The
Second Vatican Council made clear that the vision of the Church is that all of
her members, and indeed, all people, are called to live the life of holiness.
This is in keeping with our being created in the image and likeness of God. If
it is true that we are made to image God, it follows that it is when we are
most loving, most poured out, most at the service of others that we are most
ourselves. In class, I sometimes use the metaphor of a car: suppose that a car really
wants to fly (first you have to allow the possibility that a car can want
anything).
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| Hey, I may be a car, but that doesn't make me any less of a person. |
The car can want this with every fiber of its tires and every piston
of its engine, but it simply isn’t made to fly: if it tries to, it will be
broken. It is only when the car is doing what it’s made to do - when it is
screaming down the freeway or hugging the turns on a California coast road –
that the car is fully itself, that it can be completely free. In a similar way,
because of Him in whose image we are made, when we are anything less than loving,
anything less than saints of towering glory and terrifying beauty, we are broken. If we live lives
structured on anything less than the Cross, then we have missed our purpose; we
are like that car, in the air after it’s driven off the cliff, believing
ourselves to be free because we’ve thumbed our noses at the designer.
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| F' you, ground! Freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeedom! |
All of this raises the question of free will: shouldn’t
that car be able to choose whether or
not it should be able to fly? What right does the engineer have to impose a
structure and limits on the car? Or, likewise, what right does God have to call
us to holiness? Shouldn’t we be able to choose whether or not holiness is
really a worthy model for our lives, rather than being rooted in a world of
making and doing, where we can earn our own positions of power and influence?
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| Be whatever I want? Like, I could be a horse if I really wanted to? But only for a little while, because then I'd probably want to be a fish after that, and maybe a rock or an island, because a rock feels no pain and an island never cries? |
The simple answer is, yes, we do have that choice, but it’s important to
remember that when it comes to holiness, the choice is never between freedom
and being somehow chained to an unnatural, imposed way of life: rather, it is
the choice between loving and not loving. The problem here is that our culture has
redefined “freedom” to meaning “when I get to do whatever I want (as long as I’m
not hurting anyone else), then I am free.” In response to this, John Paul II
reminded us that true freedom is not “freedom from,” but “freedom for” –
in other words, we are only truly free when we are free to love – and, further,
when we freely love. This is the
freedom of being, of living out our purpose, of realizing the architect’s
blueprint. Sure, the car is free to
drive over that cliff, but it won’t really accomplish much, and it will only
destroy the car’s capacity for any kind of subsequent freedom.
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| But... I really thought I could fly. Curse you, cruel Auto Engineer in the sky! |
So
the universal call to holiness is, as Karl Rahner put it, that “supernatural
existential” – it is, because God has loved us into being, a constituent or
natural part of who we are as human persons. It is simultaneously,
paradoxically, both natural and supernatural: this call to holiness is
supernatural because it is simply the call to love, which is to say, to fully
live our being made in the image and likeness of God, who is love. There is in
all of this a question: if the universal call is to love, are we each given a
particular call to one of the particular vocations (married life, single life,
ordained life)? I think that the universal call provides a better lens through
which to approach this question: because the universal call is to love, it can’t
be that the particular call is artificial or externally imposed upon us, but
must be organic, grown into and lived out, not shrugged on or off like a
garment, because this is how love is: it's not demanded or performed, it is lived and given. Secondly, it’s also important to keep in mind that each of the
particular vocations is a vocation only insofar as it allows and challenges us to
live love, which is the greatest and most important challenge of all of
history, and which is offered to each of us individually, every moment of every
day. And nothing could be more natural to us than meeting that challenge,
because for this were we made.
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| And for this were we made: to be social raptors on Biz Cas Friday! |
