For fifty-three years, I heard the readings at Mass every Sunday and on the weekdays I went, too. I had been praying Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours since 1996, reading the history of the Jewish people and the history of the early Christians. I even either opened the physical Bible or read Bible verses on my computer. I sometimes listened to lectures or homilies from Catholic priests on YouTube.
But in all of my exposure to the Bible and its stories, and even though I was a believing cradle Catholic, including in college, I had never pieced together the point of it all.
My mother tried to tell me, I think, but I do not know if she knew for sure, or at least she did not know what to call it all—the label’s name. I felt like I was a Catholic with all of the puzzle pieces in front of me but no idea what picture the pieces were supposed to make when finally put together. It wasn’t until I had the picture shown to me in a video at a men’s conference that I understood that I was not the only Catholic who did not know the picture.
What is that picture? We call it Salvation History, and it answers a lot of questions people have about the Bible, about Jesus, and about God’s plan for us all. Our own Salvation History begins with one word—hope.
Hope
This is a word that I never understood. For me, hope was something that was distant; I never became acquainted with it in a personal way. Everyone said that it was a theological virtue and that it was “needed to go to Heaven.” Well, I did hope that, but why was it so important?
As I entered my fifties, I started to notice that my hoping for Heaven was becoming more desperate. Was I doing the things I needed to do in order to “earn” Heaven? Then I remembered that you never deserve Heaven, that you cannot “earn” a place there. It is only by the grace of God that we get to Heaven. I do not want Purgatory, so getting to Heaven is a real goal. And in my fifties, hoping for Salvation has become a major part of my life.
I started hearing more homilies at Mass about hope. Then every priest seemed to preach with a theme of hope. But it didn’t make sense—still. The priests didn’t bring their homilies about the virtue together in a way that explained why it is important and how it works in my life. The homilies reminded me again about the puzzle pieces; the priests did wonderful jobs at describing each puzzle piece, but I needed someone to put it all together, to help me place the pieces together in the right way. Thankfully, I found the puzzle master, and he was somewhere I wasn’t even looking.
It All Started with a Video
I wanted to find a devotion that I could pray during a Holy Hour. I went to Adoration once a month on First Fridays at a local parish, and I enjoyed it, but I wanted to “up” my prayer life by finding something more to think about.
So, I opened a browser and searched for something like “devotions for holy hours” or “devotions for adoration.” There were a lot of results, including a lot of books and booklets to purchase. One result, not even on the first page, stood out: Stations of the Eucharist. I first thought that this was just another way of saying the Stations of the Cross, another set of prayers to use during Lent.
I clicked on the video which began a lecture given at a men’s conference by Fr. Jonathan Meyer, a priest of the Diocese of Indianapolis. In it, Fr. Meyer presented to the group the concept of “Salvation History,” which started fitting together all those puzzle pieces right in front of my eyes. What I had been looking for was God’s picture of Salvation History.
Fr. Meyer began by talking about why we go to Mass. He presented a handful of common answers to the question but declared them all insufficient. They just didn’t go far enough into answering what the real, genuine purpose was for our Mass attendance. Mass is the re-presentation of Christ’s sacrifice at Calvary. We live it every time we go to Mass. We watch Christ die for our sins at every Mass.
After establishing the incomparable significance of the Liturgy, Fr. Meyer enlisted fourteen young men to come up front and stand in a line. Then he taught the men in the audience how to say the Stations of the Eucharist. He explained how the entire Bible is a story of God’s plan to save humanity and get us back to the state our ancestors Adam and Eve were in before the Fall of Man. God just wants us to get back to Heaven!
I spent forty-five minutes sitting at my computer watching Father Meyer present a series of Biblical stories and events from the Sacrifice of Abel all the way to the Crucifixion and then to the Wedding Supper of the Lamb in Heaven (see the Book of Revelation). All of them were a logical timeline from the Fall to Salvation.
I had finally found the picture that all of those puzzle pieces were supposed to fit together to become. Unsurprisingly, I had to learn how to see through the eyes of God in order to make sense of my faith, in order to give reason to my hope. Our Creator and Redeemer wrote this story; He shares it with us directly through Scripture, and we continue to live it in our own lives. We only need to ask for His divine perspective, and practice seeing things as God sees them, to cut through the confusion and let the Lord make sense of our lives.
Editor’s Note: For homilies, a talk on the 14 Stations of the Eucharist, and other Catholic topics, visit: https://www.youtube.com/@allparish.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
