Monday of the Fourth Week of Lent 2019

“Our heart is restless until it rests in You,” St. Augustine of Hippo famously wrote nearly 1700 years ago, describing the incompleteness that marks every human being. Central to our mind and heart is an eternal void that can only be filled by God, though we often try to fill it with lesser goods. We long for perfection: for the truth, for what is good, for what is beautiful. Yet our lives are marked by imperfection: we struggle against ignorance, lies, and deceptive beauty.

As the first reading from Isaiah (65: 17-21) points out, we also struggle, albeit in a different way, with time. The hours of a day and the whole of our lifetime seem so short: so many things left undone, words left unspoken, so much labor seemingly spent in vain. Consider also the beginning and end of our lives: we make many choices about who we spend time with while we live, but the people at our birth and death are not of our choosing. What we would give to be with a loved one all through their life, from their birth to their death!

Isaiah gives us the hope of the Final Judgment: at the end of time, we – in some mysterious way – will see all the effects of our lives. God will give us the grace to see how our labor brought people closer to Him. We will be in the presence of our loved ones, and will “see” their whole lives, birth to death. May this joyful hope bring us peace and resolve to labor in the vineyards of the Lord!