New Year; Newman ("The Lapse of Time")

The days at the end of December and the beginning of this year have been a blur of activities, decisions, and emotions: I mentioned before that I was in the hospital with COVID-related pneumonia (December 7 through 12). My older brother was also in the hospital with COVID-related pneumonia starting on December 3; went home the next week; returned to the COVID ward a couple of days later; went home for about seven days, and then ended up in CCU at another hospital, and finally in hospice/palliative care. He died January 2 in hospice and his funeral was January 13. 

January 16 was the second anniversary of my husband Mark's death. So the Four Last Things, Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell have been much on my mind.

Then on January 17 I went to our monthly "Lovers of Newman" group at the IHM convent in Colwich, Kansas to read an unusual New Year's Day sermon by John Henry Newman, "The Lapse of Time". 

Newman delivered this sermon in the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin on January 1, 1832--before the Oxford Movement began--and he celebrated the New Year with his parishioners by reminding them that their time on earth is fleeting, precious, and consequential, that each one of them will die some day--maybe not tomorrow--but some day, and that when they die they will have no time left to live so as to prepare to die.

Death may come suddenly:

We naturally shrink from the thought of death, and of its attendant circumstances; but all that is hateful and fearful about it will be fulfilled in our case, one by one. But all this is nothing compared with the consequences implied in it. Death stops us; it stops our race. Men are engaged about their work, or about their pleasure; they are in the city, or the field; any how they are stopped; their deeds are suddenly gathered in—a reckoning is made—all is sealed up till the great day. What a change is this! In the words used familiarly in speaking of the dead, they are no more. They were full of schemes and projects; whether in a greater or humbler rank, they had their hopes and fears, their prospects, their pursuits, their rivalries; all these are now come to an end. One builds a house, and its roof is not finished; another buys merchandise, and it is not yet sold. And all their virtues and pleasing qualities which endeared them to their friends are, as far as this world is concerned, vanished. Where are they who were so active, so sanguine, so generous? the amiable, the modest, and the kind? We were told that they were dead; they suddenly disappeared; that is all we know about it.

And Newman warned his nineteenth-century congregation that they don't think enough about the souls of the dead:

The world goes on without them; it forgets them. Yes, so it is; the world contrives to forget that men have souls, it looks upon them all as mere parts of some great visible system. This continues to move on; to this the world ascribes a sort of life and personality. When one or other of its members die, it considers them only as falling out of the system, and as come to nought. For a minute, perhaps, it thinks of them in sorrow, then leaves them—leaves them for ever. It keeps its eye on things seen and temporal. Truly whenever a man dies, rich or poor, an immortal soul passes to judgment; but somehow we read of the deaths of persons we have seen or heard of, and this reflection never comes across us. Thus does the world really cast off men's souls, and recognizing only their bodies, it makes it appear as if "that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts, even one thing befalleth them, as the one dieth so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath, so that a man hath no pre-eminence over a beast, for all is vanity." [Eccles. iii. 19.]

So in 1832, Newman imagined the experience of the dead man, as his soul faces judgment and eternity and realizes he is out of time (in more ways than one):

It goes forth as a stranger on a journey. Man seems to die and to be no more, when he is but quitting us, and is really beginning to live. Then he sees sights which before it did not even enter into his mind to conceive, and the world is even less to him than he to the world. Just now he was lying on the bed of sickness, but in that moment of death what an awful change has come over him! What a crisis for him! There is stillness in the room that lately held him; nothing is doing there, for he is gone, he now belongs to others; he now belongs entirely to the Lord who bought him; to Him he returns; but whether to be lodged safely in His place of hope, or to be imprisoned against the great Day, that is another matter, that depends on the deeds done in the body, whether good or evil. And now what are his thoughts? How infinitely important now appears the value of time, now when it is nothing to him! Nothing; for though he spend centuries waiting for Christ, he cannot now alter his state from bad to good, or from good to bad. What he dieth that he must be for ever; as the tree falleth so must it lie. This is the comfort of the true servant of God, and the misery of the transgressor. His lot is cast once and for all, and he can but wait in hope or in dread. Men on their death-beds have declared, that no one could form a right idea of the value of time till he came to die; but if this has truth in it, how much more truly can it be said after death! What an estimate shall we form of time while we are waiting for judgment! Yes, it is we—all this, I repeat, belongs to us most intimately. It is not to be looked at as a picture, as a man might read a light book in a leisure hour. We must die, the youngest, the healthiest, the most thoughtless; we must be thus unnaturally torn in two, soul from body; and only united again to be made more thoroughly happy or to be miserable for ever.

Reading those sentences in bold may make a Catholic wonder: how did Newman after his conversion look back at them and reconcile them with his belief in Purgatory? A Soul in Purgatory is bound for glory in Heaven; he or she can do nothing to aid himself or herself while enduring the purgation necessary for sins confessed and forgiven, so it is true that his or her "lot is cast once for all." 

On the other hand, in our discussion we did not know exactly what Newman meant by saying: "for though he spend centuries waiting for Christ" and "he can but wait in hope or in dread". Did Newman believe in 1832 that there was no immediate, particular judgment of the soul until the end of time and the return of Christ in the Second Coming? At that time, did he believe in a form of "soul sleep" in which the soul is still aware?

There's quite a contrast here to his much later work The Dream of Gerontius, which we discussed briefly, with its images of the immediate, particular judgment and the Soul of Gerontius willingly being led to Purgatory by his Guardian Angel. The Soul feels the bitter pang of realizing how he failed God while on Earth and is ready to be purified.

At the end of the sermon--and I encourage you to read the rest here--Newman certainly demonstrates that he is well-past his former Calvinist convictions, as he summarizes the mystery of God's grace and our Free Will:

Those whom Christ saves are they who at once attempt to save themselves, yet despair of saving themselves; who aim to do all, and confess they do nought; who are all love, and all fear; who are the most holy, and yet confess themselves the most sinful; who ever seek to please Him, yet feel they never can; who are full of good works, yet of works of penance. All this seems a contradiction to the natural man, but it is not so to those whom Christ enlightens. They understand in proportion to their illumination, that it is possible to work out their salvation, yet to have it wrought out for them, to fear and tremble at the thought of judgment, yet to rejoice always in the Lord, and hope and pray for His coming.

This must have been quite a sermon to hear on the first day of 1832 in Oxford. Newman was reminding his congregation of hard truths and realities they knew, but did not know. As he says at the beginning of the sermon, if we think of death only in physical and general terms, we don't know about the reality of our own deaths: we have "no knowledge of that great truth at all."