I love Catholicism. It is the only worldview that is able to make sense of all aspects of human experience. It makes sense of science, explaining why there is order, why the universe is intelligible, why science works at all. And it makes sense of non-scientific, but deeply important, aspects of our experience, like beauty. What a poet tries to capture, Catholicism has. That awed catching of the breath during a symphony, the aching yearning that whispers to us from behind the sunset . . . Catholicism tells us why we feel this way.
And Catholicism is incredibly rational. Nothing in it is arbitrary. No Catholic idea or teaching is "just because." The rational articulation of the faith given to us by Thomas Aquinas is stunning. It is a comprehensive, systematic framework for making sense of reality. It helps us see everything in light of what is real, what is true, and — because truth is beauty at its highest level — what is beautiful.
This Catholic framework illuminates Andrea's and my love in some amazing ways. Andrea likes it when I talk about this stuff. She calls it "philosophical romance." I'm just glad I found a girl who doesn't mind listening to my ramblings!
Philosophical romance is pretty cool, though. For instance, there's a popular song from one of the Twilight movies that has a refrain that goes something like, "I have loved you for a thousand years, and I'll love you for a thousand more." Well, one of the wonderful things about being Catholic is that I hear a song like that and think, "Only a thousand?"
They're selling themselves short!
See, I tell Andrea that I really will love her for a thousand years . . . and for a million years, and for a billion years, and then for a billion more after that, and a billion more, and . . . a billion more, and, well, a billion more. And a billion more. And a billion more. And a billion more. . . .
And you know what? It's true. It's not hyperbole. It is plain old, literal, honest-to-goodness truth.
We humans will exist forever. I don't think of that as often as I should. We are all immortal. Whether we spend our immortal existence in a state of love, immersed in Love Himself, or in a kind of reductio ad me, shrunk into our selfishness forever, is up to us. C.S. Lewis wrote in The Weight of Glory, "It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations."
This means that, should Andrea and I reach heaven (as I have a holy hope we shall — though I am sure, in my case, only after a long detour in Purgatory!), we will love each other for eternity. Eternity is something we cannot even comprehend, time-bound as we are in this life. Oh, we intellectually understand the concept, but we don't really get it. We can't feel the full staggering weight of it. We will never end. We will experience more time than the universe has even been in existence for. And when that time has passed, we will experience that amount of time again, and then again, and again . . . In fact, we will exist for so long and experience so much time that the entire 15 billion years that the universe has existed will be something we look back on the way we look back now at a single moment many years ago.
Another awesome truth is that my love for Andrea will never be less than it is now. It can only increase. Yes, I know that there will be hardships in marriage. Feelings ebb and flow. But love, genuine love, transcends momentary feelings. The difficulties are the crucible in which love is purified and set into the will. And then, after we have reached God, our love for each other will be truly perfected in our love for Him. So I can tell Andrea with complete truthfulness that I will never love her less than I do now.
Oh, and speaking of the universe, Andrea and I liked to sit out looking at the stars in the warm evenings last summer. I've always loved to stargaze. I love seeing the millions and billions of stars, feeling that awesome vastness of space. For example, the Andromeda galaxy, which we can see with our naked eyes, is 2.5 million light years away. That means that the light which we see when we look at it left those stars 2.5 million years ago. That's incredible! That light left that galaxy before human civilization existed. Our fastest spaceships go only 1/18,000th of the speed of light, so if we set out for Andromeda today we would reach it in 45 billion years. The universe itself has only been around for 15 billion. That gives us a sense of scale! We humans will never experience even a billionth, even a billion billionth, of the universe. Even if we should rise to Star Trek-style levels of technology, the universe will always dwarf us. We can never own the universe. It will always be too big for us to possess.
Incomprehensible vastness
And yet we can possess something far greater than the universe. We can possess its Creator. We are destined for a union with God so complete that there will be no boundaries between Him and us. The hand that sparked the Big Bang, that determined the bounds of the universe, that laid out the courses of the stars and planets, that set forth the laws of physics, and that sustains all of creation moment to moment, will be ours, and we will be completely His. We will be entirely immersed in His essence, His very Being. Love Himself will pour Himself into us continually, and we will give back to Him our own poor love, forever.
This has great meaning when I think about marriage. It means that Andrea is loved by God with an infinite love, and she is destined to be united to Him. The universe will someday cease to exist, but Andrea will not. God loves her more than he loves the entire universe, which means that she is more valuable than the universe. She is a universe unto herself. All the laws of physics and the astonishing exactitude and perfection of the operation of the universe, all the breathtaking vastness and soul-searing beauty of it, cannot compare to the vastness of Andrea's soul, which is able to possess and be possessed by Being Himself, which is free to make choices and — wonder of wonders! — to love. And so, in marrying Andrea, I will be doing something greater and more momentous than possessing the universe itself. Something more valuable than the entire universe will be in my charge. That's an awe-inspiring thought.
To end on a light note, Andrea and I like to speculate on what things will be like when we get our glorified bodies at the end of the world. See, humans are not spirits like angels. Nor are we "ghosts in machines," spirits riding around in bodies. Our bodies are essential to us. We are, in a real and fundamental way, our bodies. The separation of soul from body at death is unnatural! We are not meant to exist that way. So we will eventually get our bodies back. And our bodies will be glorified and perfected. They will be able to travel as fast as thought, walk through other matter, and do many other things a superhero would be jealous of. But they will still be bodies. They will still be physical matter. Angels travel as fast as thought because, being pure spirits, they go from one place to another in the same way that we think of one thing and then another, without anything in between. (In fact, the "presence" of angels is this kind of thing; not a physical presence, but like turning a thought towards something.) Our glorified bodies will also be able to travel as fast as thought, but, since we will still be physical beings, we will travel through every point in space in between. What a rush!
What all this means is that I will still be able to dip Andrea. In fact, I will be able to dip her better than I ever could now! Couple this with the knowledge of our immortality, and Andrea has requested that I dip her from the Mariana Trench to the moon (assuming they are still around) on a certain day almost one billion years from now.
Wheeeee!
I told her, "It's a date."
