In Preparation For Eternity, Meditate On Your Life And Pray To Fix Past Damage

[adapted from After Life, by Michael H. Brown]

In preparation for eternity, which can come at any moment, we should meditate on our lives and repair past damage. We should love where before we failed to love. I recommend a novena of Masses for our lives -- a Mass for each year we’ve been alive -- and during each Mass, asking God to send love and blessings where we had failed to love and to bless every single person who ever came anywhere near our presence, from the moment of our conceptions to the present.

I believe the power of Mass is unlimited and that if we begin a life novena in which we meditate on a different year of our lives each day, and then offer Mass for it, we can begin the necessary cleansing here on earth.

It should be coupled with regular Confession. I urge people to go to Confession at least once a month and to pray always. Pray for everyone. We’re all the children of God. When we help or pray for another person, we help everyone on the planet. There’s a chain reaction and God will view us in terms of how we carried out our role in that chain reaction. As I’ve said, the seemingly insignificant people with quiet roles may have more of an effect than those we think of as “movers and shakers.”

The quiet housewife raising her children and praying well may well affect the universe more than a politician or author. In eternity, money, and earthly honors, mean nothing. Most of all, we must remember that what we bring to God is not what we own nor what we have achieved but the extent to which (despite earthly obstacles) we have loved.

We have no idea what we have done until we see our lives through the Light of Christ, and while we’re on earth we must constantly keep that evaluation before us -- praying that we conduct our lives right now as if we are already privy to the way our lives will look from the other side. Oh, the tests we go through! Some we pass; some we can't seem to pass -- but through prayer we will.

Once we pass, grace comes to confirm that we are reaching a higher level.

We must constantly invoke the Holy Spirit to let us know what we should do with each hour of our lives. We must give to God right now all the remaining sufferings and good acts of our lives, so that not a day is wasted when we reach the judgment.

01/29/07