Paradiso: Canto XXIII -- The Fixed Stars

Blessed James Oldo and his wife taught us the meaning of storing up treasures in heaven by intentionally developing and meaningfully engaging communities of faith here on earth. We are all called to be saints in heaven, as I posted to Fr. Earl in response to yesterday's commentary, through our voluntarily striving to be Christ for others while here on earth. The idea of voluntary engagement is important not only in the sense of which Aristotle speaks, but also in the Christological sense of ensuring that an action done is in accordance with the free will given to us by God. If we don't act through free will, then we cannot properly orient ourselves to God's will, and when we give our free will to God in order to become extensions of God's will (instruments of his peace), like Peter Damiano whom we met earlier, or like Mary, whom we meet in this canto, that gift is made in all consciousness of our will through its freedom to act.



In speaking of the voluntary and the involuntary, Aristotle makes a point that resonates with Christ's pardon of his crucifiers -- "Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do." These Romans and Jews who nailed Christ and jeered are the only souls we know who, unlike Guido da Montelfeltro, could be pardoned for a mortal sin while they were committing it and not through any voluntary action of their own, but entirely through Christ's beneficence and mercy, a mercy that our own Pilgrim Christopher Martin taught me he also extended to the first canonized saint of the Catholic Church, St. Dismas, the thief hanging with him to whom he promised on that very day the gates of paradise. Dante's meeting with Christ in this canto is a similar promise, for though he swoons from the experience of being in the presence of so much love (remember, he swooned twice out of love when he first began his journey), Dante is filled with enough love by Christ to enable him to finally withstand Beatrice's smile of bliss.

S.