Satan already knew this. Many of the Church Fathers say the knowledge of God becoming man and, therefore, “lower than the angels” and Lucifer’s refusal to adore Him was the reason he and his legions of angels were cast into hell. So God’s promise in Genesis is not geared so much to the fallen angel as to those mortals who had also fallen. It became their whole reason for living—and Satan’s never-tiring attempts to have everyone forget the promise.

This, of course, is the reason for the worldly foolishness of trying to convince people that Adam, Eve and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is a myth. If the progenitors of the human race were not expelled from Eden, then there is no exile (and, obviously, no original sin). Mankind attempts to do away with original and personal sin and then wonders why its members are so much more miserable than before.

So the promises were repeated and deepened with Abraham, Moses, and David. Throughout Old Testament history, however, the Hebrews forgot God’s promises to them and renewed their sinful ways, only to distrust God when things didn’t go their way. This is particularly true during the 40 years that Moses and the Hebrews wandered the desert searching for the Promised Land.

Then during the Babylonian captivity, Ezechiel warned the exiles of Yahweh’s judgment and mercy. For six years, his words fell on deaf ears. Then the exiles despaired when they heard the news of the catastrophe that had come upon Judah in 587 BC.3

At this point, Yahweh told Ezechiel to stop preaching. Instead, the prophet was to tell the exiles that Israel still had a future and that the exile did not mean the nation’s final doom.4

But until the world was redeemed, there was no way for anyone to reach heaven. Original sin weighs on each of us like a lead ball and prevents us from truly reaching God. To remind us of our own displacement from God, Jesus was born in exile, in a humble stable in Bethlehem. The angels rejoiced at this birth: at last, the Eternal King would free the people from its slavery to sin. At least those who would accept Him and want to be freed.

Jesus’ birth and preaching was not enough to redeem our sins, however. No, He had to die for us. Not only that, but He had to shed His Blood. And He bore extreme cruelty and poured out every drop of His Blood to redeem our sins.

He knew this when He made His triumphant entry into Jerusalem during what we now call Palm Sunday. He knew the beloved Jews would reject Him. As Archbishop Alban Goodier, S.J. describes in Passion and Death of Jesus Christ: “When others had gloried, He had only wept; when others had sung: ‘Hosanna to the Son of David,’ He had only stood where David himself had once stood, an exile from his own city.”5

Then Christ said:

If thou hadst known and that in this thy day the things that are to thy peace, but now they are hidden from thy eyes. For the days shall come upon thee and thy enemies shall cast a trench about thee and compass thee round and straiten thee on every side and beat thee flat to the ground. And they shall not leave in thee a stone upon a stone because thou hast not known the time of thy visitation.6

That is not all. We also must bring others to Him, and “the harvest of souls demands sweat and blood.”7 Bringing others to the Church, or back to the Church, greatly helps to ensure our own salvation. This is because we all need Him, who left us with Himself in the Blessed Sacrament. In recent years, the abandonment of Christ in the tabernacle, from ignoring Him to blaspheming Him in deed, has been that much more evident. This is why adoring our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, receiving Him in Holy Communion and actively seeking and doing His will is the furthest we get from the exile we call earth before we are called to eternity. It also reminds us that even with Jesus with us in the Blessed Sacrament, there is still a veil between us and God due to original sin. We were meant to see God face-to-face for all eternity. We can sense this in our longing for Him.

And because this world is so laden in sin, doing God’s will often sends us to an exile, whether it be to Siberia or en route to our deaths for the faith. It could even involve having to endure such silliness as watching priests wear blue vestments during Advent and turning the Gospel into mush. But if the thought of spending the rest of one’s life in Siberia—or in a modernist parish—evokes chills and dread, how much more so the eternal exile?

Pope St. Gregory VII understood this. In the 11th century, he had abolished the practice of having heads of state make spiritual appointments, much to the displeasure of King IV of Germany. Despite the prohibition, he continued the practice of nominating bishops and abbots and investing them. Pope Gregory VII excommunicated him twice. Henry IV set up an anti-pope and marched against Rome. Gregory fled and died at the rugged castle of Salerno. He is most famous for his last words, “I have loved justice and hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile.”8

Christians who attempt to understand the concept of living in the world, but not of it, are often ostracized. This is because worldly people can sense unworldliness. They attempt to taint it; if this is not possible, then they exclude them from their world. They have little desire to be reminded of their own inattentiveness to their personal relationships with God. They care little about death, so much so that they care little about life. This is all because they care so little about God.

St. Elizabeth Ann Seton loved to meditate on the rightful desire for death, even to the point of giving her friends some written meditations about it—on their birthdays. She wrote: “Oh the happiness of a poor exile entering his home, and the house of his family . . . oh the embrace of His Father, and the welcome of his friends. I consider a good death as the passage from death to life—The life of this world is truly a death, by dying we find life, and lose death; and by this loss how immense our gain!”9

1. Lord, Daniel a., SJ, “The Song of the Rosary,” Eucharistic Crusade of the Knights and Handmaids of the Blessed Sacrament, St. Louis, Mo., 1956, p.25.
2. Genesis 3:15.
3. Cf. Ezechiel 18.
4. Cf. Heinisch, Paul, Christ in Prophecy, Order of St. Benedict, Collegeville, Minn., 1956, p. 127-128.
5. P.J. Kenedy & Sons, New York, n.d., p. 318.
6. Luke 19:42-44.
7. Attributed to Cardinal Lavigerie.
8. Laux, John, A Complete History of the Catholic Church to the Present Day, Benzinger Brothers, New York, 1945, p. 308.
9. Seton, St. Elizabeth Ann, “Meditation on the Desire of Death” as photocopied in The Soul of Elizabeth Seton: A Spiritual Portrait by Joseph I. Dirvin, CM, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1990. p. 20.
10. Psalms 85:10.