What does it mean that Jesus “rose from the dead?” Did his body literally come back to life? What kind of life? Joe Heschmeyer discusses common errors about the Resurrection, and the beautiful truths we often miss.
Cy Kellett:
Hello and welcome to Focus the Catholic Answers Podcast for living, understanding, and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host, joined in studio this time by Joe Heschmeyer. We usually connect with him via the internet. Joe, welcome.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Hi. It’s good to be here in person.
Cy Kellett:
I’m awfully glad to have you. And it’s an interesting topic that you have chosen here. I don’t know if we proposed it to you, but what Christians get wrong about the resurrection. I know that non-Christians get stuff wrong about the resurrection like it didn’t happen, that kind of thing. Well, there’s a lot of Christians who say that too as well, I suppose. But why do you think we get things wrong about the resurrection? It seems very simple.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, I think in two senses of the resurrection. That we get Jesus’s resurrection wrong and we get our own resurrection wrong.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, very, very interesting. Hey, before we get into that, because I do want to get into that, I want to mention that your podcast is doing great-
Joe Heschmeyer:
Oh, thank you.
Cy Kellett:
… Shameless Popery, and I’m delighted with the growth. Congratulations on the growth of it.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I appreciate it. Well, thank you to everyone who has subscribed and shared it and commented and all of that because that’s really the driver for it. I can make the content all day. The sharing and the listener end is what makes a huge difference for the mysterious algorithm that gets us in front of people.
Cy Kellett:
Right. There’s a number that comes up. No one knows what it means, but if it’s bigger, it’s better. It’s funny because we were in the technical meeting with the video guys the other day and somebody said, Joe’s, they said a number of how you’re growing. And it was, I don’t remember it. I’m sorry, I don’t remember these things, Joe, but it was a good [inaudible 00:01:47].
Joe Heschmeyer:
I was not in the meeting, so.
Cy Kellett:
No, but so I said “Joe’s podcast was growing that much?” And I said it like that and one of the video guys says, “Oh, that probably bums you out.” I said, “Why would that bum me out?” And he goes, “Well, because you hate Joe.” I was like, wait a second. That shtick, I don’t actually hate Joe. I love and respect Joe Heschmeyer.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I like that they’re just like, yeah, and other’s good, envy, aka Cy Kellett.
Cy Kellett:
I know. I was surprised. Because we do kind of have that shtick where we pick at each other.
Joe Heschmeyer:
We’re very jokey and unfortunately not everybody grew up with brothers, so they don’t understand that.
Cy Kellett:
But I kind of thought our own video department knew that I didn’t hate you.
Joe Heschmeyer:
You would think. But I guess they see how bad we are at turning that shtick off when we’re not on the air and just how much we interact with each other that way all the time.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, but I think you and I both have the same personality where it doesn’t matter where we are or when, if there’s a smart aleck comment to be made, we’re pretty much going to make it.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Unfortunately, so, yes.
Cy Kellett:
I know it really seems like we should have some kind of restraint, but there’s not a lot of restraint between the two of us.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I would’ve thought our wives would’ve gotten us in line by now. So I’m thinking we can probably go on record to say-
Cy Kellett:
A lot of work has gone into that.
Joe Heschmeyer:
… Missy and Anna, you guys have a little bit of blame in this.
Cy Kellett:
You’re so mean to your wife too, by the way.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I hate everyone.
Cy Kellett:
I mean, should I tell that Father’s Day story? No, I won’t. I won’t tell the Father’s Day story. Anna’s a wonderful person and you’re not mean to her.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Jane’s a wonderful person. She’s a martyr.
Cy Kellett:
She’s long-suffering. Okay, so what we get wrong about the resurrection. I remember when I was studying theology in the 1980s, which was not a great time to study Catholic theology, but I had very good theology professors. There was a kind of like trying to talk about the resurrection almost to talk your way around it. So this one theology question that was of the moment at that time was if you were in the tomb when Jesus rose, would you even have seen the resurrection? Would anything perceptible have happened? And I was young and I was thinking like, yeah, you would’ve seen somebody rising from the dead. But they were trying to make it this cosmic thing or something. You know what I’m talking about?
Joe Heschmeyer:
I do very much so. And unfortunately, that language is using vague language about cosmic and spiritual and everything else in a way where it’s not clear what the person using it means or thinks that means. Because you can find the language. St. Paul in 1 Corinthians says, what’s sown is a physical body and what’s raised is a spiritual body. And some people take that to say, aha, therefore Jesus’s resurrected body doesn’t have flesh, therefore he’s just like a ghost or something. And that is totally misunderstanding the distinction between flesh and spirit in St. Paul. Paul’s whole argument is that we have within us both the fleshly and a spiritual nature. And people living in sin are living according to their fleshly nature. In other words, I’m eating to get gluttonous and I’m drinking to get drunk and I’m just trying to have sex all the time.
You’re letting your bodily desires be in the driver’s seat. And so while we are in the body, as he puts it, can be subjected to all of that, all of those kind of bodily temptations. Now, Paul would also say we’re living in the flesh when we’re listening to ourselves over God. Because we fleshly creatures can decide we’re going to be the ones in control rather than God. So even a spiritual sin like pride, Paul would still consider that a sin of the flesh. He doesn’t mean flesh in a literal kind of sense. If you look for instance in Galatians 5 when he talks about the sins of the flesh versus the fruits of the spirit, a lot of the sins of the flesh there are ones that the devil is guilty of and the devil doesn’t have a body, so he’s not literally bodily sins.
So the flesh/spirit distinction is something we regularly get wrong. And this becomes really big because there’s a lot of Christians who think, okay, Old Testament worship is bodily worship. New Testament worship is spiritual worship and that means disembodied. And that’s actually closer to Gnosticism than it is to Christianity. The actual Christian understanding, St. Paul puts it this way in Romans 12, he talks about your body being where you can have these acts of spiritual worship. He says, make sacrifices in your body. This is your spiritual worship. So for Paul, spiritual doesn’t mean non-bodily.
Spiritual means that your body’s in right relation to rationality and right relation to God. And when things get out of whack there, that’s when he talks about the flesh as opposed to the spirit. So all that’s to say we have in a bodily level all of these things like concupiscent, sin, all of these ways that we are out of alignment and we won’t have those problems when we rise again, that’s the distinction between a physical body or a fleshly body and a spiritual body. It’s not that in Jesus’s resurrection or in the resurrection of the body, we’re just like ghosts floating around. In fact, the New Testament is very clear that’s not what the resurrection body is like. Jesus, for instance, eats fish. He lets Thomas touch his side. Ghosts can’t do that. They repeatedly stress that he’s not a ghost. And so to answer the ’80s theologians, yes, you would see a dead person stop being dead and rise from the dead. And that’s the kind of thing that I think you would notice as unusual for a dead body.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, unusual, to use a very mild language in that regard. So the spiritual body then that Paul talks about, when we struggle over these things in Paul, I always think of Peter about how some people twist Paul’s teaching to their own destruction. But in saying that, Peter is saying, look, Paul’s hard to understand.
Joe Heschmeyer:
He literally says. It’s not just that people are twisting him out of bad motives. He also says, Paul’s hard to understand.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. So you’ve got to be careful with this. So Paul is not denying the physical resurrection, nor can any Christian deny the physical resurrection.
Joe Heschmeyer:
We might say bodily resurrection if that’s clearer. But I mean, only because people seem to get hung up on the word physical. Where again, I don’t know what they’re imagining. So there’s a difference between what happens in the resurrection and what happens to Lazarus. With Lazarus, you have something like a resuscitation. The soul had left the body, the soul is reunited to the body, but the body continues in the state it was in before death. And Lazarus has to die a second time because the body still retains its mortality. It hasn’t been glorified. With the resurrection, Jesus’s and then eventually our own, it’s a glorified body we’re promised. A body that’s now immune from death, a body that’s immune from all of the effects of original sin and the fall. And so in that sense, whatever we mean by physical body, it is physical, right? It has physical property if you can touch it and all of that.
But there’s also a sense in which it does surpass the normal limitations of physical bodies. So for instance, Jesus can walk through walls. And so Aquinas has a whole section in the Summa where he looks at the properties of the resurrected body. And so the normal limitations we experience, even things like tiredness from walking around too much, none of that seems to apply to the resurrected body. So we will have total mastery of the body where we’d be able to move around at the speed of thought. I mean, that’s his kind of argument. That, okay, you want to be somewhere else? Okay, you’re there. And so your physical body is still in time and space in a certain way, but not in the way we’re used to it experiencing. Now, a lot of that gets speculative because we haven’t seen this, but it’s based on glimpses we’re seeing from the resurrection accounts. That Jesus seems to be able to appear and disappear at will, go from one place to another and pass through walls and things, all while being wholly bodily, not a ghost.
Cy Kellett:
So the diminishment of the idea of the resurrected body, if we think of it just as resuscitation and this body that I have as it is now gets to keep up. It’s kind of like a vampire body or something, and I don’t mean it in a bad way, but nothing against vampires.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It sounds like kind of a bad way.
Cy Kellett:
But this diminishes our capacity to appreciate what it means to share in the eternal life that God has gifted us in the person of Jesus. It changes our impression of what the afterlife is, in other words.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Oh, absolutely. Well, and I think frankly, a lot of Christians have internalized the idea that the afterlife just means going to heaven in a disembodied kind of way. That we leave Earth behind and never shall we meet again. And that’s not the actual Christian teaching. It’s not just that we believe in life after death. We believe in life after life after death. That there’s a stage after death in which the soul and body are separated, and if you die in a state of grace, the soul goes to be united with God. But that’s not the end of the story. Then we talk about the resting of the body in death. That’s not going to last forever. There will be a time when the body rises again to be united. And there’s a reason for this. You are not a soul trapped in a body, the way the Gnostics believed and the way that people like John Calvin taught. Soma sema was the Gnostic phrase, it just means body prison, and your body is not a prison.
Cy Kellett:
No, right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It can feel like a prison because of the limitations. We can talk in an analogous way of being freed from the body, not because the body is bad, but because it’s so limited. The flesh is weak even when the spirit is willing. But the solution there is for the body to be restored to its original design because you won’t be wholly yourself apart from your body. That even when the souls of the righteous are in the presence of God, there is still a sense we can say they lack something. They have God, so it sounds very strange to say they lack anything. But what they lack is their body. And so this is brought to a completion in the bodily resurrection.
Cy Kellett:
And this, I suppose that then I want to ask about the beatific vision then, and then, well, I have so many questions that this brings up. But if the body is raised and we say we will share in the beatific vision, how does the body participate in the beatific vision?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. How does the soul participate in the beatific vision? I mean, what I mean by that is we talk about it as the vision and contemplation of God, the direct and immediate unmediated contemplation of God. That right now when we think of God, we’re accessing the concept of God through language and analogy and mental images and all of these things that we know on some level fall short. That your idea of God is infinitely less than God himself. And there will come a time when all of those intermediaries are gone and you’re just experiencing God in this direct way. And this happens first at the level of the soul, the beatific vision, the vision of the blessing. But there’s a way in which the body itself will be able to participate in this. We don’t know how either of these things are going to look.
And St. Paul rightly says, eye has not seen and ears not heard what God has ready. What we do know that the vision in Revelation, I mentioned life after death and life after life after death. That you have these two stages in the book of Revelation where first you have the heavenly liturgy centered around the temple in heaven, but then you have the creation of the new heavens and the new earth. And there’s no sun and there’s no temple because it’s God himself that even the temple in heaven is in some way mediating the presence of God. And that there will be a way that’s even more immediate than that, that the union will become complete. And one of the most fascinating lines in this is in Ephesians 5, which is it’s a hot button passage because of all the stuff Paul says about husbands and wive. But he says in there almost as an aside that Christ in the church will become one flesh as a husband and wife do.
And you think, okay, you’ve got the courtship, you’ve got the relationship, you’ve got the wedding ceremony, and how could we possibly even be more united? And then it happens, and the fruit of that can be a person who’s half genetically yours and half genetically your wife and that’s a union beyond description. And someone who didn’t know about that reality would have a hard time saying, well, how could we be even more united than spending a great day at the park or something like this? Well, likewise, everything we have of union with God, even communion, even the Eucharist, even enjoying God in heaven is going to seed to an even higher level of union beyond our comprehension. One in which even mediating concepts like the temple are no longer necessary. And I find that fascinating because it is utter and total union with God. The two become one.
Now, you still maintain your distinctiveness. This is not the eastern notion of a drop of water going into the ocean and losing its identity. You maintain your identity. You even have a greater identity than you did before because God has prepared you as a distinct way of showing forth his glory. And so you become who you were always meant to be. You’ll find yourself. Think about the encounter Simon Peter has where he first is revealed to himself as Simon and then as Peter only after confessing Christ. When he says to Jesus, you are the Christ, the son of the living God, then Jesus can turn and say, you are Simon, son of Jonah, and I tell you, you are Peter. And so he revealed both in his original identity as Simon, but then this deeper divine identity that God has for him of Peter.
There’s something like that that all of us are going to experience. The book of Revelation describes the one who will triumph will be given two things, a hidden manna, very eucharistic language, and then a stone with a name on it known only to God. But there’s some sense in which in this union with God, instead of losing your identity, you will discover it at a deeper and more profound way than you’ve ever experienced it.
Cy Kellett:
Wow. That’s a lot better than just sitting on a cloud playing a harp. Our images are so poor compared to the reality that you’re describing.
Joe Heschmeyer:
All of the harp language, sitting on clouds, and all of that, it doesn’t sound worthwhile. I’m reminded of a joke that I believe it was Jim Gaffigan told where the phrase almost heaven, West Virginia made him want to check out what hell was like.
Cy Kellett:
Now that’s just a mean joke.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It’s a mean joke for West Virginia, but it does point to something true about heaven being all of our images fall short.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. So the sense, the fear, it’s very hard to imagine that if I have an intellectual contact with God that is unmediated, that I can keep my person. It’s very hard to imagine, well, why am I not just dissolved by that? And I have to say, I have a very simple logic about that that helps me, Joe, and I want to know if this is just silly. But I think Jesus was conceived with the beatific vision and he’s the most particular person that ever lived. Do you see what I’m saying? I just want you to know how basic I am.
Joe Heschmeyer:
No, not at all.
Cy Kellett:
Like I need basic basic things to-
Joe Heschmeyer:
I think that’s actually a very good way to begin thinking about it. That he has an identifiable personality and he doesn’t lose that in possessing the beatific vision. He’s a divine person, so it is harder to understand in that sense. But he still has clear personality. There’s still in his humanity, we find these elements of kind of character and these traits about him and he would’ve had likes and dislikes and everything else. Well, you can also, if it’s easier to understand someone who’s not a divine person, Mary says my soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord. My soul magnifies the Lord. And so she doesn’t enjoy the beatific vision, but she has this incredible contemplation of God where she meditates on all these things and it doesn’t cause her to be less of a person. It doesn’t cause her to be less unique. In the same breath that she says that her soul magnifies the Lord, she talks about how all generations will call her blessed. It won’t be, therefore, I’m irrelevant because I magnify the Lord.
That if God is infinite uncreated goodness, and all of us are finite and created, we’re all going to reflect and magnify God in some way. This is one of the reasons why even at the angelic level, there’s not just one type of angel. You’ve got angels and archangels, thrones and dominions, powers and principalities, seraphim and cherubim. Because they’re each showing forth the glory of God in a unique way, even to one another. Because nobody is getting the whole picture of God, even as you’re staring at God. It’s too vast to contemplate in a certain way. We can say we can know God, but we can’t comprehend God. So the difference there is an important one. Comprehend something is to know it thoroughly. And so God, even as we know him, still has an element of being mysterious to us because there’s always more we’re learning. Not mysterious from just unknowable, but mysterious in the sense we’re not going to run out of God and be like, oh yeah, I know that guy.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. All right, so two questions about the resurrection then. My resurrection, and if I’m not asking enough about Jesus resurrection, tell me-
Joe Heschmeyer:
No, I like that we are keeping these all-
Cy Kellett:
… Because I’m completely self-centered.
Joe Heschmeyer:
… These all together and all in view because Jesus, we’re told, is the first fruit to the resurrection. In other words, if you want to know about your resurrection, look at Jesus’s.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Okay, so here’s my question. Raised from the dead, now, and I will use temporal language that’s very earthly, even though I know that the experience of time is very likely very different once I have passed from this world. But at least in some sort of chronology, I’m alive now, body and soul. My soul will leave my body. Body will decompose unless…
Joe Heschmeyer:
I didn’t want to go there, but there is an unless. We’re taking an optimistic view here, but continue.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, unless I’m so holy that I’m like that.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Oh, okay, that’s not where I was going to go.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, okay. Where were you going to go?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Well, I’m afraid, I hope I don’t go there.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, all right. Okay, yes. But I do have an optimistic view about that, what I think is based on a reasonable trust in the love of the Lord. So my soul departs for its purgation, one would think. Body decays. Now at some point in time, body and soul are reunited. So this gives me two questions actually. A lot of people are very concerned with, what if I die in a nuclear war and my body is utterly vaporized? What if I have a terrible sub accident?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Wow. Yes, you know, it’s true. Aquinas, if memory serves, actually looks at the question about cannibalism. Who’s going to get the body?
Cy Kellett:
Oh my gosh, Aquinas, what a great question. Yeah, all those people that you ate resurrected inside of your body.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, don’t worry, it’s not going to be like that. And so when we talk about the resurrection of the body, an important thing to keep in mind is your body is not as many modern people influenced by scientific materialism imagined. Your body is not primarily a set of atoms. And how do we know that? Well, because those atoms are constantly dying, duplicating, I don’t understand.
Cy Kellett:
You’re talking about cells now, but the atoms move in and out of you. There’s no stable body.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Right. You lose skin cells. So over the course of a long enough period of time, you might lose all of the cells in your body. Not all at once.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, I would wonder, do I have any of the cells left that I had the day I was born? I have no clear-
Joe Heschmeyer:
I don’t think you do. There’s some very long-lasting cells, I think in the brainstem if memory… I looked this up once and it’s been too long since I’ve looked at this. But all that’s to say, you are not the collection of your atoms or your molecules or your skin cells or your cells. So just as you can heal the lame and grow back a limb if you’re Jesus, and you don’t have to find all of the atoms wherever they are and put them back together. So too, if your body’s incinerated or crushed or eaten or whatever else, you can still get your body back. We don’t have to deal with a finitude of molecules. That’s just not going to be a limitation on divine power, and it’ll still be recognizably your body in a glorified state.
So this is one of the other things. What if it isn’t that your body has been incinerated, what if it’s just gotten really old? And what if it’s just got some other infirmities? And well, God will heal these things. So they will be in a glorified body and in that sense as well, where even the ravages of time and disease and everything else, those things are impacts on the body. Now there are some theories because when Jesus rises from the dead, he still has the wounds.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, right. Yeah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And so you might have stretch marks from giving birth as these wounds of love.
Cy Kellett:
I won’t.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Well, you won’t. That’s a good point.
Cy Kellett:
I know that I won’t.
Joe Heschmeyer:
That was more the rhetorical you.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, I got you.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I don’t know what your wounds of love would even look like. But yeah, someone who injures themselves saving someone else might show forth some of those injuries, but in a glorified kind of way. I believe it was in The Great Divorce, but I may be misremembering. C. S. Lewis kind of plays around with that idea. And it’s this notion that all these areas that are wounded are golden. There’s something very beautiful about that because it’s right there that you’ve allowed yourself to be really transformed into being like Christ in a deeper way.
Cy Kellett:
And that’s where your body has given the greatest glory to God, where it has been wounded for love. And if we’re going to shine forth with God’s glory, one would think those wounds would be particularly.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, exactly. It’s not something where vanity’s going to come into play and you’re going to say, “Oh, I’m so embarrassed. This is where I…”
Cy Kellett:
No, because I have this image of, Hey, it’s time for the resurrection of the body. And like Brad Pitt’s like, yes, getting my body back. And my soul’s like, nah.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Are there options?
Cy Kellett:
Back into that body? Really? So I know it won’t be like that. Okay, I want to ask you, will I, in the resurrection, experience physical bliss?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yes, seemingly so. This is an area where there is debate and some confusion. And I actually sat down with a couple of theologians and I had them argue about this for three hours. I didn’t try to, I just said, will we experience hunger in the resurrection body? And it led to a big conversation. They’re both well-respected orthodox theologians. They disagreed very strongly on this point. And one of them pointed out that Christ eats after the resurrection. But the idea that there’s still a lack or a deprivation, all of that, or privation, those things, they seem like imperfections. And it doesn’t seem like the resurrected body will be imperfect. So seems to me that something like being able to eat but not having to eat would be where I would land on that question. But I do want to acknowledge this is an area on which great minds do not think alike.
Cy Kellett:
I love it that I ask about physical bliss and you immediately think I’m talking about food because you know me.
Joe Heschmeyer:
That’s right, another form of physical bliss.
Cy Kellett:
You’re like, let me just assure you about the eating part. Okay, thank you, Joe.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Well, Peter Kreeft has a whole essay on sex in Heaven, and he takes the same view. That it would be possible but not required or necessary or even desirable. He said it’d be like a kid asking if you can have candy during sex because the greatest joy they can imagine is candy.
Cy Kellett:
Isn’t that a funny analogy?
Joe Heschmeyer:
And so all that’s to say the physical bliss that we’ll enjoy will probably be at a level we can’t even imagine right now. At my wedding, don’t worry, this is not going to get weird. At my wedding, my wife’s sister sang the psalm and it was incredible. Now, my wife’s sister is a professional singer. She’s really, really good. And one of the priests who was celebrating the mass afterwards said he got a whole body chill when she sang. It just profoundly moved him at a bodily level. And it was just like, yeah, I knew exactly what he meant. And that sort of thing may be the nearest experience to what we’re even describing here. That something just at the core of your person that you feel throughout your body, just that radiant kind of joy and calm and ecstasy.
Cy Kellett:
Right. And is the bliss of the body… Because even if I were given perfect bliss right now, like it was like a perfect day on a desert island with the… I made it a desert island. No people, I’m all by myself.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Like I’m stranded, I’m slowly dying.
Cy Kellett:
No children, no in-laws, nothing. Well, that took a turn.
Joe Heschmeyer:
You’re just describing San Diego without your family.
Cy Kellett:
No, but what I’m saying is there’s a certain way with even that is misery, because I cannot moderate my desires well enough to assure that every moment is bliss. So that the perfection of the soul is part of the physical bliss of heaven.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And the fleeting nature of reality, that in this life, all reality is fleeting. And so you can have this amazing moment and the next time it just isn’t quite as good as the time that you first remembered. So you can go back to your favorite vacation spot, it’s not quite as good. And you have your favorite meal, it’s not quite as good. And not every day is as exciting as the first day of your marriage or your first day on the job or your first day wherever. You’re not going to hit those same peaks every time. And the idea of staying at the peak for us doesn’t even necessarily sound that good. But all of that is because of this real passing, fleeting, temporal nature of earthly existence.
Cy Kellett:
If I could just confess something to you, if I had to say what are the greatest, most satisfying experiences of my life, it would be-
Joe Heschmeyer:
Was it this podcast?
Cy Kellett:
It was this whole thing, Joe, and I’m going to tear up now. Just, no, Joe, it was not this podcast. No, the experience of peace is better than anything else you can experience. And I feel like, Christ is the Prince of Peace. That peace be with you is the thing that he says upon being raised from the dead. And that everything, even eternal life, without peace would be intolerable. I wonder if you would say something about the experience of the peace of heaven.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, I think that’s well put. This is one of the ways which we’re talking about entering the Sabbath rest of God. And it’s that notion of you’re not constantly having to try so hard. Like so much of this life, you have to try so hard. And you have all of the anxieties and the worries and all of that. And there’s a sense where you can have sinful anxiety where it’s born out of not trusting God enough. There’s another sense in which you just have anxiety about, I’ve got this thing weighing on me that I want to do well at. And it’s not a lack of trust, you’re just taking seriously the thing God has entrusted you. And all of that to be freed of those things in a way that creates any sort of mental anxiety or agitation or the bodily stress to have all those things gone.
There’s this real sense, and you’ll see it even now, I think you’ve really spoken to it. A priest when I was discerning whether I was called to seminary or not, gave me some of the best discernment advice I’ve ever heard, which is to follow the peace of Christ. That there is a lot that you can see option A and option B, they both make sense rationally. You can have a temptation that looks really good in some way, but even among good things that they’re not sinful. But you cannot give yourself the peace of Christ, and the devil can’t give you the peace of Christ. And so it is the closest thing you’re going to get to an infallible guide. That when you really know the voice of Christ, when you really know the experience of his peace, when you are there, you’re in the place you’re meant to be.
Cy Kellett:
Yes. Right. Very, very well said. That’s exactly right. And with that whole passage in Isaiah where the Messiah is referred to as Prince of Peace, it’s funny that all those other titles, you never hear Mighty God parish. But Prince of Peace Parish is a common-
Joe Heschmeyer:
Mighty God Parish would be a good one.
Cy Kellett:
Can you imagine it? But do you understand what I’m saying?
Joe Heschmeyer:
I’d even take Wonder Counselor. Yeah, absolutely.
Cy Kellett:
Of all the titles of Christ, the title Prince of Peace-
Joe Heschmeyer:
It speaks to us.
Cy Kellett:
… It says something that we really need to hear.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Well, and maybe this is a thing to point out for purposes of evangelization and catechesis and everything else. So often we talk about this stuff in terms of pleasure. That, oh, heaven is this place of pleasure. And the world offers you pleasure and the world constantly under-delivers on pleasure. And we’ve gotten really good at putting sugar and salt in things. We’ve gotten really good at making every form of pornography you can imagine available at the tips of you or your kids, we’ve got really good at doing all of these things, and they constantly under-deliver in terms of pleasure. But what we don’t talk about enough is the peace. And I think you’re right to see that, that people don’t get or experience peace.
You can see this in the data, right? Anxiety levels are way up. Depression levels are way up. I mean, literally higher than we’ve ever seen them. And the more people use smartphones, the more they experience it. The more they have social media, the more they experience it. That the world is not only incapable of giving you peace, it’s not even really trying to, and it’s constantly making you unhappy and ill at ease. And Christ promises you peace. And I think there are people who, knowing that, actually sounds better than you’re going to have one more emotional high because they’ve experienced one after another after another.
Cy Kellett:
To be at peace, there’s nothing that could compare to it, to have found peace. And it’s the saddest thing in this life is the person you know where you know they have no peace, they experience no peace. That even a fleeting glimpse of peace, it rescues life from desperation. Well, all right. I don’t know if I did a good job interviewing you. I love talking with you, so I don’t know if I do a good job interviewing you. So are there things about the resurrection that you wanted to cover that I didn’t get to?
Joe Heschmeyer:
You know what? We planned this topic months ago, I think, and I don’t remember all the things I intended at that time, so I’m glad we just went where we went in terms of the broader vision of how does the resurrection of Christ connect to our resurrection, connect to the experience of heaven, connect to the promises the beatific vision. And so yeah, hopefully people aren’t annoyed if the interview is a little more than it says on the tin, but that’s the nature of an interview.
Cy Kellett:
Hey, we under promise, over deliver. That’s our motto here and it stresses us out. It just drives us crazy.
Joe Heschmeyer:
We need peace, that’s the problem.
Cy Kellett:
Joe, thank you. Thanks very much.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, my pleasure.
Cy Kellett:
Check out Joe Heschmeyer’s podcast, Shameless Popery. Can you go to shamelesspopery.com or?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Shamelessjoe.com.
Cy Kellett:
Shamelessjoe.com.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, I think we thought Popery would be hard to spell.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right. Joe’s not hard to spell.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It’s true.
Cy Kellett:
Shamelessjoe.com, check it out. You won’t be sorry you did. All kinds of great stuff there. And hey, if you want to communicate with us about this conversation or any conversation we have, maybe one you want to propose, send us an email. Focus@catholic.com is our email address. If you’d like to support us financially, as I always say, it does cost a few dollars to keep the lights and cameras on. You can do that by going to givecatholic.com, givecatholic.com. And wherever you’re listening to this podcast, if you’d give us a review and maybe hit that five star button, that also will help to grow the podcast and that way maybe we’ll be able to grow at the pace that Joe’s podcast is growing. That’s the main thing, we just want to keep pace with what Joe is doing. Anyways, thanks for being with us. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. We’ll see you next time, God willing, right here on Catholic Answers Focus.