Meant to go beyond ourselves

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

 

THERE’S a stanza in that Josh Groban song, You raise me up, that, I think, is worthwhile giving some more serious consideration. It’s when it says, “You raise me up, so I can stand on mountains / You raise me up, to walk on stormy seas / I am strong, when I am on your shoulders / You raise up to MORE THAN I CAN BE.” (Emphasis, mine)

That Christ can raise us up to more that we can be is a basic truth about ourselves that, sadly, we often take for granted. As a consequence, we would not know how to properly deal with such reality, since we would neither know what practical implications such truth would bring about. We would not know how to live with it.

This basic truth is about us being meant to be raised to the supernatural order of God, to live in the very divine life of God. That’s how God wants us to be. He created us in his image and likeness, endowed with the capacity to know with our intelligence and to love with our will.

With such endowments, we have the capacity to know and love God and also everybody else. As such, we have the capacity to enter into the life of God himself, to somehow be divinized ourselves. And this capacity is made actual because God himself gives us his grace. In fact, he gives us Christ himself, the son of God who became man to redeem us.

We have to understand then that we are not meant to live a purely natural life that is based on our biological constitution alone that can define us physically, emotionally, psychologically, socially, and in the other aspects that our nature can lend itself to. Neither are we meant to live a purely rational life only that can lead us to make big accomplishments in philosophy, the sciences, arts and technology.

We are meant to live a supernatural life with God, to share in the very divine life of God. Yes, we are meant to be divine ourselves, not just naturally human. And this is made possible because aside from endowing us with those spiritual faculties that would enable us to know and love God, God has given us Christ himself who wants to be in and with us, so we can share in his own divinity even as he shares our own humanity.

This is a truth about ourselves that we have to process slowly and as thoroughly as possible in our mind and heart, so we would know what we have to do, what we can expect, what other implications there are from it, etc.

One very clear corollary we can derive from this truth is that we truly need to go along with Christ as best that we can because it would be he who will do what we cannot do anymore by our human powers. As St. Paul would put it, “He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” (Phil 1,6)

We have to understand then that the fullness of our humanity can only take place when it is hitched to the divinity of Christ. As such, we can expect some awkwardness in the beginning due to the difference between the natural and the supernatural.

But Christ somehow reassures us, because he always comes to us with greetings of peace, even if he will somehow complicate our lives.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com