Salve Regina

Hail, holy queen, mother of mercy; our life, our sweetness, and our hope. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.

We said the prayer daily. Father Joe always objected to it. This is not, he insisted, a valley of tears. To say so is rank ingratitude. He was of the hallelujah chorus:

This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.

I believe the Salve Regina is right, and the Hallelujah chorus has it wrong.

We are not, after all, in the Garden of Eden, and this present world we inhabit is not the Kingdom of Heaven.

Why not? Why couldn’t God, being all-powerful and all-good, do a better job of it?

Because, surely, a heaven that had bad people in it could not be a heaven. Their activities would subvert it. There was and is a need for a place of trial. Here the tares must be allowed to thrive with the wheat, here there must be sufferings and temptations to sin--so that a heaven is possible. And everyone cannot go there.

For those who experience this present world as a satisfactory world, there must be something wrong. It is not a good sign to have reconciled with an unjust world in which, whatever your own circumstances, others are manifestly suffering. Luke lays it out in the Sermon on the Plain: “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.” But “woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep.”