Today's readings: Apocalypse 7, 2-4.9-14; 1 John 3, 1-3; Matthew 5, 1-12.

Christianity offers a vast panoramic vision of cosmic history, extending from the creation of the world through its redemption, and culminating in the great hope of final restoration. This hope has a history and it developed in the religious imagination of humanity as Heaven, the Promised Land, the New Jerusalem.

It is relatively easy for us to narrate time-bound stories about suffering, the experience of evil, of things incomprehensible to the mind. But it is not so easy to speak of eternity, to imagine what being outside time would be like.

Yet the stories of those who have completed the full circle and are already in God's presence and whom we celebrate collectively today constitute our memory, the memory of the Church, the assurance of things hoped for. They give meaning to time, history, and to our hope.

In our religious and collective imagination, we have been brought up to think of saints either as heroes whose achievement it is useless to aspire to because it is unreachable, or as models, some of whom are even off-putting.

But the Scripture representation of sainthood by far goes beyond our schemes and conditions for someone to be canonically beatified or declared a saint. John speaks of a huge number of people, impossible to count, from every nation, race, tribe and language.

Jesus, speaking of the beatified, mentions specifically the poor in spirit, the gentle, those who mourn, those who hunger and thirst for what is right, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and the persecuted. This is the line-up described in John's Apocalypse of those who have been through the great persecution and who have "washed their robes white again in the blood of the Lamb".

There are so many people scattered throughout the world who fit this description and yet who are not heeded, who literally do not matter to us, who are and will remain unknown forever.

The major truth that transpires from today's Scripture readings and that keeps our hope alive is that God is not the indifferent spectator of the struggle between good and evil. God is never neutral. He takes sides.

Leonardo Boff, the Brazilian theologian of liberation, is right when he writes: "If heaven is not for those who on earth have known only hell, then I do not want to go to the heaven of the God of good moralists. That God would be one without a heart."

In the context of contemporary life, it still makes sense to ask why is it so outrageously irresponsible to think more about heaven than politics. Peter Kreeft, a leading Catholic philosopher of religion, writes that "the big , blazing, terrible truth about man is that he has a heaven-sized hole in his heart, and nothing else can fill it".

We have been tempted for quite a long time now to think that talk about heaven is escapist, distracting, and even irresponsible. A few Sundays ago we read about the rich man asking Jesus what to do to gain eterrnal life. It's a pity we have so much to say about our dissatisfaction and problems, but we keep silent on what is essential. It's a pity that life makes it so easy to substitute the essential with the trivial.

We are all travellers, and death will call us all one day. Stability is an illusion. Jesus speaks of the secret of our happiness. We struggle daily to discover also the secret of our unhappiness. Because at the end of the day we are still children, however hard we try to cover that up. The time will come for all of us to put away our toys and come home.