Counting Casualties with God
My mission as an evangelist is to see souls like God sees them, and then to act accordingly.
In the news these days, there two types of death reports.
The first are lists. Total numbers of professionals or civilians, young or old, killed in this place or that. The psychology of a list is that the bigger the number, the more the impact. We might even (perhaps secretly) breathe a sigh of relief if we learn that fewer people died than anticipated, because we know it could have been so much worse.
Or, the other way around: If initial reports were hopeful, it can be a punch in the gut to learn later that the casualties were far worse than originally believed.
The other type of death announcement is the individual story. A photo of this or that one person, or perhaps a family who all died together, and a brief biography. What struggles marked this person's life? What heroism? Who now grieves that loss? Who suffers because this person is gone?
The personal account allows us to feel the impact of disastrous loss more keenly, even when it tells the story of complete strangers: What if I were that mother standing over her son's or daughter's coffin? This irreplaceable person, this one who filled my life, this one who was there for me . . . is no longer there. There's a hole in my family, a hole in my heart, that nothing can ever fill, no one can ever replace.
To mentally put ourselves in the place of the bereaved allows us to more accurately understand the nature of the disaster that those long lists are describing.
As a human person, limited, finite, it is normal that I grieve more for those closest to me. I care generally about all people affected by a distant disaster, but I care most deeply about those in my own circle who are personally involved.
To be human is to be able to vicariously share the sorrow of others in a small way, but ultimately our capacity for grief is directly related to how deeply we loved the individual deceased. There's nothing wrong with that.
God, however, is different from us.
Because God intimately and completely loves every individual human being, He grieves the loss and suffering of each.
There is no "those other people I don't really know" to God. He knows us all. He grieves more deeply than the mother at her child's coffin, which sounds almost heretical because who could do that?
But that's how it is. To love completely is to grieve completely.
Which brings us back to the topic of this newsletter, evangelization and discipleship. Though the loss of natural life is soul-searing to the bereaved, it is the loss of eternal life that is the enormous and unconquerable death.
We who have hope in eternal life can hope to see our loved ones again in Heaven one day. We can be aware even now, at the holy Mass, of the heavens opening up at the consecration and our beloved departed being present, there with us, shoulder to shoulder, as Our Lord descends in the holy Eucharist. For a moment heaven and earth are united.
To be absent from this life is to be present to the Lord, we hope.
But human beings each have a choice about their eternity. And God who grieves completely is the Father who is pierced to the heart by every individual who chooses an eternity absent from Him.
"How many people in are in Hell?" is not the question God asks, any more than we're content with statistics when someone we love is known to be in harm's way and we're waiting for news of survival or death.
Every soul lost from eternal life is a soul God has loved intimately and completely, the one whose absence from Him hurts so badly, so irreplaceably.
Here we are, the adopted sons and daughters of God. We're part of the family. That's my brother or sister who is in danger of eternal death.
In the spiritual life, no one can be written off as an impossible case, as an unfortunate casualty, as someone else's problem.
Within the bounds of our state in life and our own limited abilities, we therefore do all that we can to bring the reality of salvation to each and every one.
Lists are not acceptable, when it's your own kid.