GO TO HEAVEN

FULTON J. SHEEN

GO TO HEAVEN

A Spiritual Road Map to Eternity

IGNATIUS PRESS    SAN FRANCISCO

Original edition published by Dell Publishing, New York

© 1949, 1958, 1960 by Fulton J. Sheen

All rights reserved

Copyright permission was granted by

The Estate of Fulton J. Sheen / The Society for the Propagation

of the Faith

www.onefamilyinmission.org

Nihil obstat: John A. Woodwine, J.C.D., Censor Librorum

Imprimatur: Francis Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York

August 10, 1960

Cover photograph of Fulton J. Sheen

by Fabian Bachrach (1965)

Peoria Star Journal Archives

Cover design by Enrique Javier Aguilar Pinto

Reprinted in 2017 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-62164-154-4 (PB)

ISBN 978-1-68149-776-1 (EB)

Library of Congress Control Number 2017931781

Printed in the United States of America

Dedicated to the LADY who looked down to Heaven

As she held Heaven in her arms

CONTENTS

Go to Heaven

1 The First Faint Summons to Heaven

2 Christ Helps Our Minds and Wills

3 Grace and Faith in Christian Life

4 Christ’s Office as Teacher, King, and Priest

5 Christian Life Is Struggle

6 Christian Marriage and Love

7 Prayer and Meditation

8 Love of God and Resignation to His Will

9 The Role of Mary in the Church

10 Suffering and Consolation

11 Our Final Choice

Acknowledgments

Notes

GO TO HEAVEN

If Horace Greeley had not believed there was such a thing as territory beyond the Mississippi, he would never have said: Go west, young man. If the modern man did not believe there was such a thing as hell, he would never give so many directives to those to whom he did not like to go there. Nobody ever says: Go to heaven. That is why we propose in this book to reverse the direction. As a matter of fact, neither hell nor heaven is related to our lives as arbitrary punishments or rewards.

Hell is not related to an evil life, as is generally supposed, as a spanking is related to an act of disobedience, for a spanking need not necessarily follow disobedience, and rarely does in juvenile circles. Rather, hell is related to an evil life as blindness is related to the plucking out of an eye. Heaven is not related to a good life as a medal is related to a school examination; it is rather related to a good life as knowledge to study. By the mere fact that we apply ourselves intellectually, we become learned.

This book is a road map to heaven and follows a very definite pattern. Many of the ideas contained herein have appeared in our previous writings, but they are here ordered in the forms of steps to the Kingdom of Light. The book opens with the story of man full of certain tensions and complexes originating from the conflict between what he ought to do and what he actually does. Once man recognizes that he cannot escape this civil war within by lifting himself by his own psychological bootstraps, he sees that supra-human aid is possible. There is a Truth beyond the reach of his mind and a Power beyond his tepid and weak will. This Truth and this Power are gifts. Man’s quest for God, however dim it is, is seen to be answered by God’s quest for man.

Once there is this divine romance between divinity and mankind in the person of Christ, there arises the great question confronting every man: Will he appropriate to himself this Divine Life, which is gratis and, therefore, called grace, or will he reject it?

Life is a tremendous drama in which one may say, Aye or Nay to his eternal destiny. To admit light to the eye, music to the ear, and food to the stomach is to perfect each of these organs; so too, to admit Truth to the mind and Power to the will is to make us more than a creature, namely, a partaker of the Divine Nature.

From that point on, the signposts to Heaven are clearly marked in succeeding chapters. Some say we have our hell on this earth. We do. We can start it here, but it does not finish here. But heaven has its beginnings here in a true peace of mind in union with Divine Life, but it does not finish here either. That is why we offer the encouragement: Go to Heaven.

1

The First Faint Summons to Heaven

Men of other generations went to God from the order in the universe; the modern man goes to God through the disorder in himself. The modern soul no longer looks to find God in nature. In other generations, man, gazing out on the vastness of creation, the beauty of the skies, and the order of the planets, deduced the power, the beauty, and the wisdom of the God Who created and sustained that world. But the modern man, unfortunately, is cut off from that approach by several obstacles: he is impressed less with the order of nature than he is with the disorder of his own mind; the atomic bomb has destroyed his awe of nature; and, finally, the science of nature is too impersonal for this self-centered creature. It is the human personality, not nature, which really interests and troubles men today.

This change in our times does not mean that the modern soul has given up the search for God, but only that it has abandoned the more rational, and even more normal, way of finding Him. Not the order in the cosmos, but the disorder in himself; not the visible things of the world, but the invisible frustrations, complexes, and anxieties of his own personality—these are the modern man’s starting point when he turns questioningly toward religion. In happier days, philosophers discussed the problem of man; now they discuss man as a problem.

Formerly, man lived in a three-dimensional universe where, from an earth he inhabited with his neighbors, he looked forth to heaven above and to hell below. Forgetting God, man’s vision has lately been reduced to a single dimension; namely, that of his own mind.

Where can the soul go, now that a roadblock has been thrown up against every external outlet? Like a city which has had all its outer ramparts seized, man must retreat inside himself. As a body of water that is blocked turns back upon itself, collecting scum, refuse, and silt, so the modern soul (which has none of the goals or channels of the Christian) backs upon itself and in that choked condition collects all the subrational, instinctive, dark, unconscious sediment which would never have accumulated had there been the normal exits of normal times. Man now finds that he is locked up within himself, his own prisoner. Jailed by self, he now attempts to compensate for the loss of the three-dimensional universe of faith by analyzing his mind.

The complexes, anxieties, and fears of the modern soul did not exist to such an extent in previous generations because they were shaken off and integrated in the great social-spiritual organism of Christian civilization. They are, however, so much a part of modern man that one would think they were tattooed on him. Whatever his condition, the modern man must be brought back to God and happiness. If the modern man wants to go to God from the devil, why, then, we will even start with the devil: that is where the Divine Lord began with Magdalen, and He told His followers that, with prayer and fasting, they too could start their evangelical work there.

There is no difference except that of terminology between the frustrated soul of today and the frustrated souls found in the Gospel. The modern man is characterized by three alienations: he is divided from himself, from his fellow man, and from his God. These are the same three characteristics of the frustrated youth in the land of the Gerasenes.

The first of these is self-estrangement. The modern man is no longer a unity, but a confused bundle of complexes and nerves. He is so dissociated, so alienated from himself that he sees himself less as a personality than as a battlefield where a civil war rages between a thousand and one conflicting loyalties. There is no single over-all purpose in his life. His soul is comparable to a menagerie in which a number of beasts, each seeking its own prey, turn one upon the other. Or he may be likened to a radio that is tuned in to several stations; instead of getting any one clearly, it receives only an annoying static.

If the frustrated soul is educated, it has a smattering of uncorrelated bits of information with no unifying philosophy. Then the frustrated soul may say to itself: I sometimes think there are two of me—a living soul and a Ph.D. Such a man projects his own mental confusion to the outside world and concludes that, since he knows no truth, nobody can know it. His own skepticism (which he universalizes into a philosophy of life) throws him back more and more upon those powers lurking in the dark, dank caverns of his unconsciousness. He changes his philosophy as he changes his clothes. On Monday, he lays down the tracks of materialism; on Tuesday, he reads a best seller, pulls up the old tracks, and lays the new tracks of an idealist; on Wednesday, his new roadway is communistic; on Thursday, the new rails of liberalism are laid; on Friday, he hears a broadcast and decides to travel on Freudian tracks; on Saturday, he takes a long drink to forget his railroading, and on Sunday, ponders why people are so foolish as to go to church. Each day he has a new idol, each week a new mood. His authority is public opinion; when that shifts, his frustrated soul shifts with it. There is no fixed ideal, no great passion, but only a cold indifference to the rest of the world. Because he lives in a continual state of self-reference, his conversational I’s come closer and closer, as he finds all neighbors increasingly boring if they insist on talking about themselves instead of about him.

The second characteristic of modern man is his isolation from his fellow men. This characteristic is revealed not only by the two world wars in twenty-one years and a constant threat of a third; not only by the growth of class conflict and selfishness wherein each man seeks his own; but also by man’s break with tradition and the accumulated heritage of the centuries. Any respect for that tradition is called reactionary, with the result that the modern soul has developed a commentator mentality which judges yesterday by today, and today by tomorrow. Nothing is more tragic in an individual who once was wise than to lose his memory, and nothing is more tragic to a civilization than the loss of its tradition. The modern soul which cannot live with itself cannot live with its fellow men. A man who is not at peace with himself will not be at peace with his brother. World wars are nothing but macrocosmic signs of the psychic wars waging inside microcosmic muddled souls. If there had not already been battles in millions of hearts, there would be none on the battlefields of the world.

Given a soul alienated from self, lawlessness follows. A soul with a fight inside itself will soon have a fight outside itself with others. Once a man ceases to be of service to his neighbor, he begins to be a burden to him; it is only a step from refusing to live with others to refusing to live for others. When Adam sinned, he accused Eve, and when Cain murdered Abel, he asked the antisocial question, Am I my brother’s keeper? (Gen 4:9). When Peter sinned, he went out alone and wept bitterly. Babel’s sin of pride ended in a confusion of tongues which made it impossible to maintain fellowship.

Finally, modern man is estranged from God. Alienation from self and from one’s fellow men has its roots in separation from God. Once the hub of the wheel, which is God, is lost, the spokes, which are men, fall apart. God seems very far away from the modern man: this is due, to a great extent, to his own Godless behavior. Goodness always appears as a reproach to those who are not living right, and this reproach on the part of the sinner expresses itself in hatred and persecution. There is rarely a disrupted, frustrated soul, critical and envious of his neighbor, who is not at the same time an antireligious man.

The organized atheism of the present hour is thus a projection of self-hatred; no man hates God without first hating himself. Persecution of religion is a sign of the indefensibility of the antireligious or atheistic attitude, for by the violence of hate it hopes to escape the irrationality of Godlessness. The final form of this hatred of religion is a wish to defy God and to maintain one’s own evil in the face of His goodness and power. Revolting against the whole of existence, such a soul thinks that it has disproved it; it begins to admire its own torment as a protest against life. Such a soul will not hear about religion, lest the comfort become a condemnation of its own arrogance; it defies it instead. Never able to make sense of its own life, it universalizes its own inner discord and sees the world as a kind of chaos in the face of which it develops the philosophy of living dangerously.

Does such a confused soul exist in the Gospel? Is modern psychology studying a different type of man from the one Our Divine Lord came to redeem? If we turn to St. Mark, we find that a young man in the land of the Gerasenes is described as having exactly the same three frustrations as the modern soul.

He was self-estranged, for when Our Lord asked, What is thy name? the young man answered, My name is Legion, for we are many (Mk 5:9). Notice the personality conflict and the confusion between my and we are many. It is obvious that he is a problem to himself, a bewildered backwash of a thousand and one conflicting anxieties. For that reason he called himself Legion. No divided personality is happy. The Gospel describes this unhappiness by saying that the young man was crying and cutting himself with stones (Mk 5:5). The confused man is always sad; he is his own worst enemy, as he abuses the purpose of nature for his own destruction.

The young man was also separated from his fellow men, for the Gospel describes him thus: . . . And he was always day and night in the tombs and in the mountains (Mk 5:5). He was a menace to other men. . . For he had been bound with fetters and chains, and he had rent the chains asunder and broken the fetters into pieces. And no one was able to control him. . . (Mk 5:4, 5). Isolation is a peculiar quality of Godlessness, whose natural habitat is away from fellow men, among the tombs, in the region of death. There is no cement in sin; its nature is centrifugal, divisive, and disruptive.

He was separated from God, for when he saw the Divine Savior, he shouted, What have I to do with Thee, Jesus the Son of the most high God? I adjure Thee by God that Thou torment me not (Mk 5:7). That is to say, What have we in common? Your presence is my destruction. It is an interesting psychological fact that the frustrated soul hates goodness and wants to be separated from it. Every sinner hides from God. The very first murderer said, And I shall be hidden from thy face, and I shall be a vagabond and a fugitive on the earth (Gen 4:14).

The important question, then, is not, What will become of us, but What will we be? The atomic bomb has taken our minds off existence and purpose. Yet it is still true today that how one gets out of time is not so important as how one is in eternity. The atomic bomb in the hands of a Francis of Assisi would be less harmful than a pistol in the hand of a thug; what makes the bomb dangerous is not the energy it contains, but the man who uses it. Therefore, it is modern man who has to be remade. Unless he can stop the explosions inside his own mind, he will probably—armed with the bomb—do harm to the planet itself, as Pius XII has warned. Modern man has locked himself in the prison of his own mind, and only God can let him out, as He let Peter out of his dungeon. All that man himself must do is to contribute the desire to get out. God will not fail; it is only our human desire that is weak. There is no reason for discouragement. It was the bleating lamb in the thickets, more than the flock in the peaceful pastures, which attracted the Savior’s heart and helping hand. But the recovery of peace through His grace implies an understanding of anxiety, the grave complaint of imprisoned modern man.

Modern anxiety is different from the anxiety of previous and more normal ages in two ways. In other days men were anxious about their souls, but modern anxiety is principally concerned with the body; the major worries of today are economic security, health, the complexion, wealth, social prestige, and sex. To read modern advertisements, one would think that the greatest calamity that could befall a person would be to have dishpan hands or a cough in the T-zone. This overemphasis on corporal security is not healthy; it has begotten a generation that is much more concerned about having life jackets to wear on a sea journey than about the cabin it will occupy and enjoy.

The second characteristic of modern anxiety is that it is not a fear of objective, natural dangers, such as lightning, beasts, famine; it is subjective, a vague fear of what one believes would be dangerous if it happened. That is why it is so difficult to deal with people who have today’s types of anxieties; it does no good to tell them that there is no outside danger, because the danger that they fear is inside of them and therefore is abnormally real to them.

It is important to inquire into the basic reason and ground of anxiety, according to man’s present historical condition, of which the psychological is only one superficial manifestation. The philosophy of anxiety looks to the fact that man is a fallen being composed of body and soul. Standing midway between the animal and the angel, living in a finite world and aspiring toward the infinite, moving in time and seeking the eternal, he is pulled at one moment toward the pleasures of the body and at another moment to the joys of the spirit. He is in a constant state of suspension between matter and spirit and may be likened to a mountain climber who aspires to the great peak above and yet, looking back from his present position, fears falling to the abyss below. This state of indeterminacy and tension between what he ought to be and what he actually is, this pull between his capacity for enjoyment and its tawdry realization, this consciousness of distance between his yearning for abiding love without satiety and his particular loves with their intermittent sense of fed-up-ness, this wavering between sacrificing lesser values to attain higher ideals or else abdicating the higher ideals entirely, this pull of the old Adam and the beautiful attraction of the new Adam, this necessity of choice which offers him two roads, one leading to God and the other away from Him—all this makes man anxious about his destiny beyond the stars and fearful of his fall to the depths beneath.

In every man, there is a double law of gravitation, one pulling him to the earth, where he has his time of trial, and the other pulling him to God, where he has his happiness. The anxiety underlying all modern man’s anxieties arises from his trying to be himself without God or from his trying to get beyond himself without God. The example of the mountain climber is not exact, for such a man has no helper on the upper peak to which he aspires. Man, however, has a helper—God on the upper peak of eternity reaches out His omnipotent hand to lift him up, even before man raises his voice in plea. It is evident that, even though we escaped all the anxieties of modern economic life, even though we avoided all the tensions which psychology finds in the unconsciousness and consciousness, we should still have that great basic fundamental anxiety born of our creatureliness. Anxiety stems fundamentally from irregulated desires, from the creature wanting something that is unnecessary for him or contrary to his nature or positively harmful to his soul. Anxiety increases in direct ratio and proportion as man departs from God. Every man in the world has an anxiety complex because he has the capacity to be either saint or sinner.

When we see a monkey acting foolishly, we do not say to the monkey, Do not act like a nut; but when we see a man acting foolishly, we do say, Do not act like a monkey. Because a man is spirit, as well as matter, he can descend to the level of beasts (though not so completely as to destroy the image of God in his soul). It is this possibility that makes the peculiar tragedy of man. Cows have no psychoses, and pigs have no neuroses, and chickens are not frustrated (unless these frustrations are artificially produced by man); neither would man be frustrated or have an anxiety complex if he were an animal made only for this world.

Since the basic cause of man’s anxiety is the possibility of being either a saint or a sinner, it follows that there are only two alternatives for him. Man can either mount upward to the peak of eternity or else slip backward to the chasms of despair and frustration. Yet there are many who think there is yet another alternative, namely, that of indifference. They think that, just as bears hibernate for a season in a state of suspended animation, so they, too, can sleep through life without choosing to live for God or against Him. But hibernation is no escape; winter ends, and one is then forced to make a decision—indeed, the very choice of indifference itself is a decision. White fences do not remain white fences by having nothing done to them; they soon become black fences. Since there is a tendency in us that pulls us back to the animal, the mere fact that we do not resist it operates to our own destruction. Just as life is the sum of the forces that resist death, so, too, man’s will must be the sum of the forces that resist frustration. A man who has taken poison into his system can ignore the antidote, or he can throw it out of the window; it makes no difference which he does, for death is already on the march. St. Paul warns us, How shall we escape if we neglect. . .? (Heb 2:3). By the mere fact that we do not go forward, we go backward. There are no plains in the spiritual life; we are either going uphill or coming down. Furthermore the pose of indifference is only intellectual. The will must choose. And even though an indifferent soul does not positively reject the infinite, the infinite