The Banquet (Fulfillment of All Longing 5)
Becoming Divine
We have been reflecting on the fact that we can come to know God through creation, that the beauty of creation was designed to lead us to the divine artist – God. Yesterday we reflected on the fact that the human person is the crown of creation made in the image of and likeness of God with the capacity to receive God within and be transformed into sons and daughters of God who share in His life – divinized. The CCC quoting the early fathers of the Church says God become man so that man could become God. now we can’t make ourselves God apart from God and by our own effort. No but we can become like God by directing all our desire, all our longing toward God. If we desire or long for God above all else, He will fill that desire with Himself and He will divinize us – make us like God. As Jesus said to St. Angela of Folingo “If you make yourself a capacity (by longing, by desire), I will make myself a Torrent!”
Starvation, Fast Food, or Banquet
In our effort to find happiness we are either going to become the stoic who represses all desires and just follows rules; or we become an addict trying to fulfill infinite longing with finite pleasures that enslave; or we will become an aspiring mystic who longs for union with God above all!
Who is closer to the aspiring mystic: the stoic or the addict? The Addict because he is in touch with his hunger. The stoic has killed the hunger. St. Augustine said those who are lost in the passions are less lost than those who have lost their passions. If the desires, the HUNGER we have really are for something infinite, imagine God loved us so much, that He would become food we could eat in the Eucharist. That is mind blowing! If our eyes will be opened like the disciples on the road to Emmaus when they recognized Jesus in the Eucharist then we have a message that is truly good news because the Infinite God has come to satisfy our infinite desires and he does so in the Eucharist. There is a banquet that corresponds to our hunger. But you will not experience this satisfaction if your heart is not a longing heart.
Our Gift
This invitation to participate in the banquet in which God feeds us with His own divine life, this call to share in the eternal exchange of divine love has been revealed in plain sight and in the most clear language when God chiseled it right in our bodies as male and female and calling the two to participate in the goodness of one another. [In Genesis we learn] that not only is man by himself the image of God, that not only woman by herself is the image of God, but also man and woman, as a couple, are the image of God.
This is what we read in Genesis “Then God said: ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’” – Notice God refers to himself in the plural, as a communion of persons. He is one God in three persons. When we say God is love, it means there is an eternal exchange of love between the persons of the Trinity. For love to be love, you have to have one who loves, one who is loved, and the love they share. Love is trinitarian by nature. In the Trinity, the Father is the one who loves, who makes a gift of himself from all eternity; the Son is the one who is loved, he is the Beloved of the Father; and the love they share, the love that is exchanged is the Holy Spirit. This is the image in which we are made as man and woman. The man is disposed in his very being to make a gift of himself to the woman; she is disposed in her very being to receiving the gift of the man into herself and return the gift; and the love they exchange is so real in the normal course of events it becomes another person.
Ressurection of the Body
The human body in its creation as male and female is the greatest manifestation of God’s glory in all of creation.
This is confirmed when God sent his Son to become man
“I know some muddle-headed Christians have talked as if Christianity thought that sex, or the body ... were bad in themselves. But they were wrong. Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body – which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness” (C.S. Lewis, MC, p. 98).
Moment of Communion.
We “can deduce that man became the image of God not only through his own humanity, but also through the communion of persons, which man and woman form from the very beginning. The function of the image is that of mirroring the one who is the model, of reproducing its own prototype. Man becomes an image of God not so much in the moment of solitude as in the moment of communion.” This “constitutes, perhaps, the deepest theological aspect of everything one can say about man … On all this, right from the beginning, the blessing of fruitfulness descended” (John Paul II, TOB 9:3).