God desires your perfection. The church teaches this and Jesus teaches it. However, hearing this the first time, I thought, how wonderful, another area where I’m a failure. I’m sure this thought isn’t too far from most people’s minds when deliberating over such a demand. If God knows how flawed we are, how can he reasonably expect something like perfection from us? When considering this, I’m reminded of the scripture, “For a man this is impossible but with God all things are possible.”
Thinking of ourselves and imagining perfection seems even more futile when considering great Saints. St. Teresa of Avila spent hours meditating on just one word of the Our Father while we attempt to re-focus ourselves after only moments of prayer.
We say our rosaries and think to ourselves, “Did I just say a Glory Be or an Our Father? Am I on the 3rd Glorious mystery or the 1st?”. That’s if we remembered to say a rosary at all. It’s days like these when our sanctity juxtaposed with that of the Saints seems insurmountable.
It can be tempting to fall into the spirituality of “God loves me no matter what, He knows I’ll never be a saint” and pray that we’ll die on the right side of the turnstile of confession. We can put the prospect of sanctity by the way-side and try our best not to miss mass on Sunday and say our prayers before bed. If we’re feeling particularly transcendent, we might watch an episode of “The Chosen” instead of “The Office.”
Reasoning like this is familiar to most of us, but if perfection is nearly impossible, how did the Saints reach it? Particularly, when so many of them originated with such lives of sin. How can someone with a past like St. Augustine attain such a degree of sanctity? Surely if Saints like he can do it, it is possible for us as well.
If God wills it of us then it is possible.
We know God wills our perfection in various ways. We can logically conclude that God wills our perfection by asserting a few truths that we already know. God can only do what is utterly perfect. He created us so that he can love us and so that we might return that love to him. Consequently, since we know that God loves us perfectly, we also know he can only will for us what completely fulfills us and results in our maximum happiness. Fortunately for us, God doesn’t “half-step.” This maximum capacity for contentment is acquired through reaching our perfected human nature by sharing in the divine nature insomuch as our human nature allows. Original sin interrupted this possibility, but redemption revived it.
St. Athanasius asserts in his work “On the Incarnation” “God became man so that man might become god.” Jesus tells us in Matthew 5:48 “to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect.” Jesus also tells the rich young man to be perfect, he must sell all his possessions and follow him. If we believe perfection to be an impossibility, why doesn’t it seem like Jesus does?
Jesus knows we can’t make ourselves perfect, but it certainly is not impossible for him to make us perfect. If we know that all the good we do is not by our own doing but by God’s, why does it seem so foreign that God can make us Saints in this life? God, being the source of all goodness, can give himself through grace to whom he chooses. If God has the power to make us perfect, he wills us to be perfect what other condition could be missing?
The answer to that is our consent.
We must desire our sanctification for God to begin his work.
The most crucial faculty God gave to our soul was our will. In receiving our will, we received God’s image. The ability to choose what we judge to be good. Through the gift to choose, we are able to choose what we love. God knows the power of this gift and knows that if he acted upon it, it would no longer be.
When St. Thomas Aquinas was asked by a religious sister how to become a saint, he said very simply, “will it.” This seems pretty rudimentary, but God will not begin our sanctification until we want him to. He won’t sanctify us beyond the point of sanctity that we desire to reach.
If the majority of the journey to sanctity consists of the firm desire to start it, why are there so few saints?
Most people are afraid to give up the things they know they should.
When proposing the idea of becoming a Saint, It is likely that we become aware of some habits or actions that are obstacles to sanctity almost immediately. We recoil at the thought of even attempting to overcome them. We are experts at self-deception and immediately think that we don’t have the strength to fix them or try and reason our way into believing that these habits or actions aren’t in themselves aren’t bad at all, THEY’RE GOOD!
The truth is, if without much consideration, these obstacles jolt into our minds at the mere thought of what could be keeping you from God, they most likely are. The great thing about God speaking to us is that he is loud and persistent. Not always clear, but persistent enough to bring his desires for us more than once into our conscience.
For me, although many things have kept me from God, a big one was smoking. I tried forever to justify that I could become a Saint without giving it up. I even attempted to research Saints that smoked so that I could say, “they smoked, so can I.” But, when thinking of mortification, smoking presented itself before my mind. I reasoned that I did not need to give it up. I was addicted, I wasn’t strong enough, and smoking wasn’t even really a sin. These were all the things I needed to hear to keep at it.
Until one day, God made it fearfully clear that he wanted me to stop smoking. With his grace only, I was able to quit. You see, God is a jealous God and desires that we give ourselves entirely to him so that he can give himself entirely. You see, there is nothing inherently wrong with smoking but this is not why God wanted me to stop. The issue was that every time I thought I should quit, I refused and made every excuse why I didn’t need to quit. Effectively, telling God, I’ll do anything for you, just not this. Smoking is more important to me than you. You, the source of all existence, you who incarnated, lived, died, redeemed me, and rose again from the dead so that i might know your love. Nicotine is my idol, not you. Sounds ridiculous, right? But that’s what I was communicating to God.
Our attachments can be things or they can be acts. They can even be omissions. They can be Drinking, smoking, too much screen time, saying the lord’s name in vain, gossiping, not making time for prayer, etc. The danger in them is that they are things in our lives we are not willing to stop or things that we are not willing to start in order to love God more. As I made clear with my own attachment, once we examine them closely, we see how ridiculous they can be.
What God is offering in exchange for our attachments is infinitely more valuable. Himself.
Why Love God? Because of love.
Is pursuing God at all costs worth the effort? Human nature tends to look at things in terms of opportunity cost. We are constantly calculating if our input is worth the output. So it is expected to consider, “well, is giving up these things that I’m so accustomed to worth it”? Most definitively, yes.
As mentioned before, God created man with the intention for us to be completely overflowing with fulfillment and happiness. Nothing he brought into existence could satisfy us because he destined us to be satisfied with the best he could offer us. His love. In the end, the gift giver is far superior to the gift. Even with minimal life experience, we know that all pleasure from created goods is fleeting. We eat and drink; we get hungry and thirsty again. We have sexual desire; we have sex. We get the urge again. These things don’t fulfill us because it is not within our nature to be fulfilled by them. If eating one time fulfilled our desire for food our entire life, we’d pretty quickly die. So how does God fill this metaphysical void in each one of us?
He loves us in the way we desire to be loved. His love is what we’re seeking when all is said and done. Most of us are desperately seeking it without even being conscious of it. The drug addict knocks at the door of his dealer searching for God’s love. The drunk who stumbles back to a vacant home because his addiction has taken everything from him is looking for God’s love. The sex addict goes from partner to partner, hoping that they will quench his thirst for love in the manner God designed his thirst quenched. The longing for love makes Man do un-thinkable things. Sometimes it makes us do bad things like ultimate self-destruction and some good things like deciding to dedicate our lives to return that love to the one who gave it, as Saints do.
So what does responding to God’s call mean? It means to live as God designed us. Receive endless and infinite love to such a capacity that we cannot help but overflow with it and give our lives for such love. To be inflamed inside and out for such a love. To receive love so sublime that it leaves us with no desire other than to give it back to the one who gave it to us.
God is offering happiness at every moment. However, he knows that happiness lies in accepting what he has in store for us. What could take priority over searching for the complete bliss found in God’s friendship? How could time be better spent? Let us stop believing the lie that the world has what we deeply desire and begin to strive for our ultimate end, deep love and friendship with God”
