The young religion teacher asked her grade five students, “Who wants to go to heaven?”
She was happy when all of the students raised their hands. Then she asked the class to write down a list of what they thought they had to do in order to go to Heaven.
The pupils excitedly began writing down everything that came to their young and imaginative minds. To make the class even more interesting, she asked each one to share at least three of the best things they listed down.
The usual answers came up as the teacher expected. Many children answered they would pray more, others would obey their parents, and some would offer more prayers and sacrifices.
There was one student, however, who came up with a unique idea: she wanted to know her guardian angel more. Her classmates wondered how this was going to help one get to Heaven.
“I want to know my guardian angel more…so he will help me to be useful in Heaven,” she candidly replied.
The teacher was more puzzled with this answer. She asked her to clarify what she said. The girl replied that every time she went to some place with her mother, like visiting relatives or friends, her mom would tell her: ‘Remember, Beth, make yourself useful while we’re here.’
* * *
The girl’s reply may seem strange, but I think we see and get her point very well. It’s always endearing to hear little children express their ‘heavenly desires,’ but it’s sad to see many of them grow up without having concretized this goal in this present brief life.
Heaven, as much as many long for it, only becomes some sort of wonderland that somehow gradually becomes totally disconnected from our present lives. The girl’s desire to be ‘useful’ in heaven isn’t so much –to my mind– what she will do there. Rather, it is the constancy with which we specify our love here on earth, to offer to God that singular and personal love which He will reward us one day in Heaven for.
Our faith and the consequences of living it to the full has as its principal goal of reaching Heaven. A person’s desire to go to Heaven is wonderful! But what remains is surpassing something inspirational and striving to concretize it into deeds. Otherwise, good intentions can only end up paving a highway to hell.
We must constantly remind ourselves that going to Heaven will depend on how we find our specific calling or mission here on earth. After all, God who is all-just will not generically reward us for simply ‘being good’. On the contrary, our Lord will take into account how we have exquisitely given ourselves here on earth, that is, our ‘special way of being holy’ in life.
In many of Jesus’ parables, we witness how He rewards each servant according to his generosity in what was entrusted to his care. There are no two individuals who are alike. The Apostles, despite their defects and weaknesses, were all called to carry out specific missions which they accomplished in various forms. All the saints of the Church, even though professing the same aim of reaching Heaven, arrived there through different paths and inspirations.
In this life, one is never satisfied with simply getting by with an abstract or generic contribution. One aims to be a doctor, a lawyer, a housewife, an architect, and artist, and many other related professional identities. These are not for the sake of having a ‘title’ to go by and display, these have a lot to say about who we are and what we can leave behind to our loves ones. If this is so in man’s professional calling, how much truer is it in his spiritual life.
Thus, we cannot settle for only ‘getting to Heaven’, that would tantamount to only ‘wanting to be goodish’ here on earth. We must gradually, with the help of God’s grace and the means He has placed at our disposal, discover and forge our spiritual identity here on earth.
This supernatural identity, conferred upon all Christians through Baptism, requires the further sculpturing and polishing by man’s free response to God’s love and mercy. Saints like St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus eagerly begged our Lord to further reveal His plans for her here on earth. She her vocation in ‘love’, and spent her heaven by doing good here on earth.
St. Josemaría, whose heart was enkindled with divine love by witnessing a Carmelite’s footprints on the snow, never ceased to ask himself –and guiding others as well– how to find God in the most ordinary events of his life.
To use the girl’s simple expression: we must desire to be useful in Heaven by already being useful here on earth. In short, we must already live our life here on earth with a realistic spiritual ideal or program.
In this year of faith, let us not fear to discover ‘new paths’ in our life of prayer, exerting in both small and big details a more upright attitude towards personal sacrifice and trials, of growing in our faith in the Sacraments, of embracing our professional work with a more serene and cheerful spirit of service, of undertaking a plan of formation to grow in our knowledge of faith and the virtues of our spiritual life, and of making concrete apostolic goals focusing on how to bring more people towards the same path that we tread.
This will make our desire for heaven truly meaningful. In this manner, we somehow set a ‘specific trend of holiness’ that will help others see heaven become a reality now through our living faith here on earth.