“See what love the Father has bestowed on us
that we may be called the children of God.
And so we are.”
This last week, I visited the school classrooms,
like I do once a trimester,
and the rule is they can ask anything they want.
It works out sometimes. Sometimes.
This week, I was visiting one of the classes,
and I get the regular questions.
There are all sorts of fun questions,
and then they asked some difficult ones.
And then there was one that stopped me in my tracks,
I had to slow down and really pay attention to it.
One little child put up her hand and said,
“Father, how do non-believers get into heaven?
What about us?”
Now, I assume she was not Catholic;
there are lots of non-Catholics at school.
You could see she was worried,
maybe worried for her family, worried for herself.
So I had to pause, catch myself, and then respond.
I believe that God has created every single one of us,
every single one of us in His own image,
and He called us very good.
He loves every single one of us.
There is nothing we can do to earn that love
because we already have it.
And there is nothing we can do to ever lose that love,
because He has made a covenant
that He will always love us to the end of time.
Now, I said, I believe that heaven
is a reunion with God in that love.
So He is going to draw all of us to Himself.
All we have to do is want to be united with Him.
You can see she relaxed.
What is interesting is
that question is a question that a lot of us carry on our hearts,
not just for ourselves, but for others.
Many of as parents and grandparents
worry because your kids and grandkids
no longer going to church.
You wonder about that question.
Or you worry about other friends or family
who have no longer attended.
You see, we need to remember
that God’s love is overwhelming.
God’s love is always bringing us back.
So it is my firm conviction
that the gates of heaven are open to all.
The challenge is that we live in a society,
especially here in Silicon Valley,
where everything is done on merit, right?
So you earn your salary.
You earn your title.
You earn your place.
And we are tempted to apply that logic to heaven.
We put up the gates of heaven.
Then we become the gatekeepers.
And we decide who gets in
and who does not get in.
That is the struggle.
I believe that the gates of heaven are quite open.
The challenge is that we have to want to go.
That is not to say there are some things
that are incompatible in heaven.
For example, unforgiveness is incompatible in heaven.
The door is open but you cannot bring that stuff in.
The Lord says, “That is great, you are welcome,
but you cannot bring that in.”
Because that is incompatible with the love of God.
As is hate.
Unforgiveness and hate
are at least two that are incompatible.
But first we need to have the desire
to go to heaven.
Today we celebrate the feast of All Saints.
They are not the canonized saints
that are not on statues and stained glass windows.
They are all the saints who, as the psalmist says,
wanted to see the face of God.
And they do.
All those people we know
who were saintly in their lives.
People who loved us and were models of discipleship.
We believe they are with the Lord in heaven.
We call them all the saints.
They are in the communion of saints.
Scripture tells us today there is
so great a multitude that no one can count.
Then we are told in the second reading
that we are God’s children now.
Not that we will be, but we are.
The reason why I am so sure about this
is that I have been there for many people’s deaths.
I see what that transition looks like,
when it is done well,
when you are a believer.
I have seen it firsthand.
The delight in their face when they are ready
for that last moment of transition from here to there.
You have heard me talk of my brother,
who died several years ago.
I was there in his last moments.
But I remember the night before he died.
He had six months of pancreatic cancer.
His body was ravaged with cancer.
It was awful.
He was just ready to go.
I remember the night before he died,
just a couple of hours before he died,
he woke up again, and he said,
“Oh Lord, come on, open the doors.”
He was delighted.
I mean, he was delighted to go,
because he knew where he was going.
This last weekend we have been on a retreat,
and we call it Flourish.
We had a couple hundred people here,
and we finished it late last night with a jazz Mass.
We have this yellow door.
Let me explain what it meant.
It comes from Daniel Coyle’s book, Flourish.
He says, in life, we tend to have two types of doors:
a red door, which we do not go through,
and a green door, which we do.
Everything falls into those two categories.
But Coyle says that there is a third door,
a yellow door.
I call that the holy yellow door.
We are invited to go through it
because the God of surprises is behind it.
But it takes courage to open that door.
It takes humility to open the door
because you do not know what you are going to get.
I firmly believe that the door of heaven is a yellow door.
But the challenge is
we tend to paint our yellow doors red,
so we do not want to go through them.
So we paint it with merit.
Nope, cannot get in here unless you merit it.
Or you cannot get in because of fear.
We paint the door red.
But here is the thing about it:
no matter how many times we paint that door red,
God repaints it yellow,
because it is always open.
The God of Suprises!
Here is the harder part to hear.
There is no handle on the other side.
There is only a handle on our side.
We are the ones who have to open it.
We are the ones who have to want to go in.
We are the ones who want to live the gospel.
What does that mean for us here today?
I think a number of things.
First of all,
the little girl had that follow-up question:
“Well then, why would you join a religion
if you can just get in at the end?”
Good question.
Because religion, or good religion, good discipleship,
is living the joy of the gospel now.
Living the joy of heaven now,
that we know we are going to get in.
So we are living it now,
and we live all of life knowing that,
with that great weight off our shoulders.
But it is also to keep practicing,
to make sure we are not carrying anything
that we cannot get in with.
That is where our role is as disciples.
We need to stop unforgiveness.
We need to not carry that
because we cannot take it with us.
We cannot take hate with you into heaven,
so stop hating.
You cannot take unforgiveness with you
when you go to heaven,
so stop carrying it for a lifetime.
No matter how small and no matter how large.
You are just wasting energy.
You are wasting a good life of joy
carrying misery.
That is our challenge,
because we are living a messy life,
and that is part of what the retreat was about.
Life is messy.
We have to keep on letting go of all the stuff.
You have to keep opening the yellow doors in our life.
So as we celebrate the gift of all the saints
who are witness to us,
and we encourage them to help us,
because we ask them as our intercessors,
let us really work on letting go of all hate,
letting go of all unforgiveness and all grudges,
and to live the joy of the yellow door of heaven now.
Open for all.
Not just us.
All.
All creation has been created by God,
and it was good.
And so it is He who has the door, not us.
“See what love the Father has bestowed on us
that we may be called the children of God.
And so we are.”