  In the wake of the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, it is unsurprising that a number of commentators have taken the opportunity in turn to attack not just religious extremism, but religion in general. One columnist writing about the incident, extolling Enlightenment values as the antidote to this kind of incident, reminded readers that the Roman Catholic Church had been responsible for the slaughter of perhaps 70,000 Huguenots (French Protestants) in the sixteenth century. He might also have mentioned the brutality that Protestant regimes of that era inflicted on their Roman Catholic subjects, or the collective toll of the Thirty Years’ War in the next century – and continued with the consequences of the French Revolution, or the American one, carried out in the name of those Enlightenment values. These revolutions and regimes, along with the EU and UN, the Velvet Revolution and even South Africa with its Truth and Reconciliation Commission, no less than the Third Reich, the Russian Revolution, the Khmer Rouge, the Islamic State, and every third-rate instigator of a third-world coup d’état, at some level always seek, believe they seek, or at least claim to seek, to establish a paradise on earth. They always, always fail.

For paradise is not a place accessible to us in that way; what Christ and His Forerunner (St John the Baptizer) called the Kingdom of God or Kingdom of Heaven, despite the best (or worst) intentions of liberal or conservative, religious or secular outlook or ideology, is not something we create (or destroy). No amount of coercion, expulsion, extermination, or other external force can either establish the Kingdom or drive it out, and attempts to do so will always be foiled by our own lust for power, glory, purity, order, or a host of other, perhaps even more banal, goals.

No, the Kingdom simply, and already, exists for us to discover: that is the message which we hear at Mass in the Sundays of Epiphanytide and thereafter (picking up the narrative thread we left in mid-Advent), in the Sermon on the Mount and the parables. The Kingdom is nothing less, more, or other than the divine Wisdom, Law, Teaching, Way, Truth, and Life that is woven into the fabric of creation. It does and must have external demands, aspects, and consequences, but we cannot reach it except by making the journey to find it in our own hearts.

For unless and until we, with God’s help, uproot anger, fear, hatred, envy, and the other vices from our hearts, we all of us are capable of committing atrocities equal to that of the Paris attack, and we all of us do. As an Anglican abbot said and every contemplative knows, ‘One need go no further than one’s own heart to find the source of all violence in the world.’ This is why Our Lord taught that anger is tantamount to murder, lust to adultery, covetousness to theft, and why we confess that we have sinned in thought and word as well as in deed.

When we have made that confession, the Celebrant (at Rite I Masses, at least) prays that God will grant us ‘true repentance’ and ‘amendment of life’: that is, a radical reorientation, both decisive and constant, of our behaviors and relationships to self, others, and creation. And this is intensified on Ash Wednesday and during Lent, when we are reminded of ‘the need which all Christians continually have to renew their repentance and faith’ [Exhortation on Ash Wednesday, 265] and ‘cleanse their hearts’ [Preface for Later Lent, 346] and the ways in which all Christians, reflecting the original renunciations and exorcisms of the catechumenate and examination of candidates for baptism, are invited to do so –

     self-examination and repentance

     prayer, fasting, and self-denial

     reading and meditating on God’s holy Word

     [265]

     prayer and works of mercy

       renew[al] by Word and Sacraments

     [346]

     special acts of discipline and self-denial

     [17]

– with the hope that ‘they may come to the fullness of grace which [God has] prepared for those who love [Him]’ [346]. This is the true paradise, and it awaits us even here and now.