GRACE BUILDS ON NATURE

JULY 24, 2009

A great unifying theme of our time is respect for the whole person, and for all people, and the search for total human development. There is much talk of the rights of the individual. The human potential movement is pushing back the frontiers of our understanding about the powers of the mind.

There's a new sense of individual responsibility that recognizes that every action generates consequences that must eventually be faced. People are more conscious of their physical health. They care about the air, and about what they eat. They exercise.

Advanced medicine has extended life. People are weighing personal commitments more carefully. They show greater concern for achieving and maintaining inner balance, peace, and integration, and much greater respect for the idiosyncrasies, preferences, feelings, and life styles of others.

Today's generation appears to be responding most seriously to the challenge, "Be all that you can be".

The two most important dimensions of this search for self-realization are probably the desire for psychological healing and wholeness, and the longing for spiritual discovery.

Psychology has made great strides in helping us understand the hidden causes of mental and emotional distress, and has been working hard to develop effective strategies for dealing with them. Unfortunately, there has been a tendency among some (not all) to make a religion out of psychology, and to place all hopes for human happiness in achieving psychological equilibrium through programs of therapy or popular self-help books.

Religion, in this mistaken view, is a primitive effort to achieve what psychology can now offer scientifically and precisely: namely, human fulfillment. But, just as a correct diagnosis of a physical ailment cannot by itself cure, so also psychology, while helping us understand ourselves, does not of itself possess the power to heal. Healing never follows automatically from any program or pill. Healing of the human spirit is a great mystery, and requires a medicine only God possesses.

The Church's conviction of faith is that, unless we place God at the center of our lives, follow his ways, and grow in our relationship with him, our lives will always be off-balance, troubled, and incomplete.

At the other extreme are persons who shirk psychological aids to growth under the banner of "God alone". But God is not glorified in our remaining broken, half-persons.

The contemplative Carmelite nun Ruth Burrows told of her lifetime struggle with depression, self-doubt, and longing to be loved, until she eventually found a way to combine two things that she once considered incompatible: using her talent for leadership and surrendering entirely to God.

Burrow's central message is encouragement to learn, as she did, to see God at work in all aspects of life. Learn to see God working, she says, not merely in exterior events but in your own heart, in the difficulties of your temperament, and in all that you have considered outside the range of God's activity.

St. Irenaeus said "The glory of God is man fully alive." In so speaking, he was only affirming what is central to Christian faith, God's desire to give and sustain the life of his people. Jesus said, "I came that they might have life, and have it abundantly (John 10:10). Jesus offers a life richer than any we could ever otherwise have, a life so radically new that we must be born again to have it (John 3:3-8).

This new life fulfills the deepest longings of humanity. It makes what is good in human life far better and richer. It makes our lives, broken by sin, authentically human, and causes us to share in God's life as well.

In order for us to overcome the effects of sin and enjoy the life God offers, effort is required on our part to achieve psychological integration and personal maturity. To reach the divine, we must attend to human nature.

Christians need not be afraid or suspicious of human nature, emotions, or the ambiguity and struggles of human development. God works through every aspect of our life, even those we may have been taught to see as obstacles to God: our sins and failures. This does not mean that everything automatically deepens our relationship to God, but everything could and can deepen it, once we understand that God speaks to us through all our experiences.

God's grace works not apart from human nature, but builds on it. Maturity and happiness go together.

+Bishop Raymundo J. Peña

last updated 09-Jun-2010 10:44 sitemap