Why Are We Here?
One
Why are we here?
We are humans and that is a really good thing. We have an immense capacity for knowledge and creativity and physical strength and speed and endurance. We have the freedom to do whatever we choose. Greatest of all, we can love.
But we are also beset by all kinds of physical, mental, emotional, and cultural limitations. At any moment we can be overcome and destroyed by a microscopic virus cancer or car wreck. We are born, go to school, get a job, get married, and have kids and for the next thirty years we’re running so hard we can’t even think. Then it’s just all over, the kids leave, the professions end, our health declines and there’s just not much to fill the day except TV and loneliness. And it all goes so so unimaginably fast. Then we die.
Is this why we are here? It can’t be. What is this supposed to be all about?
Two
The Goal of Life: Holiness
The very first paragraph of the Catechism has a stunning statement of the purpose of life. It says, “God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all his strength. He calls together all men, scattered and divided by sin, into the unity of his family, the Church. To accomplish this, when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son as Redeemer and Savior. In his Son and through him, he invites men to become, in the Holy Spirit, his adopted children and thus heirs of his blessed life.”
God put us on this earth so that through the course of our lives we would come to share in, participate in His divine, indestructible, perfect, and everlasting life through transforming union with His Son Jesus Christ. By receiving His divine life we become children of God.
1 John 3:1-3: “Think of the love that the Father has lavished on us, by letting us be called God's children; and that is what we are…but what we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed; all we know is, that when it is revealed we shall be like him…”
Did you catch that? We shall be like Him. He wants to make us like him. God wants to make us divine. This is called divinization or theosis.
We don’t become God on our own, but by union with Jesus, we participate in His divine being so that we can be like God and live like God forever in Heaven.
Three
How do we become like God?
Jesus gives His divine life to us primarily through the Liturgy and Sacraments.
Jesus gives His divine life to us beginning with Baptism. He nourishes and increases His divine life in us through the Eucharist. And when we diminish or destroy his life in us by sin, he will restore it by Reconciliation.
John 6:51-58, “I am the living bread which has come down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world. I tell you most solemnly, if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will not have life in you. Anyone who does eat my flesh and drink my blood has eternal life, and I shall raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me and I live in him. As I, who am sent by the living Father, myself draw life from the Father, so whoever eats me will draw life from me. This is the bread come down from heaven; not like the bread our ancestors ate: they are dead, but anyone who eats this bread will live for ever.”
Four
Prayer
Jesus gives His divine life to us through the Sacraments. We must receive the gift of divine life offered in Jesus through Prayer. It is not enough for Jesus to give his divine life in the sacraments. It is not enough for us to just go to Mass. We must receive the gift Jesus offers. The Catechism reminds us that the fruits of the sacraments also depend on the disposition of the one who receives them. (1128)
We must open our soul to receive the divine life Jesus gives in the Eucharist. We must open our souls to drink in the Living Water. We open our souls to receive by prayer. Teresa of Avila says we must specifically do this by mental prayer.
Daily mental prayer in the Rosary or in Lectio Divina opens the soul to drink the Living Water that flows from the heart of Jesus.
So if we want to be like God, fully human and divine, we need the sacraments, but we also need daily mental prayer. To go to the sacraments without a life of deeper prayer is like going to a well and not drinking!
Five
Finally, we must convert, change, and grow from vice to virtue
If we want to be holy, to be like God, then we need to think and feel and desire and act fully human and divine. How in the world will this happen?
Receive the life of God as often as you can in the Eucharist and Reconciliation. Commit to daily mental prayer, the Catechism suggests two forms: lectio divina which is meditating on the Word of God in prayer or the Rosary. We combine both in this podcast
This is how we are transformed from vice to virtue.
Read or listen to the Word of God. Think about it. Am I living this or not? Make a choice, make a resolution to practice today what Jesus wants us to live, some good action. Do this every day and the way you think and feel and act will change so that you think and feel and act more and more like God. This is the great transforming power of frequent sacraments, daily meditation, and a resolution.
The purpose of life is to become holy, fully human and divine. But we’re not there yet. And in the process, we will fall.
Don’t beat yourself up or get discouraged when you fall. That is just pride. Don’t use your falls as an excuse to quit. When you fall, immediately turn to Jesus and say, “See, Lord what I am without you. I’m sorry. Forgive me.” Go and receive his mercy, his excessive unconditional healing love in the sacrament of Reconciliation. For, the mercy of Jesus will give you what you need to get up after you fall and get moving because we have somewhere to go, to Heaven!