Then, still like a star, I saw them winding up, scaling what seemed impossible steeps, and quicker every moment, till near the dim brow of the landscape, so high that I must strain my neck to see them, they vanished, bright themselves, into the rose-brightness of that everlasting morning.
-C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
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| Aronsyne, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons |
In an address to the faculty, staff, and administration of Catholic high schools in the Diocese of Cleveland this past fall, Fr. Damian Ference posed many strong insights about who God is, who Jesus is, and who we are as humans created in God's image and likeness.
Starting with a discussion about how things exist - water bottles, chairs, bibles - Fr. Ference then moved to how God exists: as existence itself. Whereas everything else has a creator and exists as a creation for a specific purpose, God exists as existence itself.
And, this existence is love. God is love.
Following this logical flow, since God is love, God is also - inherently - relational. God exists as a relationship and for relationships. God exists as love and therefore to love. He creates out of love and is constantly revealing Himself to us through His created world and all that is in it.
At the beginning of the Bible, the Book of Genesis opens with the Word - Jesus - bringing things into existence and into order. Fr. Ference led us through the six days of creation - day one, the light; day two, the sky and sea; day three, the land; day four, the sun, moon, and stars; day five, the birds and the fish; and day six, the land animals. After each of these acts of creation, God deems His creations "good." However, His final act of creation on day six, after creating the land animals, involved the creation of one in "our" (notice the relational nature of God) "image and likeness" - humans. And, after this act of creation, God deemed it "very good."
Being made in God's image and likeness endows us with capacities for intellect, will, and love. Being made in God's image and likeness means that we are relational and therefore want love. This love entails sacrifice, it involves making something holy, and it wills the good of the other for the sake of the other. Imagine the scene of a parent caring for a sick child in the middle of the night - willing the good of the the other for the sake of the other. Sacrifice. Love.
Being made in God's image and likeness provides us with intention. We can make choices with intent - once again willing to do something - out of which arises virtue and vice. Chapter one of Genesis ends with God giving all of creation to humans to use and the responsibility to do so ethically in accordance with each thing's purpose.
Use, not abuse.
Moving to Genesis's second chapter, Fr. Ference unpacked the gems of this take on the creation story. Creating man out of clay and His breath, God forms humans with two unified parts - visible and invisible, body and soul. The body acts the visible manifestation of our invisible soul. Unfortunately, we can reduce people to only their bodies and/or see the body as a hindrance to our true selves. This leads to the problems of things like pornography and reassignment surgeries - seeing people as only bodies or the body as something that can be changed at will.
In this version of creation, God plants two trees in the garden - the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Whereas we might think our lives easier without both trees, this demonstrates the powerful gift of our free will and that God allows us to choose to enter into relationship with Him. It reinforces that He truly did make us in His image and likeness.
Man alone, though, makes no sense. The male and female bodies come together in such a way that they complement and complete the other. Stamped on our nature by our Creator is a desire for relationship, for someone to love and for complete us.
At this point in the presentation, Fr. Damian belted out a few verses of Queen's "Somebody to Love", one of a few artistic performances he sprinkled throughout his powerful messages.
Find me somebody to love...Find me somebody to love...
At this point in the creation story, the union between and among people and God remained whole and complete and in communion.
Enter sin. Pull away from God and each other. Curve inward toward ourselves. Start using people for selfish reasons instead of loving them for sacrificial ones - loving things and using people and not the other way around.
Covered. Hidden. Ashamed. Broken.
Enter Jesus to restore God's relationship with humanity. Drawing parallels between Mary - the New Eve -and the original one, as well as Jesus - the New Adam - and His predecessor, Fr. Damian highlighted how instead of a fallen angel, Mary was visited by Gabriel. And, instead of choosing the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Mary chose the tree of life. Jesus, instead of hiding and watching the enemy devour others, wages war with the forces of evil, darkness, and sin by letting His light shine for all to see.
Jesus's first miracle, turning water into an abundance of wine, illustrates how He came to both show us who we were created to be - the recipients of God's abundant love - and who God is - love itself.
To further demonstrate this point, Fr. Damian literally rolled up his sleeves and dug into the healing of the Gerasene demoniac found in Mark 5.
The person possessed by the demon has no name, making it easier for him to represent each of us.
He lives among the tombs - sin and death - and no chains can restrain him - much like we cannot control our addictions to sin on our own.
Jesus goes to the peripheries, meeting this man where he is. Jesus heals the man, driving the demons - because sin divides - into the pigs that go running off the cliff into the waters below (another artistic performance highlight).
The people of the town, having heard about this event, come to see what's happening and they find the man "sitting there clothed and in his right mind" (Mark 5:16). Desiring to stay with Jesus and this mountaintop experience - who wouldn't?! - Jesus tells the newly restored man to go back to his family and proclaim "all that the Lord in his pity has done for you" (Mark 5:19).
On the cross, Jesus brings us back into communion with God and with each other. He consummates and completes the relationship that had prior to this been severed. The Resurrection offers the love, grace, and life for us to maintain this communion.
In closing, Fr. Ference referenced the powerful restoration Peter experiences on the shore after the Resurrection. Once again highlighting the parallelism found throughout the greatest story ever told, Peter experiences healing around a charcoal fire, the same environment where Peter had denied even knowing Christ. Instead of a gathering of strangers, Jesus restores Peter through the context of a meal where those gathered are made closer than blood relatives.
Jesus restores Peter and sends him on mission to love, to serve, to heal, and to restore.
In a final moment of performative glory, Fr. Ference ended with a retelling of C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce where a person is restored to his created glory and goes riding off into the distance on a powerful steed.
We were made for greatness, built for holiness, and destined for sainthood. Like Peter and the man possessed by a demon and the person in C.S. Lewis's tale, we often fall short of this noble call. Christ came, though, to return us to who were were created to be.
In the words of Pope Benedict XVI, "(Humans were) created for greatness—for God himself; (we were) created to be filled by God. But (our) heart is too small for the greatness to which it is destined. It must be stretched" (Spe salvi, 2007, #33).
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| Marek.69 talk, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons |
May we open ourselves to this stretching so that we can live up to the greatness for which we were made: to love, to serve, to heal, and to restore.
To God.
And to each other.
