other light is as if it were not:
a unique, absolute Force that sustains and creates everything.
God’s transcendence.
Silence and Abyss that in you become a ‘word,’ a form.
It is as if God lives for you.”
Let us hope this aspiration is a hope for all of us.
[End, essay by Aurelio Porfiri]
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