Welcome to heaven

In paradisum deducant te angeli,
in tuo adventu
suscipiant te martyres,
et perducant te
in civitatem sanctam Jerusalem.
Chorus angelorum te suscipiat,
et cum Lazaro quondam paupere
aeternam habeas requiem.

May angels lead you into Paradise,
on your arrival
may martyrs receive you,
and lead you through
into the City, holy Jerusalem.
May the chorus of angels take you up,
and with Lazarus, once poor,
may you have eternal rest.

"Archbishop Cranmer" quoted the beautiful Latin words in his piece about Jade. Jade has been rather like Lazarus in our Lord's parable in Luke 16, a poor outsider, now welcomed to Abraham's bosom.

"There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man's table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.

"The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham's side. The rich man also died and was buried. In hell, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, 'Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.'

"But Abraham replied, 'Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.'

"He answered, 'Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my father's house, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.'

"Abraham replied, 'They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.'

" 'No, father Abraham,' he said, 'but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.'

"He said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.' "

May I introduce Archbishop Cranmer?

I discovered this anglican clergyman's blog a couple of months ago. Before writing more about him, let me quote him on the death of Jade Goody:

There will be no more night, no pain, no sorrow or shame: the suffering is over. At the tender age of 27, Jade Tweed, mother of two, married for just 27 days, has died and passed into the holy light of paradise to sing the song of peace and glory. She is now with her Lord and Saviour, according to her faith, just as he has promised.

There were tears and sadness, but she wanted to be remembered for the laughter she brought. There will be very many who do not care, for who was she to them or they to her? There will be some who are relieved at her departure, sickened by the incessant, trivia-obsessed voyeurism of the tedious red-top notion of dumbed-down celebrity. There will be those who scoff at the paucity of her biblical understanding; who question the validity of her repentance and the efficacy of her death-bed baptism; who pour scorn upon her imperfect grasp of the soteriological and theological imperatives.....

Now, "Archbishop Cranmer" is politically right wing, and as you can see, orthodoxly Christian. Among his targets are the government's support of anti-Christian groups, and its favouring of Muslim over Christian causes.

I am not a tory, or a member of any political party, but I have to agree with many of "Cranmer's" attacks. Christians must stand up for their faith and their Lord. If you don't mind being alternately irritated and inspired, then a glance at his blog could be a tonic/stimulus.

Pascal's Wager

I don't know how helpful this will be, but I am posting an extract from Wikipedia about the 18th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal. To put the matter in a very simple way, imagine a bishop talking to an atheist. The bishop says to the atheist: "If you are right and death is nothingness, neither of us will know that you were right. If I'm right, and through death we pass to God's judgement and heaven or hell, we'll both know I was right. What's more, I shall have had a lifetime of looking forward to heaven, and you will have missed all that hope and joy."

Anyway, here's a slightly more complicated way of putting it:

Pascal begins with the premise that the existence or non-existence of God is not provable by human reason, since the essence of God is "infinitely incomprehensible". Since reason cannot decide the question, one must "wager", either by guessing or making a leap of faith. Agnosticism on this point is not possible, in Pascal's view, for we are already "embarked", effectively living out our choice.

We only have two things to stake, our "reason" and our "happiness". Pascal considers that there is "equal risk of loss and gain", a coin toss, since human reason is powerless to address the question of God's existence. That being the case, we then must decide it according to our happiness... by weighing the gain and loss in believing that God exists. He contends the wise decision is to wager that God exists, since "If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing", meaning one can gain eternal life if God exists, but if not, one will be no worse off in death than if one had not believed.