God’s Plan – Holiness for All – Notes for Discussion

Leviticus 11:44  —  For I am the Lord, your God; sanctify yourselves therefore, be holy, for I am holy.

1 Peter 1:16  — As he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct; for it is written “You shall be holy, for I am holy.’

Catechism of Catholic Church 2013 – “All Christians in any state or walk of life are called to the fullness of Christian life and to the perfection of charity.”  All are called to holiness: “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  [LG 40-2; Mt. 5:48)

The Scriptures as well as the traditions and teaching of the Church plus the example of Mary and of the Saints in responding to God, are all sources of what it means to be holy.

The description of “Saints” in scripture:

Ps 31:23 – Love the Lord, all you his saints … all you who wait for the Lord.

Romans 8:27 – And God who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

I Corinthians 6:1-2 – Paul refers to the faithful members of the Corinthian community as saints.

Ephesians 4:11-12 – The gifts Christ gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ.

Revelation 5:9-10 – In John’s heavenly vision of God and the Lamb and the 4 living creatures and the 24 elders, they sing:  “You are worthy to take the scroll and open its seals for you were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God saints from every tribe, language and people and nation; you have made them to be a kingdom and priests serving our God, and they will reign on earth.”

Brief Summary of how saints have been named:

In the Early Church – those who were martyred for their faith: they imitated Christ in his passion and death.

The prevailing spirituality

Evangelization – ‘no salvation outside the Church’. Absolute necessity of Baptism.
Their great desire to bring the gospel, the good news of God’s love for humanity, to those who had no knowledge of it.
Desiring to know Christ intimately and to love him by enduring extreme physical penances and by caring for the sick and needy.
Renunciation of the world’s values, with an emphasis on corporal penances, pain and suffering.
Willingness to endure martyrdom for their faith.

But it is important to remember, that there is no evidence of Jesus during his lifetime consciously and freely inflicting pain or suffering on himself as a form of prayer and devotion to God.

The pain and suffering that Jesus endured in his passion was unavoidable suffering, pain and humiliation inflicted on him by others.

Christ as “Holy”:

The Incarnation, God becoming flesh, is Christ becoming a human being and loving God with all his heart, all his soul, all his mind and all his strength and loving his neighbor as himself.

He is completely God-focused but with his feet firmly planted on the earth; in his time and culture. He lives his human experience fully.

For us, this means that our own human experience within all of creation, with all its ups and downs, its successes and failures, its joys and sorrows, its faithfulness and sinfulness, is a blessed, graced way of coming to know and love God.

St. Paul describes God’s hidden purpose in the Letter to the Ephesians (3:10): “…this grace was given to me to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ, and to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things.”

And as the mystic, Teilhard de Chardin, sees it, the point and purpose of Jesus becoming human is what Louis Savary, a Chardin scholar calls, “The Christ project”: ‘its aim is to bring creation, including all of humanity, back to God, fully conscious of our divine origin and divine destiny.’  [The New Spiritual  Exercises, In the Spirit of Teilhard de Chardin,  p. xii, Paulist Press, New York, 2012]

How to become a saint today:

 

St. Ignatius Loyola, in the 16th Century, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in the 20th Century, both saw the way to holiness as helping to carry out God’s intention, or in the words of Louis Savary, God’s project on earth.

 

Jesus is inviting us to join him in the special project, initiated by God, which is so important that it needed God’s own Son to reveal it clearly and accurately and to spearhead it.

 

Jesus reveals that the nature of God is unconditional love and that this divine love is creative, active and purposeful; it is forward-looking, proactive and evolutionary.God has nurtured a loving plan for all creation from the very first moment of creation.God has been revealing God’s self to us for 14 billion year.

 

Even the ancient psalmist was trying to tell us about God and God’s love for us.Psalm 19:1-4:

The heavens are telling the glory of God and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.

Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.

There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard;

Yet their voice goes out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world.

 

So, if we want to be saints, to be holy, in today’s world, it requires of us “nothing less than unconditional love for all humans and all of creation – learning to love the way God loves.

 

John 3:16-17 – For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son … Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

 

Conversion / Repentance

“Change the way you are thinking and doing things in such a way that you are now supporting what God is trying to do in the world.”

Bernie Carroll, SJ, is a spiritual director at the Ignatius Jesuit Centre in Guelph, Ontario.

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