Brett's Two Cents

Hello everyone. As Frs. Dave and Hans have indicated, these last weeks of the liturgical year turn our attention towards the end of time (the world’s, but also our own) and the account that we must all one day render to God for our lives. Reflecting on this judgment, C.S. Lewis had this to say:
 

“We have all encountered judgments or verdicts on ourselves in this life. Every now and then we discover what our fellow creatures really think of us… I am thinking of what we sometimes overhear by accident or of the opinions about us which our neighbors or employees or subordinates unknowingly reveal in their actions: and of the terrible, or lovely, judgments artlessly betrayed by children or even animals. Such discoveries can be the bitterest or sweetest experiences we have…I suppose the experience of the Final Judgment (which may break in upon us at any moment) will be like these little experiences, but
magnified to the Nth.
 
“For it will be infallible judgment. If it is favorable we shall have no fear, if unfavorable, no hope, that it is wrong. We shall not only believe, we shall know, know beyond doubt in every fiber of our appalled or delighted being, that as the judge has said, so we are: neither more nor less nor other. We shall perhaps even realize that in some dim fashion we could have known it all along…
 
“I do not find that pictures of physical catastrophe — that sign in the clouds, those heavens rolled up like a scroll — help one so much as the naked idea of judgment. We cannot always be excited. We can, perhaps, train ourselves to ask more and more often how the thing which we are saying or doing (or failing to do) at each moment will look when the irresistible light streams in upon it; that light which is so different from the light of this world—and yet, even now, we know just enough of it to take it into account. Women sometimes have the problem of trying to judge by artificial light how a dress will look by daylight. That is very like the problem of all of us: to dress our souls not for the electric lights of the present world but for the daylight of the next. The good dress is the one that will face that light. For that light will last longer.”