On That For Which We Were Made

                 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). 

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.

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? 

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.

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.

And for this were we made: to be social raptors on Biz Cas Friday!