From What Happened to Sin, by Seán Fagan. S.M.
The Columba Press, 2008.
A major ingredient in neurotic guilt is the fear of punishment. The super‑ego‑ridden conscience tends to produce a super‑ego type of religion, which not only pictures God as a lawgiver laying down rigid rules, but also fears him as a hard taskmaster. His all‑seeing eye can penetrate one’s actions to discover hidden motives, and his never‑failing memory can recall forgotten or only half‑confessed sins from the past. There is no avoiding his strict accounting, and though his justice may be tempered by mercy, it is still divine justice, reaching beyond the grave. Psychiatrists are familiar with the extreme forms which this irrational fear can take, and there are many people who suffer from it.
But even apart from the extremely neurotic cases, there were large numbers of good, conscientious people whose religion contained no small amount of fear. Until recently there were Catholics whose attendance at Sunday Mass was largely assured by their fear of mortal sin and eternal damnation. On the other hand, because many people no longer believe in hell they are less inclined to take sin seriously. An important element in the traditional notion of sin was not only that it was a transgression of God’s law, but also that it was punishable by God. Can we still speak of punishment for sin? Are we still bound to believe in purgatory and hell?
Punishment in the Bible
The biblical notion of sin certainly involved punishment. The author of Genesis speaks of God destroying the whole human race except Noah and his family because sin had spread everywhere. The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were likewise wiped out. Throughout the Old Testament God is pictured as rewarding the good and punishing sinners. Since there was no belief in an afterlife for most of that period, the rewards and punishments were bestowed in this life. Health, long life and prosperity were counted as blessings from God for good behaviour, while illness, defeat in battle or any other calamity was looked upon as an expression of God’s judgment and anger. The picture that emerges is quite clear: God is really offended by sin, his wrath is aroused and he punishes the sinner. The New Testament continues this picture. God’s anger is manifest in the treatment given to the servant who showed no mercy (Mt 18:34), to the unfaithful servant (Mt 24:51), to those who killed the messengers inviting them to the wedding feast (Mt 22:7), and to the man without a wedding garment (Mt 22:13). It is evident in Jesus’ condemnation of the unbelieving towns: ‘You can be sure that on judgment day God will show more mercy to Sodom than to you!’ (Mt 20:24). It is clearest of all in his description of the final judgment: ‘Away from me, you that are under God’s curse! Away to the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels!’ (Mt 25:41).
Punishment in the Church
The Old Testament people of God, the New Testament Christian communities and the Christian Church through the centuries have all believed that God punishes sin. They believed in God as the just judge who would deal with each one according to their merits. The sinner upsets the order of justice, infringes rights, and must be made to pay. Divine justice judges and condemns sinners. While it was recognised that God would punish the sinner, the authorities in the community often took it upon themselves to mete out punishment in his name. Death, mutilation, excommunication were among the penalties inflicted by the community for various sins. Indeed, zeal for the rights and dignity of God led authorities to do the strangest things in his name and in his defence. The book of Leviticus commands the whole community to stone a blasphemer to death. The New Testament recommends that he be ‘handed over to Satan’. The Church’s Inquisition gagged him and dragged him through the streets in disgrace. In seventeenth‑century England, blasphemy was punished by boring a hole in the culprit’s tongue. For a second offence, he would be stigmatised by having the letter B burned into his forehead, and for a third offence he would be sentenced to death This notion of vindictive justice, that a sinner deserves punishment, and that it is imposed or inflicted from without, makes little sense in today’s world.
Throughout most of the Old Testament, God’s reward or punishment was experienced this side of the grave. In this context, there was no solution to the problem of innocent suffering. The book of Job simply acknowledges the mystery, but cannot explain why so many of the wicked prosper and go unpunished, while the faithful Job has to suffer so much. In the centuries immediately before Christ, belief in a real afterlife, as distinct from the shadowy underworld of Sheol, gradually began to take shape. The book of Daniel explicitly says: ‘Many of those who have already died will live again: some will enjoy eternal life, and some will suffer eternal disgrace’ (Dan 12:2). Paul told the Corinthians: ‘All of us must appear before Christ, to be judged by him. Each one will receive what he deserves, according to everything he has done, good or bad, in his bodily life’ (2 Cor 5:10). The words of Jesus about Gehenna, the flames of hell and the weeping and gnashing of teeth provided the basis for the fire-and-brimstone preaching of later centuries.
Catechism picture
The doctrine of hell and purgatory had quite a complicated theological history, but took definitive shape during the Middle Ages. We need to remember from chapter two that the Bible is not a book of history, geography or science, but the written account of the religious experience of the People of God, of the Jews in the Old Testament and of the Christians in the New. It is not to be taken literally in a fundamentalist way. There is no objective, a-historical, a-cultural word of God to be taken literally. God’s word comes to us in human words, and these are always culturally conditioned, reflecting the thought-patterns and culture of the speakers. If we accept them uncritically we can easily create a picture of God reflecting our own all-too human and imperfect ideas and experiences. Biblical statements and Church teaching about faith reflect the culture of the period in which they were formulated. Thus, the book of Genesis is not a scientific description of how the universe came into being and where human beings fit into it, but gives us a religious understanding of its deeper meaning, and of our own nature and destiny. The colourful language and metaphorical imagery are not to be taken literally. When Jesus spoke of Gehenna and everlasting fire he was simply using the language and images of his place and time. The challenge is to discover his meaning in terms that make sense to our contemporary world. This is also true of the statements in catechisms and popular preaching through the ages, and particularly so in the case of hell and purgatory. Catechisms generally were a digest of theology textbooks, presenting an uncritical, undifferentiated picture of ‘the teaching of the Church’. The short, concise answers gave the impression of perfect clarity and absolute certainty. The over‑all picture was so logical and consistent, with the various parts interlocking so perfectly, that some people now fear that the whole system will collapse because various items in it no longer make sense. They need to be reassured that the essentials of the faith remain intact, but they have to be expressed in modern terms if they are to carry conviction in today’s world.
For people who may never have seen such catechisms or heard such preaching, it may be useful to recall some of the simplistic views of the past. Christian morality is the effort to do God’s will as manifested in Scripture, the teaching of the Church and the dictates of one’s conscience. Deliberate failure is sin. This can be mortal, which destroys the divine life of grace in the soul, or venial, which diminishes it but still leaves one in God’s grace. To die in the state of mortal sin is to be excluded from the blessed vision of God in heaven, to be condemned to hell. Since the human soul is immortal, its punishment in hell will be eternal. Should one die in the state of grace, but not sufficiently pure to merit heaven, purgatory would provide the necessary purification to enable one eventually to see God. In the forgiveness of sin, even when the guilt had been remitted, there remained a ‘debt of temporal punishment’ still to be paid. Should any of this remain outstanding at the moment of death, it could be taken care of in purgatory. The souls in purgatory were considered ‘holy souls’ because they were already sure of heaven (which is more than could be said of the living), and they could be helped in their expiation by the prayers of those still alive.
Hell and purgatory
This brief summary is hardly fair to the full teaching of the Church, but it is an accurate enough description of what was generally taught and believed. Popular imagination embroidered it with details not in the Church’s basic teaching. Many thought of purgatory as a kind of hell at a lower temperature or hell with the back door open. Teachers were often quite eloquent in describing the particular torments that would afflict different kinds of sinner, both in hell and in purgatory. A widely-read pamphlet still current up to Vatican II spoke of a certain holy religious spending eighty years in purgatory for a minor imperfection, and of others languishing there for years because they had no one to pray for them. In discussing the resurrection of the body, theologians explained that each person was judged individually at the moment of death, that the ‘separated soul’ went to its appropriate place of reward or punishment, heaven or hell, and that the body would be raised on the last day for a general judgment to rejoin the soul in joy or torment.
Many people took all of this to be a literally true description of fact, ultimately revealed by God, and were hesitant to question it. With equal simplicity they accepted accounts of visions by saints who claimed to have seen souls falling into hell like leaves in wintry weather. They did not understand that even canonised saints reflect the culture of their time and can talk nonsense. St. Pius X in an encyclical raged against ‘that most pernicious doctrine which would make of the laity a factor of progress in the Church’.
In actual fact, the official teaching of the Church is quite sober in this area. It says nothing whatever about the number of people in hell. Indeed, there is no statement to commit us to believing that anybody is there, even Judas, Hitler or Stalin. All that the Church in its official statements is committed to on the subject is: that hell exists as a possibility for every human being, that it is the consequence of a person’s final and total rejection of God, that it begins immediately after death, and that it lasts forever. There is no way of knowing the details. The most solid, and indeed consoling, statement we have about the after-life is the beautiful affirmation of St. Paul to the Corinthians: ‘No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him’ (I Cor 2:9). Anything beyond that is mere guesswork and theological opinion. We really know nothing about the geography or furniture of heaven, hell or purgatory.
Church teaching about purgatory is that there is a purification needed for all who die truly penitent in the love of God before sufficiently satisfying for their sins through acts of penance. It adds that these people can be helped by the prayers of the faithful, and especially by the sacrifice of the Mass. Nothing more. There is no official statement of the Church obliging us to believe anything about the nature of the purification, its location or its duration. Whether purgatory is a place, a state or simply a process is not mentioned, nor do we have to believe in a purifying fire or specific torments. Purgatory is simply a purifying process of final preparation before entering into the blessedness of heaven. It may be totally instantaneous, experienced in the very moment of meeting God. An example of the experience might be a loving couple who have separated because of the infidelity of one partner. When they decide to re-unite, the erring partner moving towards the re-union will be overjoyed at the prospect of the meeting and reunion, but still carry an element of fear and guilt which can be intensely painful but will disappear in the ecstasy of the actual meeting. The level of fear and guilt might determine the intensity of pain, but the purification itself would be instantaneous and total.
In his recent encyclical, Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict XVI refers to recent theologians who are of the opinion that the fire which both burns and saves is Christ himself, our Judge and Saviour. He beautifully describes the experience: ‘The encounter with him is the decisive act of judgment. Before his gaze all falsehood melts away. This encounter with him, as it burns us, transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves. All that we build during our lives can prove to be mere straw, pure bluster, and it collapses. Yet in the pain of this encounter, when the impurity and sickness of our lives become evident to us, there lies salvation. His gaze, the touch of his heart heals us through an undeniably painful transformation ‘as through fire’. But it is a blessed pain, in which the holy power of his love sears through us like a flame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus totally of God…. At the moment of judgment we experience and we absorb the overwhelming power of his love over all the evil in the world and in ourselves. The pain of love becomes our salvation and our joy…. The transforming ‘moment’ of this encounter eludes earthly time-reckoning − it is the heart’s time, it is the time of ‘passage’ to communion with God in the Body of Christ’ (n.47).
New approach
In chapter two above we noted that the book of Genesis tells us nothing about what happened at the beginning of time, but gives us the deeper, religious meaning of what is happening all the time. We have long since stopped asking the Bible and the teaching Church for answers to scientific questions about the shaping of the universe or the age of the human race. Scientists tell us that our universe began 13.7 billion years ago. Our imagination cannot cope with such a figure, but if we think of it as one calendar year we would discover that our earth was born on the 14 August and first life appeared on earth on 4 September. Our first human ancestors appeared on the 31st December about 7.00 p.m., while the first human beings as we know them came just two minutes to midnight on that same last day of the year. On this calendar Jesus of Nazareth was born at two seconds to midnight. On this time-scale, the two thousand years of Christian history are the equivalent of just two seconds of the existence our universe. Awareness of these facts should make us a little more humble in our assertions and in the way we understand our religious faith. The Bible is not a book of science, but it gives us the deeper meaning of it all. It is time people realised that the same principle applies at the other end of our life. Biblical statements and Church teaching on purgatory and hell are not meant as advance coverage on the details of our future life. They are not so much statements from the final chapter in the history of salvation as basic truths which help us to a better understanding of our present life and of the seriousness of the struggle between good and evil, grace and sin, freedom and unfreedom. It is a trivialisation of heaven, hell and purgatory to think of them simply and solely as future states, as reward and punishment for present behaviour.
It is true that Jesus himself used the language of reward and punishment: ‘Well done, good and faithful servant . . .’ and ‘Depart from me, you cursed ones.’ He could hardly do otherwise than use the language of his time. He was a first-century Jew and used the words and images of his time and culture. But the idea of God sitting in judgment at the end time seems to drag him down to our level, and the very concept of vindictive justice is alien to the notion of a God who is infinite love and wills all people to be saved. It can be a frightening thing, frightening in the sense of awesome, to fall into the hands of the living God, and reverential fear is the beginning of wisdom. But God wants our love, and this will not come from fear. St. John reminds us that fear has to do with punishment, but ‘perfect love drives out all fear’ (1 Jn 4:18). Too much in our understanding of the punishment for sin came from our experience of penal laws in civil society. The social element in sin, the harm done to others, calls for compensation or restitution, but it is difficult to imagine God gaining anything by punishing us simply for the sake of his justice. Just as we found a meaningful way of understanding God’s will without thinking of a law extrinsically imposed, so we can speak meaningfully of punishment for sin without picturing God inflicting punishment from without.
Judgment is not God’s condemnation
While allowing for the use of metaphor in the Bible and in Christian tradition, it would be wrong to dismiss references to ‘God’s anger’ as mere anthropomorphism, speaking of God in human terms. Behind such phrases is the firm belief that God is a personal being who is not indifferent to our behaviour, that he is the All-Holy, that he is a loving Father/Mother who really cares and is concerned about our welfare. All references to the anger and judgment of God in both Old and New Testaments, however, need to be balanced against the emphasis on God’s love. The key to a more satisfactory understanding of punishment for sin is to be found in the words of Jesus himself: ‘If anyone hears my message and does not obey it, I will not judge him. I came, not to judge the world, but to save it. Whoever rejects me and does not accept my message has one who will judge him. The words I have spoken will be his judge on the last day’ (Jn 12:47‑48). There is no need for a judgment by God extrinsically decreed, nor for punishment inflicted from without. We are continually being called to judgment, continually being faced with the challenge of Jesus and his word. We cannot be neutral towards his invitation. We must decide whether we will serve God or Mammon. Our own decision is our judgment. It is our own personal act, and punishment is simply the inevitable and natural consequence of sin. It occurs in the very moment of sin and continues throughout the state of sinfulness.
Sin is its own punishment
Sin does indeed bring punishment, not from without, but from within itself, in terms of alienation and disintegration. When we sin seriously we are no longer the integrated, Christ-centred people God invites us to be, people growing in love, reaching out more and more to others, but disintegrated people, divided within ourselves, cut off from our true selves, from others, from the world about us, and in all of this from God. This, of course, refers to the state of mortal sinfulness, which excludes God and enthrones self at the centre of life. In this state, as explained in the last chapter, we still have freedom of choice, but the range of our freedom is radically diminished, and on the deepest level we are enslaved to self. Having rejected God’s love, we lose our own power to love, though we may keep its appearances. If our life is really dominated by self instead of God, we will be incapable of loving others for their own sake. Others will be desired, exploited or dominated as objects for our own selfish interests. Since a basic need of our nature is the need to love and be loved, the sinner’s inability to love is a loss at the most fundamental level of our being. We are not only strangers to ourselves, but we are estranged from our brothers and sisters, and no matter how much we surround ourselves with company, our heart experiences a profound loneliness. The very presence of others only aggravates the searing pain of our utter aloneness. The sinner is the only one who can echo with conviction Sartre’s famous words: ‘Hell is other people’.
Hell begins on earth
It is a mistake to picture hell simply as a punishment coming at the end of life, a sudden shock of a new experience. Hell after death is simply the continuation and the logical consequence of a selfish, sinful pattern of life, the definitive state of mortal sinfulness. To experience the basic need for love and yet find it totally and continually frustrated is to be in hell already in this life, and to have it go on endlessly is worse than the hell-fire of medieval theology. Sartre’s play Huis Clos is a brilliant imaginative picture of what hell may be like. The three characters are presented as having just died. They are in hell, pictured as a drab drawing room without windows or mirrors, and it is clear that they have become the kind of people they are because of the way they lived. They are pathetically reaching out to each other looking for sympathy, understanding and love, but each is so preoccupied with self, so totally locked up in self, that there is no love to give, and yet they cannot give up the effort, so there is the hell of constant striving and longing for love continually frustrated. In this kind of approach, hell is a state of mental anguish prepared for and begun in this life, but reaching a point of no return in death when the sinner says a total and definitive No to God. If hell is prison, there is no greater hell than to be locked up within oneself when that self has become infinitely small through rejection of God.
Some theologians would go so far as to say that since sin is negative selfishness, we can, by the way we live, become so turned in on self and so totally negative, that we have nothing to carry over into eternity, that we simply disappear or cease to exist. Growth in Christ and living for others, on the other hand, is a positive reality enabling us to live on forever in the intimacy of God’s family. Then we can love fully without the barriers that at present tend to keep us apart.
There is no need to picture judgment at death in terms of God searching his account books or computer records to see whether we have a credit or debit balance. He has only to look at us to know whether we belong with him. If we have lived the Christ‑life (known explicitly or only implicitly), reaching out in genuine care and concern for others, he sees the image of Christ in us and recognises us as his children. Heaven means being at home with God who is infinite love. It begins in this life insofar as to live the Christ-life is to increase our capacity for love, to grow in the likeness of Christ, so that in the moment of death we move into the fullness of life, a state we call heaven, where we will be at home with God and all those who love him.
This approach is beautifully expressed by James Michener in The Fires of Spring:
‘Then from a side bench a man in grey rose and began to speak. Neither David nor Marcia knew this Quaker, nor would they ever know his name, but his words fell over the ugly architecture of their past like snow upon the buildings of Washington Square. He said: ‘The most misleading concept in religion is that of the recording angel. I cannot believe that God remembers or cares to remember a single incident of our lives. I am the recording angel. My spirit and my body are the record. My good deeds show in me, and my wrong deeds can never be hidden. My spirit either grows to fullness or declines to nothing. God has no need of recording devices. We must not think of him as a vengeful or shopkeeping dictograph. He has created a better instrument than a strip of all‑recording film. He has made me. He needs only look to me, and all is recorded.
Therefore we must conclude that we retain the privilege of erasing past mistakes. Sometimes I think we Quakers do not attend carefully enough to the teachings of the Catholic Church. I refer especially to their doctrine of final salvation. I know it is repugnant for some Friends to contemplate a totally evil man’s being saved in the last gasp of life, but if what I have just said about God’s establishing us as his immortal recording devices is true, I for one believe this to be possible.’ (p. 445, London, 1949).
Fear of hell
All our talk of future existence, of course, is simply guesswork and very much an over‑ simplification. There are difficult philosophical and theological problems about the details of life after death and the resurrection of the body. Our belief in bodily resurrection stresses the essential fact of continuity and personal survival, but the Church is in no way committed to any particular theological opinion about the details. Our faith does not oblige us to believe that anyone is actually in the state of hell as final, irrevocable separation from God. It does require us to believe that God who is all-powerful and infinite love wills everybody to be saved, but that we humans are capable of rejecting God’s love. Hell in this sense is a real possibility for each and every one of us, precisely because we have free will. To fear it is not to be terrified by an unchristian avenging God waiting to punish us, but rather to be conscious of the seriousness of life, to be concerned and awed by the fact that we can sinfully refuse God’s gift of love, and to be constantly reminded of the need for repentance and conversion. Our traditional imagery of souls tormented by fire for all eternity in hell is beyond belief, and in no way part of our faith. In more innocent (ignorant?) times, preaching this kind of threat might have helped simple people to keep to the ‘straight and narrow’ path, but it is mind-boggling to imagine God creating this kind of parallel spiritual universe in which to punish his enemies for all eternity. When Jesus spoke of punishment for sin he naturally used the words and images of his time and culture. Only fundamentalists who read the Bible literally understand him as describing the geography and furniture of hell. We should have the humility to say that we have no way of knowing the details of the after-life, but we believe in the infinite love and forgiveness of our God.
The healing process begins now
Heaven and hell are not simply states of life after death, but realities prepared for and already begun this side of the grave, eschatological conditions with all the tension of the ‘here and now but not yet’ about them. In the same way, purgatory as a purifying process has its beginnings here on earth. As we have just seen, the punishment for sin, beginning even in this life, is really the effect of sin itself on our being. Even apart from the consequences our sin may have for others, injuring their person, their property or their reputation, poisoning the moral climate of the community or damaging the physical environment, all sin has an effect on ourselves. Apart from the harm particular sins may do to our health, every sin leaves its mark, deep or shallow, on our personality, making us the kind of person we are. Since all sin is selfishness, every sinful decision increases the selfish streak in our nature. It affects our relationship with God, neighbour and environment, and disrupts our inner harmony.
When we repent and receive God’s forgiveness, we are healed by his grace at the core of our being. It is possible that our repentance and conversion will be a dramatic experience, turning us inside out and shaking us to the foundations. But it is seldom like that. It is not often, if ever, that we are capable of taking the whole of ourselves into a single act. Our conversion is a re-orientation of our life back to God, but it takes time for this to be worked out fully so that it penetrates all areas of our lives, all levels of our heart. The sin itself is forgiven and is now no more, but its effects (which are not sins) still need to be dealt with. Repentance is more than just sorrow for sin. To be genuine, it must involve atonement, and this means restoring ‘at-oneness’ between ourselves and God (by prayer and prayerful love of neighbour), between ourselves and our neighbour (by restitution and loving service), and within ourselves (by mortification, discipline, self-control). It should be obvious that these are not three watertight compartments that can be taken care of in isolation. Work in any one area will not be genuine unless it reaches over into the others. Even prayer can be an escape, and it is an illusion unless it also finds expression in service.
Repentance takes time
What all this means is that repentance is not just a decision, but also a process that takes time, that must reach into the different levels of our being. God’s forgiveness heals the root of our problem, transforms us into new creatures, but he expects us to co-operate with his grace in healing the effects of sin. This is what penance is all about. Should death intervene before the process is complete, the remainder is taken care of by what we call purgatory. This is the instantaneous purification in the moment of death enabling us to become whole persons, purged of the last traces of selfishness, and ready to enjoy the happiness of heaven. There is no need to think of it as a place in which people have to spend time until they are released. Those undergoing such a painful, but purifying experience can be helped by our prayers, not in the sense of having others pay the fine for their release, but in the sense that they are supported by the solidarity of the communion of saints in their transition from this life into the fullness of life with God. Pope Benedict XVI puts it very well when he says that the faithful departed ‘can receive solace and refreshment through the Eucharist, prayer, fasting and almsgiving. The belief that love can reach into the afterlife, that reciprocal giving and receiving is possible, in which our affection for one another continues beyond the limits of death − this has been a fundamental conviction of Christianity throughout the ages and it remains a source of comfort today. Who would not feel the need to convey to their departed loved ones a sign of kindness, a gesture of gratitude or even a request for pardon? . . . The lives of others continually spill over into mine: in what I think, say, do and achieve. And conversely, my life spills over into that of others: for better and for worse. So my prayer for another is not something extraneous to that person, something external, not even after death. In the inter-connectedness of Being, my gratitude to others − my prayer for them− can play a small part in their purification. And for that there is no need to convert earthly time into God’s time: in the communion of saints simple terrestrial time is superseded. It is never too late to touch the heart of another, nor is it ever in vain’ (Spe Salvi, n.48).
The future is here
Christian faith will always be curious to know more details of the great truths of faith, so we will continue to search for ways of making them meaningful in each new age. Whichever theories of heaven, hell and purgatory we find most helpful, we need to remember that they are only theories, guesswork, and must be constantly checked against the basic teaching of the Church, however bare and sober this may seem to be.
The mystics often speak of the acceptance of a certain degree of ignorance, docta ignorantia, as a mark of wisdom. The reminder is especially necessary in our present context. We know nothing of the details of life after death, and perhaps it is just as well. Our Christian faith has to do with the meaning of life rather than with the geography or furniture of heaven and hell. Preoccupation with future states could distract us from the business of everyday living and let us forget that the realities of heaven and hell begin here on earth. Jesus came, as he tells us, that we ‘might have life, life in all its fullness’ (Jn 10:10), not simply as a future reward, but as a here and now possession. When we look forward to the fullness of that life beyond the limitations of our present existence, there is no need to fear, because the God we meet is not the God who punishes, but the loving and faithful God who wants all people to be saved. It is not at all true that God punishes sin, but sin is its own punishment. What we need to fear is our own sinfulness, what it can do to us, and most of all our refusal to repent, to be converted and to accept the gift of God’s forgiveness. The phrase ‘eternal life’ does not mean just more of the same, one day at a time going on forever, but the fullness of life, of all that is good and true and beautiful, without limit, beyond imagination. Paul’s beautiful words to the Corinthians are all we need to know: ‘No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him’ (I Cor 2:9).