the place from which he set out? Every step he takes, every movement of his body, is directed to the sole end of returning home.
Our end and home is heaven. My dear brethren, what is the end and object for which we are created? It is a well-known question, one that can never be either sufficiently proposed or answered: why are we in this world? We are here to serve God during this life, to keep His commandments, and after this life to rejoice with God forever in the kingdom of heaven. Such is the answer to that question. Heaven is the place to which we really belong; it is our centre outside of which we cannot find rest; heaven is the eternal home towards which we must daily travel in this life, as on a pilgrimage, and we travel here as strangers and pilgrims. Heaven is the harbor to which we are making our way over the stormy, dangerous ocean of the world; heaven is the home of our Father to whom we pray daily: “Our Father, who art in heaven.”
So that we should always long for it. What then should we do with our thoughts and desires if we do not often fix them on heaven? Why do we not look with joy on this our greatest inheritance, our happiest home? Why should we not pray hourly with the utmost fervor: “Father, Thy kingdom come”? Is it not surprising that we should desire anything else but this fatherland of ours? that we do not direct all our thoughts and desires thither the whole day? For daily and hourly we experience that we have not here a lasting dwelling, that this is not the place to which we belong, that in this sorrowful vale of tears we are beset on all sides with miseries and troubles, so that we have good reason for looking on the earth with disgust, and for longing and sighing all the more eagerly for the place of joys, the haven of eternal rest? And that is the chief reason why the God of infinite goodness, who loves us, His adopted children, far more tenderly than any father loves his offspring—that is the reason why He fills our lives with so many trials and miseries; He wishes to compel us, as it were, to desire the end of all this wretchedness and the glorious future that awaits us in His kingdom. Therefore He says to us daily in the holy Mass: “Lift up your hearts.” Therefore He caused His apostle St Paul to warn us so emphatically to “seek the things that are above, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God.”[1] Why should your desires grovel on this earth? This is not the
- ↑ Quæ sursum sunt quærtte, ubi Christus est in dextera Dei sedens.—Coloss. iii. 1.
