I’ve always disliked the word Salvation.
There are all sorts of reasons why this might be, and most of them are bad. It could be spiritual insensitivity, or distrust of fundamentalism, or some kind of cultural anti-supernaturalism that I’ve received by osmosis. It’s probably all of those things, so I beg your pardon in advance. But, please, what does the word actually mean?
Does it refer to Heaven, to the fact that after we die everything will be okay, even if it’s a horrifying mess now? That can’t be right, because when Jesus talked about eternal life, He was talking about now as well as later, the already as well as the not yet. The Kingdom of God is at hand, even if it’s also something that happens at the end of time.
So if salvation doesn’t just happen in the afterlife, if it happens now, then what is it? Is it freedom from suffering? Hardly. If it were, all one’s troubles would be over at Baptism, and Christians would be universally serene, content, and benevolent. Not the Christians I know, brother, and certainly not me.
Is it, then, some sort of undetectable, purely spiritual change, something odorless, invisible, maybe a little like carbon monoxide? This is the way I thought about it for a long time. I might be a wreck, I told myself, I might be a mess of petty grievances and destructive habits, but at least I’ve got Salvation under by belt.
That’s not right either, of course. Salvation doesn’t mean freedom from suffering, but that doesn’t mean it has no bearing whatsoever on our day-to-day life. It’s only in the last few years that I’ve started to realized how utterly impoverished I’d be without the Faith that was given to me by my parents and by God; and given without my consultation, without my deserving, without even (at the beginning) my will.
As I talk about it, I see that the notion of Salvation I’ve mentioned above is a Protestant notion, not a Catholic one. You don’t hear Catholics asking if you’ve been Saved. I used to put this down to Catholics’ chronic ineptitude (or just inertia) when it comes to evangelizing, but that’s not it. The Catholic notion of salvation has everything to do with Philippians 2:12-13:
Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.
Funny, I didn’t remember that second part until I looked it up. Salvation is something God does in us, continually. It’s something that feels like our own effort, feels like it’s composed only of our sweat and our tears, until we look back and realize where we used to be, and where we are now. And think about how incapable we were of getting here, and where we might otherwise have been. It’s like what King Azaz tells Milo near the end of The Phantom Tollbooth: What’s happened to you was, in fact, impossible. But there it is, nevertheless. (q.v. Matthew 19:26, by way of Norton Juster.)
For various reasons, the past few days have found me peaceful, fearless, and full of hope. During a walk to the park today I wondered how long these feelings would last, and wished there was a way to hold on to them, make sure that they’re really mine, and not just a temporary fluctuation.
They won’t last, of course, not in their current intensity. That’s how it is, it’s the law of undulation. It doesn’t mean they aren’t real, and it doesn’t mean I’m not becoming better and happier. But the experience has been bringing home to me another sense of the word “saved.” Not saved in the sense of pulled back from destruction, the way someone might be saved from an attacker or from a burning building. But saved the way a photograph saves a moment: preserves it, makes it sure and real, puts it into a realm that’s beyond the possibility of destruction.
Here and now, salvation is something we work towards, or allow God to work towards in us. Our gains must be guarded: Henri de Lubac said, “Nothing remains intact without effort,” which is to say that stagnation always means atrophy. But it will not always be so. Salvation is real, it happens; and one day it will be final.
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Thank you for this.