Hypocrite!

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Arianism, Atheists, Christmas, Oration 38, Secularism, St. Gregory the Theologian

After I made the claim that modern secularists and atheists like to brand Christians with the image of the fire and brimstone preacher, one might be tempted to point out that in Section 15 of his Oration 38 St. Gregory the Theologian sounds an awful lot like a fire and brimstone preacher:

Against which is he more angry?…It would have been better for you to be circumcised and possessed by a demon, if I may say something ridiculous, rather than in uncircumcision and good health to be in a state of wickedness and atheism.

This characterization, however, would completely miss the point of what St. Gregory is trying to say. Whereas the fire and brimstone preacher is typically urging morality (stop sinning so you don’t go to hell), St. Gregory really isn’t talking about moral behavior in Section 15.

The point, rather, is about how to answer that most important question: Who is God? and subsequently Who is Christ? St. Gregory mentions demons because they, unlike his Arian opponents, understand that Christ is God.

This section talks about how the Triune God is one in essence and distinct in persons. Father and Son have their own activities (the Father sends forth and the Son is sent), yet both have the power to resurrect. Therefore his point about being a demon possessed Jew (an illustration he calls ridiculous) isn’t about behavior, but understanding.

In order to have a proper relationship with God, and therefore be able to partake of His divine nature (cf 2 Peter 1:4), we must have a proper (aka orthodox) understand of who God is. If I go around insisting that all women are really men and that all men are really women, all of the relationships in my life are going to be dysfunctional. How can it be otherwise with our relationship with God?

To demonstrate this relational understanding, St. Gregory mitigates his own characterization of God as angry by correcting himself: Rather whom must he pardon more? God is a loving God. The relationship, therefore, is about love (who must He pardon) and not anger (who must He condemn).

Ultimately, what do the Arians and the atheists gain from who they insist God is? Nothing. If Christ is a created being (as the Arians insist) we cannot partake of divine nature — we merely partake of creation, something we already do at every meal. Since Christ would have a beginning (as we do), he must also have an end (just as we do). Therefore, both Arians and atheists really have only one hope: death.

In contrast, St. Gregory lives in hope that by partaking of Christ, who is one of the persons of the Triune God, we may all share in God’s eternity and thus overcome death. Morality really doesn’t play a role in this discussion, because we are all hypocrites and sinners. In fact, that is why Christ became a babe born in a cave.

Thus, to mirror St. Gregory’s self-admitted ridiculous statement, it is better to be a sinful hypocrite who has a proper understanding of who God is than an atheist who is unquestionably moral.

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Polemics

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Atheists, Christmas, Love, Oration 38, Secularism, St. Gregory the Theologian

Inevitably when reading the Fathers of the Church, we will run into a polemic style like that in Section 14 of St. Gregory the Theologian’s Oration 38. To the modern ear, it sounds angry, mean, over the top and even bigoted. However, we must understand that our own politically correct, post-Holocaust context is extremely different than the context that St. Gregory found himself in.

Christianity, despite being adopted by the emperor St. Constantine at the beginning of the fourth century was still on precarious ground. Not only had it suffered persecution under the emperor Julian the Apostate only two decades prior, but St. Gregory’s faith, expressed in the Nicene Creed, was not held by the majority of clergy or the emperor when St. Gregory was preaching this homily. As I stated in my introduction to St. Gregory, despite being bishop, he was forced to serve in a house church because every single church in the city was controlled by Arians. In addition, Judaism not only had had special privileges within the empire, they were a source of persecution against the Church.

In the same way we might be comfortable with the polemic cries of bigotry aimed at those who would persecute Jews or other minorities today, we should not allow our modern ear to allow us to dismiss Oration 38 because St. Gregory’s polemics are entirely appropriate for the context in which they were said.

If we can look past these contextual polemics, what we actually find is a apologetic style that we modern Christians should actually find quite useful. In essence, St. Gregory is challenging his foes (the Arians, in his case) to answer for their rejection of the Christianity preached by St. Gregory. He does so in a wonderful way that is still applicable today: “Do you bring as a charge against God his good deed?”

So often we Christians must defend ourselves from personal attacks by secularists. We are seen as ignorant, non-rational, backwards thinking and un-scientific. The assumption is that only non-rational and ignorant people would be foolish enough to believe in an old-fashioned idea like God. Rarely do they have to answer to St. Gregory’s challenge: Do you accuse God because He loved you so much so as to send you His Only Begotten Son? Do you accuse God because Christ humbled Himself for you? Do we need to dismiss God because Christ loved you enough to go to the Cross and experience death? Does God need to be persecuted because He gave us the gift of the resurrection?

Rather than having to get into an argument over who we are as Christians (an argument we cannot win, because there is no way to prove or disprove faith), we should talk about the real issue: God and His Gospel. At issue isn’t our faith, our intelligence or our ignorance. At issue is the rejection of God and all the good He willingly gives us.

Today’s atheists are used to Christians talking about morality, avoiding punishment and operating from a negative view of who God is. St. Gregory powerfully demonstrates that we shouldn’t operate that way. The Gospel isn’t about morality, hell or punishment, it is about the ultimate expression of love. It is this love that is rejected. It is this love that is attacked. It is with this love that we should be challenging the secular world around us.

Choice

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America, Atheists, Calvin, Creation from Nothing, Image and Likeness, Psalm 1, St. Hilary

Having established that the tree next to the stream is Christ, St. Hilary explains how the happy man can be like Christ the Tree of Life:

That happy man, then, will become like unto this tree when he shall be transplanted, as the thief was, into the garden and set to grow beside the rills of water: and his planting will be that happy new planting which cannot be uprooted, to which the Lord refers in the Gospels when He curses the other kind of planting and says: ‘Every planting that My Father hath not planted shall be rooted up (Matt 15:13).’ This tree, therefore, will yield its fruits. Now in all other passages where God’s Word teaches some lesson from the fruits of trees, it mentions them as making fruit rather than as yielding fruit, as when it says: ‘A good tree cannot make evil fruits (Matt 7:18),’ and when in Isaiah the complaint about the vine is: ‘I looked that it should make grapes, and it made thorns (Is 5:2).’ But this tree will yield its fruits, being supplied with free-will and understanding for the purpose. For it will yield its fruits in its own season.

It is God’s desire to see everyone be like Him. He wants nothing more than to have every human being in all of history transplanted, drinking of water that brings everlasting life — just as He did with the Thief on the Cross. Note, however, that St. Hilary acknowledges something very important about how God deals with human beings — the fact that the happy man yields his fruits rather than makes his fruits demonstrates that the exercise of free will is a necessary component to this entire process — of becoming blessed, happy and ultimately transplanted.

One of the arguments used against Christianity is in reaction to the fire and brimstone-type homilies that are part and parcel to the history of Christianity in America. This history is heavily influenced by the fatalism of Calvin, which, in turn, affects entire swaths of denominations of Protestants in the United States. The argument is usually some variation on the theme that God is coercive and that He rules by fear. If God were truly good, He would snap His fingers and all the evil in the world would go away and we could all be happy.

The problem with both this assessment and the fatalism of Calvin is rooted in the free will that St. Hilary sees being exercised in the First Psalm. God is ultimately free — His freedom is beyond our comprehension. There was nothing that coerced or compelled Him to create. There was nothing that forced Him to go to the Cross. There was nothing that obliged Him to make humanity in His image and His likeness.

If, therefore, we are truly made in that image and in that likeness, part of what makes us like God is our free will. In other words, if God were to snap His fingers and get rid of all evil in the world, He would actually destroy His creation. In ridding the world of evil, He would deny our free will to choose that evil. In denying our free will, He would deny us His image and likeness. In denying us His image and likeness, we would cease to be human beings. We would cease to be what He made us to be.

In other words, God cannot be coercive. The road to salvation — the path we must take to be transplanted to the rill of water that gives us eternal life — is a road that we must choose. Only in that way can God maintain His creation — honor and protect the image and likeness that He freely granted to us. Thus, the evil that exists in this world is not of God’s making or God’s fault. We are wholly responsible for that evil because we choose it on a daily basis. Rather, God — by allowing us that choice in the first place — is demonstrating His patience and His love for His creation.

When we made the choice to turn our back on our Creator, He had every right to erase us all from existence — to allow us to go back to the nothing from which we came. Instead, God chose not only to allow us continued existence, but to come to us, to become one of us, to suffer as we suffer, to die as we die and, ultimately, to honor and fulfill our free will to reject Him in the hope that we will see the Truth — that we will see in ourselves the ability to be like the tree by waters which never dies and yields its fruits in its own season.

Inevitability

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Atheists, Communism, Psalm 1, Secularism, St. Hilary

St. Hilary continues with his discussion of the ungodly:

There are, besides, other counsels of the ungodly, i.e., of those who have fallen into heresy, unrestrained by the laws of either the New Testament or the Old. Their reasoning ever takes the course of a vicious circle; without grasp or foothold to stay them they tread their interminable round of endless indecision. Their ungodliness consists in measuring God, not by His own revelation, but by a standard of their choosing; they forget that it is as godless to make a God as to deny Him; if you ask them what effect these opinions have on their faith and hope, they are perplexed and confused, they wander from the point and wilfully avoid the real issue of the debate. Happy is the man then who hath not walked in this kind of counsel of the ungodly, nay, who has not even entertained the wish to walk therein, for it is a sin even to think for a moment of things that are ungodly.

In our modern context, St. Hilary’s complaint that there are ungodly people who “have fallen into heresy unrestrained by the laws of either the New Testament or the Old” might seem to be no longer relevant; however, his criticism that they measure God “by a standard of their choosing” is as accurate today as it was in any age. Whether or not anyone wants to admit it, the twentieth century should stand as a warning to us all about wandering down the path of the kind of ungodliness that St. Hilary describes here.

When one measures God by any standard other than God’s (especially in the case of secularism and atheism), that means that the arbiter of morality and ethical behavior is humanity, not God. Since humanity is fallible and changeable, so, too, then is morality and ethical behavior. When a society starts down this road, tyranny is inevitable.

This may seem an outrageous statement, but when human beings are the ones who decide what is moral and ethical and this morality and these ethics are malleable, then the one who ultimately decides what is moral and ethical is the person who has the most power and is willing to use it. The twentieth century saw this made manifest, with figures like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Moa Tse Tung who were perfectly comfortable killing people who disagreed with them and who justified these murders through the morality and ethics of the political philosophies that the adhered to.

This same pattern is inevitable. It may take a few generations, but once God — the external, eternal and unchanging source of morality and ethics — is removed from our discussions of proper behavior, someone somewhere will arise who is willing to use force to impose their own version of what is moral and ethical. Indeed, the twentieth century has demonstrated the the truth of Psalm 1 — Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly.

Cause

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Atheists, Psalm 1, Science, Scientism, St. Hilary

St. Hilary continues his discussion of the ungodly:

Thus, all the counsel of these men is wavering, unsteady, and vague, and wanders about in the same familiar paths and over the same familiar ground, never finding a resting-place, for it fails to reach any definite decision. They have never in their system risen to the doctrine of a Creator of the world, for instead of answering our questions as to the cause, beginning, and duration of the world, whether the world is for man, or man for the world, the reason of death, its extent and nature, they press in ceaseless motion round the circle of this godless argument and find no rest in these imaginings.

One of the things the modern atheist hangs their hat on is science, because science appears to allow them to contradict the criticisms that St. Hilary lays against them in this paragraph. If one pays close attention, however, science still cannot satisfactorily answer these questions.

We can now guess that there was an event that began the universe (generally referred to as the Big Bang) and we can guess that the universe has been around billions of years; however, despite all of the theoretical physics, biology and math that we are now able to use, science has yet to come up with a satisfactory reason for the cause of the universe (save for the idea of intelligent design, which they dismiss out of hand). Humanity, if anything, is increasingly seen as a blight upon creation. They have no reason for death except that it is. These same basic arguments, though now dressed up in physics, biology and math, have basically been the same since St. Hilary.

Indeed, if one wishes to see the ridiculous lengths modern atheists go in order to maintain their world view, I would suggest watching Ben Stein’s documentary on intelligent design and academic freedom Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Stein sits down to interview one of the leading atheist advocates, Richard Dawkins, to talk about intelligent design. Dawkins not only states that the idea that aliens created life on earth is more credible than intelligent design, but he’d be willing to consider it.

In other words, despite all of the physics, biology and math we have at our disposal, science still cannot answer cause. Why do we exist? Why is there death? What is our purpose? Science cannot answer these questions. Thus, the ungodly dance around them today, just as they did in the fourth century.

Old-Fashioned Thinking

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Atheists, Psalm 1, St. Hilary

St. Hilary continues his discussion of the sinner vs. the undutiful:

There is no doubt then that, as this instance proves, the undutiful (or ungodly) must be distinguished from the sinner. And, indeed, general opinion agrees to call those men ungodly who scorn to search for the knowledge of God, who in their irreverent mind take for granted that there is no Creator of the world, who assert that it arrived at the order and beauty which we see by chance movements, who, in order to deprive their Creator of all power to pass judgment on a life lived rightly or in sin, will have it that man comes into being and passes out of it again by the simple operation of a law of nature.

It is passages like these that have convinced me of the importance of reading and becoming familiar with the Fathers of the Church. Modern man has accomplished and progressed so much and in terms of technology that we live under the illusion that we have made the same kind of progress in terms of our thinking. St. Hilary, whose description of the undutiful could as easily apply to 21st century atheists as it does 4th century pagans, dispels this delusion.

One of the consequences (for good or ill) of our technological prowess is the ability to affect huge populations very quickly. This requires a great deal of responsibility and care as to how this technology is applied. For example, one of the more intriguing, but troubling, scientific frontiers is stem cell research.

If we (correctly) see identical twins as unique and unrepeatable human persons, than any research that impregnates a human egg with the genetic material acquired from stem cells creates a unique and unrepeatable human person. Should that impregnated egg then be used to re-grow someone’s organ in order to replace it we have created a slave for the express purpose of benefitting someone else. It would be akin to one identical twin killing their sibling in order to harvest their organs in order to save their own life.

What St. Hilary has to say about the ungodly is just as relevant today as it was in the 4th century. The ungodly mind would have no real issue with enslaving a whole class of human beings (fertilized eggs) because they are merely a group of cells that operate under the laws of nature. Human life in and of itself has no real intrinsic value. We saw this writ large during the communist regimes of the 20th century, which had no qualms about murdering tens if not hundreds of millions of people.

One of the main ways modern atheists like to dismiss Christianity and Christian thought is by labeling it as old-fashioned and out of step with modern reality. St. Hilary demonstrates that their thinking is no less old-fashioned.

Science

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Atheists, Holy Spirit, Science, Secularism, St. Ambrose

When one reads enough of the Fathers of the Church, there is one aspect of our modern world that begins to seem downright backwards. To the modern mind, there is a dichotomy between science and religion. This is, in part, due to the emergence of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Since his theory hypothesizes a mechanism for change that operates primarily by random chance, it intellectually challenges the role of a divine creator in the grand scheme of things. However (despite the protestations of atheists and secularists), the actual mechanism that Darwin proposes (natural selection) does not stand up to scientific analysis (how does it explain altruism?). If scientists are honest they will admit as such.

However, as characterized by the Scopes Trial, the modern world sees religion and science as adversaries. This dichotomy, in part, is perpetuated by people who are anti-religion because it allows them to remove religion (especially Christianity) from the public sphere and makes power over others easier to obtain and hold onto. Remember the words of St. Paul in the third chapter of Galatians (v. 28):

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

For anyone who seeks to have power over anyone else, Christianity is a major stumbling block.

Evolution, however, is not alien to religion — indeed the goal of Orthodox Christianity is the evolution of creation from its fallenness to the divine life of God. Indeed, I would argue that the current perception of religion vs. science is something that does not hold up to a close examination, especially if one reads the Fathers.

Take St. Ambrose, for example. Having established, in the ninth chapter of the first book of his treatise On the Holy Spirit, that the Holy Spirit is the oil of gladness, he states:

And well did he say oil of gladness, lest you should think Him a creature; for it is the nature of this sort of oil that it will by no means mingle with moisture of another kind. Gladness, too, does not anoint the body, but brightens the inmost heart, as the prophet said: ‘Thou hast put gladness in my heart’ (Ps. 4:7). So as he loses his pains who wishes to mix oil with moister matter, because since the nature of oil is lighter than others, when the others settle, it rises and is separated. How do those wretched pedlars think that the oil of gladness can by their tricks be mingled with other creatures, since of a truth corporeal things cannot be mingled with incorporeal, nor things created with uncreated?

Did you see it? Did you see how St. Ambrose used science to make a theological point? Oil and water do not mix. Oil is lighter than water and so when the two settle, the oil sits atop the water. This is science and the Fathers were never afraid to use science to illustrate a theological point. God is the creator of all. Therefore, our observations of His creation will inevitably reveal to us theology. We just have to be open to the possibility.

Sadly, the modern mind has convinced itself that science — the means by which we explore and explain creation — is incapable of seeing the Creator through His Creation. Who, in their right mind, says that we can know nothing about Pablo Picasso, Rembrandt or Claude Monet from their paintings? Certainly, we cannot know them in their entirety without having other sources of information, but we can intuit basic information about them. Seeing what they painted, in what style they painted in and by the technology used in their paint we can determine when and where they lived, for example. Thus, to say that God cannot be known by observing His creation is patently ridiculous.

In other words, science vs. religion (especially Christianity) is a false dichotomy.

Goodness

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Atheists, Christmas, Church and State, Communism, Holy Spirit, Jefferson, Secularism, St. Ambrose, Truth

In the American culture, especially in the last century where we have twisted Jefferson’s separation of church and state to mean exactly the opposite of what he meant,* speaking about religion and, especially, theology and dogma is uncomfortable and difficult. A knee-jerk reaction is to ask: Why is the writing of St. Ambrose (and his steadfast arguments over dogma concerning the Holy Spirit) so important? Why can’t we just get along? Isn’t being a good person enough?

Recently, a survey was done that demonstrates that this attitude is overwhelmingly prevalent among American Catholics. Here is a response from Fr. Barron, a Catholic apologist, that does a very good job of explaining why doctrine (a much more palatable word than dogma, which I think is more the accurate term) is so vitally important:

 

To place what Fr. Barron is saying in context of St. Ambrose, note this passage from the fifth chapter of the first book of On the Holy Spirit:

Good, then, is the Spirit, but good, not as though acquiring but as imparting goodness. For the Holy Spirit does not receive from creatures but is received; as also He is not sanctified but sanctifies; for the creature is sanctified, but the Holy Spirit sanctifies. In which matter, though the word is used in common, there is a difference in the nature.

Goodness comes from God — imparted by the Holy Spirit, our contact point and source of communion with God. If we get rid of God, or even if we have an improper understanding of God (and therefore a dysfunctional relationship with Him), we get rid of the source of goodness. Therefore, being a good person is not only not enough, but becomes impossible.

When one takes into consideration Fr. Barron’s examples of both the ancient and modern (communist, fascist, atheistic) worlds where the Christian God is absent and the complete disregard these worlds have for entire classes of human beings, it puts into perspective the radical change brought about by the Nativity and the Incarnation of Christ. As St. Ambrose points out above, all good in the world comes from God. It is an external reality imparted by God.

The coming of Christ changes this dynamic completely. By uniting Himself to human nature, He makes humanity the temple of God, capable of housing the Holy Spirit. Thus goodness can now be internal — gushing forth from a human nature united to the divine.

In other words, what St. Ambrose is arguing about is vitally important. We cannot just get along and be good people without God, without Christ or without the Holy Spirit.

*Jefferson wrote these words in defense of a group of Baptists in Rhode Island, where they were a religious minority. He was arguing that it was right and proper for them to be Baptists in the public sphere. A separation of church and state allows their religion to mix with their politics and their ability to be bold about speaking their own beliefs in the political sphere. Thus, when modern Americans use the words separation of church and state to try and remove any symbols or discussion of religion from the public sphere they are actually doing the very thing Jefferson was writing against.

Give Me Understanding

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Atheists, Christmas, prayer, Psalms, Secularism, St. Gregory Palamas

8. David, who is a forefather of God on account of Him who has now been born of his line, hymns God somewhere, “Thy hands have made me and fashioned me: give me understanding, that I may learn thy commandments” (Ps. 119:73). What does this mean? That only the Creator can grant true understanding. Anyone who has been vouchsafed understanding and grasped the honour which our nature received from God through being formed by His hands in His own image, will run towards Him, having come to a realization of His love for mankind, and will obey Him and learn His commandments. But how much more so if he comprehends, as far as is possible, this great mystery of our re-creation and restoration. God formed human nature out of the earth with His own hand and breathed His own life into man (Gen. 2:7, cf. 1 Thess. 5:23), whereas everything else He brought into being by His word alone. He then allowed man to be governed by his own thoughts and follow his own initiative, because he was a rational creature with a sovereign will. Left alone, deceived by the evil one’s counsel and unable to withstand his assault, man did not keep to what was in accordance with his nature, but slid towards what was unnatural to it. So now God not only forms human nature anew by His own hand in a mysterious way, but also keeps it near Him. Not only does He assume this nature and raise it up from the fall, but He inexpressibly clothes Himself in it and unites Himself inseparably with it and was born as both God and man: from a woman, in the first instance, that He might take upon Himself the same nature which He formed in our forefathers; and from a woman who was a virgin, in the second, so that He might make man new. — St. Gregory Palamas, Homily Fifty-Eight on the Saving Nativity According to the Flesh of Our Lord and God and Savior.

Psalm 119:73 is a verse that Orthodox Christian priests know well. It is part of the prayers that they say while vesting. This particular verse is said while putting on the left cuff (epimanikia). It is a stark reminder that what we know of God is given to us. This knowledge and this relationship has little to do with a person’s intelligence, skill or age. I know people who the world would call mentally challenged who know the liturgy better than I do. St. Kyrikos was three years old when he chose martyrdom over denouncing Christ.

It is also a reminder that atheism, secularism and the rejection of Christianity is willful ignorance — to  make the choice to believe that we know better than God is nothing more than arrogance. God has given us everything we need to know Him, understand Him and have a relationship with Him. As a matter of fact, He has gone beyond our wildest expectations and imaginations — becoming a babe born in a cave — in order that we might be with Him eternally. We need only have the humility to say, “Thy hands have made me and fashioned me: give me understanding, that I may learn thy commandments.”

He whom nothing can contain has been contained in a womb. He is in the Father’s bosom and His Mother’s embrace. How can this be, but as He knows and willed and was well pleased. Fleshless as He was, He willingly took flesh. And He Who Is became what He was not, for us. And while departing not from His own nature, He shared in our nature’s substance. So Christ was born with dual natures, wishing to replenish the world on high. — Third Kathisma from the Orthros of the Nativity

Amen.

Is the Devil Real?

Tags

Atheists, Christmas, saints, Secularism, St. Gregory Palamas, the devil

It occurs to me that I should spend some time addressing the reality of the devil, since in his Homily Fifty-Eight on the Saving Nativity According to the Flesh of Our Lord and God and Savior, St. Gregory Palamas has been addressing how the Nativity affects the evil one. I have had a number of conversations about the necessity of believing that the devil is real — do we really need to believe in him? In a word: yes. One of the great victories that the evil one has accomplished in the modern era is getting us to the point where we are arrogant enough to stop believing in the reality of the devil and his minions. It gives him free reign to do us damage. Remember the consequences of the Fall:

God said to the serpent…”I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers” — Genesis 3:14-15

Humanity is in an eternal struggle against the evil one whether or not we like it or believe it.

Acknowledging this struggle does have its advantages:

• It gives us an incentive to be vigilant. We are in a spiritual war where we do not get to be neutral, because the invading army is coming after us.
• It helps remind us that not only are we good (cf Genesis 1:31), but we are made in the image and likeness of God. Evil is an external force that is not a natural or intended part of who we are. All of those negative and evil thoughts that assault us every day, day in and day out do not originate with us. They are placed there by an external force: the devil and his angels.
• This means that humanity is evil by choice, not by nature.
• Thus, we always have the ability to choose good over evil no matter what the circumstances.
• Finally, as St. Gregory has pointed out, Christ is born uniting Himself to us. We now have the infinite power reserve that is God to give us the strength and the wherewithal to choose good in every circumstance. We need only say, “Away with you Satan!” and to worship the Lord our God and serve only Him (cf Matthew 4:11) and the devil is powerless against us.

Knowing these things and believing them makes the seemingly impossible possible, because Emmanuel! — God is with us. All of the saints that have come before us — the lives they lived, the choices they made, the feats that they accomplished — are our witnesses to the power available to us. We, too, can choose this. We are not destined to be as the secularists and atheists see the world (with the lowest common denominator), we are destined for the heights of heaven. We need only make the choice to go there. Amen.