What Are You Waiting For?
by Miracle Chasers on 06/27/20
One of the stranger concepts, now defunct, in Catholic theology is the idea of limbo, a place somewhere between heaven and hell where unbaptized babies, among others, went after they died. They were supposedly stuck there for all eternity, the unfairness of which caused quite an uproar when I was in second grade. “But, what if...” our little eight-year-old hands went up with all sorts of gyrations and circumstances for how and why the unbaptized babies should go to heaven anyway. This was to the consternation of our teacher, a Dominican nun, who didn’t have very good answers and even though we were young, we were not much fooled. Limbo was and is unsettling.
In our modern vernacular, limbo connotes uncertainty and waiting, the uncomfortable place we find ourselves in today. It is also a time of reckoning, with an urgent spotlight on racism in this country that has brought many of us to task, shaken us out of our complacency, and our smug assessment of who we think we really are. As we wait for a cure or a vaccine for Covid-19, we long for the peace and justice that should have come long ago. We wait and we hope, somewhere between heaven and hell. Our country seems to be hanging in the balance, with many of us feeling like we have too much time on our hands and yet no time to lose.
Heaven is a place we might imagine differently through the prism of the pandemic. The small, ordinary daily occurrences we may have taken for granted: a walk in the park with a friend, freedom to celebrate life’s milestones, take a vacation anywhere in the world, or hold a new grandchild. Hell is also a place we can imagine differently, especially if we close our eyes and set the timer for 8 minutes and 46 seconds.
You might say, we could use a few miracles right about now. Personally, I believe God, by whatever name, has given us the gifts of goodness and compassion, fairness and faith, and love, above all, to harness the winds of change and fate in the best ways we know how, and that hope is more than a pipe dream. That perhaps, for all of us, there is an escape from limbo after all. (Katie)
