Relationship with God: Universal Call to Holiness

I teach my students about the Universal Vocation to Holiness. Usually, when people think of Holiness, they imagine some long-skirted woman sitting silently and properly in a church pew (or kneeling in prayer), usually alone with God, with eyes shut tightly, and a smile as if to communicate she is having some mystical conversation with God, adoring Him in bliss. I have seen those people and maybe they are experiencing some form of Peace and that is good, I suppose. But I think Holiness is more. Holiness is living out the image and likeness in which we are made. It is Loving and being Loved the same way the Trinity Loves and is Loved. Holiness necessitates self-giving Love and if one is to be self-giving, then there must be another person or group of persons to give that Love to. Holiness is Loving and being Loved within the context of community. Holiness is the Trinity, and if we are made in the image and likeness of God, the Trinity, then to be who we are made to be, we, too, must be in Community and humility, Agape. Sacramentally, if we look at the material Truths we discover in anthropological studies, maybe we discover community and humility to be major material themes of the continuing development of the human person.

            “God Loves me”, Monsignor Buchignani teaches. If we know this then all else follows. When we talk about what it means to be who God wants us to be and the source of transcendent happiness then “God Loves me” is vital. But to reach further into the essence of God, let’s start with making the claim that we are made in the image and likeness of God and that image and likeness resembles a community of self-giving Love. If we want to be our most Authentic Selves, that is the model we should live out. Hopefully my students have a good understanding right now of what it means to think in terms of Sacramentality and Christian Anthropology. Of course, if the goal is “to know” the Authentic Self, then we need to also discuss what it means “to know” and how we can “know” anything, especially if that “anything” is transcendent. We learn some more buzz words like “epistemology”, “episteme”, and “phronesis”.

(Not exactly the kind of Love we are working for, but it is a start).