Don’t gamble on your health or on your eternal life

“How many people like to play the Pick-6 Lottery?”  Most of us would love to win this; however, there is an internal struggle involved here between “do we buy a ticket, since we always lose,” or “do we take the chance again?” Most of us, who play, will gamble again because, to quote the Lottery Commission: “You have to be in it to win it.”

Faith, like the lottery, is a gamble. We have to believe in a God we cannot see and behave a certain way in order to reach eternal life in heaven. It’s a gamble because we can’t prove God’s existence and no one has come back from the other side of the grave to assure us that God really does exist and that heaven, purgatory and hell are not places conjured up by a creative imagination. Since the object of faith is a gamble, we struggle with the question: “Do we behave a certain way to please God and enjoy heaven,” or “do we do whatever brings us pleasure since many of us are tempted to believe that there may be nothing after death,” a void of nothingness which haunted even the greatest of saints and theologians.

Today, many well-intentioned individuals are gambling with the question of getting vaccinated with Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson-Johnson in order to protect themselves from the ravages of COVID-19.  It is a gamble because even the  vaccine does not protect one 100% from contracting this virus or the Delta Variant, which appears to be the strongest mutation of the COVID virus yet. Still, those who are vaccinated, who may come into contact with the Delta Variant are likely to have mild or no symptoms compared to those who are unvaccinated and have grave symptoms leading up to hospitalization, intubation and even death.  While some government officials are mandating the vaccinations for certain groups such as health care workers and first responders, ultimately, whether to get a vaccine or not weighs heavily on whether one believes the science or not.  Science and faith are not mutually exclusive.  The first Vatican Council defined this clearly. Without science or reason, one has no rational ground of credibility. Without grace, we would not know what we believe, if we believe anything at all.   So, we need both: science and faith.

Contrary to fundamentalist Christians who believe that all we have to do to be saved is accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior, we, Catholics believe that salvation is a two-step grace.

Step One is “justification,” which involves Jesus offering us eternal life, an offer often sensed by the movement of desire as the “call of Love.’  If we accept this “call,” normatively in baptism, we are cleansed of all sin, personal and original, and we are put in good standing with God. But this gift only stays with us if we live henceforth as having been transformed by Christ. In other words, there is a second step to this salvation journey which is “sanctification“ or growth in holiness, which accrues from a life of faith lived out in charity.

If we want to live forever, then, we must hold fast to the odds in favor of a living God who wishes to spend eternity with us in his Kingdom of Heaven. Yes, we need to follow what we believe is the morally upright path: striving to do good and avoiding evil, seeking virtue, avoiding vice, pursuing what is holy and avoiding what is sinful.

Faith is a gamble, so is getting vaccinated against COVID-19 especially as the Delta Variant spreads through our country, but if we wish to attain health in this life and eternal life in the next, then a resounding “yes” seems to make the most sense to both science and faith!

Father Comandini is managing editor of “The Catholic Spirit.”