Call to Holiness
What is holiness?
There are two aspects of holiness. The first consists in separation from sin and those things that lead to sin, and the second consists in union with the Will of God. Holiness in human beings and angels is due to the gift of God known as Sanctifying Grace. This gift is a quality given to the soul that elevates the soul above its natural state so that the person has a share in the Life of God. “Sanctifying grace is an habitual gift, a stable and supernatural disposition that perfects the soul itself to enable it to live with God, to act by his love.” CCC 2000. [(A)Jn. 15:4-5 “Remain in me, as I remain in you. Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing.”; (B)Jn. 17:21-23 “that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me. And I have given them the glory you gave me, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be brought to perfection as one, that the world may know that you sent me, and that you loved them even as you loved me.”; (C)Fr. Hardon’s Catholic Dictionary, (D)CCC 1996-2005].
Why should I want to be holy?
Human beings were created to be united to God. The very reason why people exist is to be united with God forever in Heaven. The first reason I should wish to be holy is that God has called me to be holy; secondly, sin is degrading to the human person and makes any kind of relationship, especially marriage, difficult if not impossible; and third, holiness is the way to perfect fulfillment and eternal happiness. “[T]he desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for: ‘The dignity of man rests above all on the fact that he is called to communion with God. This invitation to converse with God is addressed to man as soon as he comes into being. For if man exists it is because God has created him through love, and through love continues to hold him in existence. He cannot live fully according to truth unless he freely acknowledges that love and entrusts himself to his creator.’” CCC 27, quoting GS 19. Holiness means that we know, love, and serve God here to be happy forever in Heaven. A large part of loving and serving Him is to love the people He loves. [(A) CCC 27-30; (B) CCC 355-368; LG 5]
What does holiness have to do with happiness?
Creation is God sharing His own Perfections and Goodness, in fact, creating creatures with which He is able to share His Goodness and Happiness. “The glory of God consists in the realization of this manifestation and communication of his goodness, for which the world was created.” CCC 294. God shared His Goodness by the very act of creating, by which He made things good. “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.” (Genesis 1:31) He thus created all things out of His Divine Love, “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16) – He created you because He loves you, His love is what created you in the first place. “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us”. (1 John 4:10) His Love not only allows us to love, but it causes us to exist. And this Love pulls us through our lives to friendship and union with Him in Heaven. “Heaven is the communion with Perfect Life, Perfect Truth, and Perfect Love: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.” (Fulteen Sheen, Three to Get Married) Holiness is uniting oneself deliberately to God and what He wishes for us, and removing from our lives those things that hurt us and other people, that is, sin and evil. Since we were made for God, the Greatest of All Things, nothing else is good enough, nothing else can satisfy us.
To Glorify God is not simply something outside the creature, then, as though it were something only something superadded as an afterthought. To Glorify God is to Manifest Him, it is to reflect Him, to share His Goodness. But this is not a share in the way that a statue shares in the glory of the king or hero it represents. To share God’s Life is to be alive, to share His Goodness is to be good, to share His Beatitude is to be happy. “The heavens are telling the glory of God…There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard, yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.” (Psalm 19:1,3)
Why is holiness difficult?
Holiness is difficult because of Original Sin. Adam had been given a special role in the history of mankind. God had decided to let man have a real share in his work, and had decided to give the rest of mankind the supernatural and preternatural gifts through Adam. His children are not only made in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26), but they are also in the image and likeness of Adam. “When Adam had lived a hundred and thirty years, he became father of a son in his own likeness, after his image”. (Genesis 5:3). Since Adam had thrown the gifts away, he could not pass them on to us. Instead, he passed on the guilt and effects of original sin. God had promised Adam the role of Head of the human race. He did not change His mind when Adam failed, “the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.” (Romans 11:29) Had Adam remained in God’s friendship, we would have received this grace and friendship by the very fact that we were the sons and daughters of Adam. Instead, we received a wounded nature. Every person is still meant for Heaven, but cannot reach it on his own.
Why is being holy the most loving thing I can do?
God did not deem it enough to give us good things, or even ourselves, but God has given mankind the Greatest of all things, Himself. But He has also made us to love one another, to love and to be loved, and thus be a living image of His Triune Life. “For this is the message which you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another…Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and truth.” (1 John 3:11,18) He has made us reliant on each other.
By loving God and by becoming holy, I open up my own heart to love others. This allows for a deeper union in marriage, and more perfect love and service for the other, and truly helping the other reach their own holiness and happiness. On the contrary, refusing to love God means to take the other person as something good only for a period of time, refusing to love them for eternity, but only for a few years. It means that I become less lovable, and less able to love. God wishes us to help Him make the other person holy, and therefore, happy.
This is also especially important for the raising of children, to guide young souls to be happy with God forever in Heaven.
What is the relationship of time and eternity, heaven and earth?
God made the material universe for the human race. He created for man, and created generously. But He did more. He wished that the human race would truly be His children, truly be His friends. He created the universe, but deliberately left it unfinished. He left the completion of the universe to humanity.
God did not need our help, but He chose to have it. He made us able to help Him, able to make the world more beautiful, better able to reflect Him and manifest His Glory. In the language of the Bible, God told man to “fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion” over it (Genesis 1:28), to “till and keep” (Genesis 2:15) His creation. Humanity was given the power not only to serve God, not only to work as a servant, directed and subdued by His Tremendous Power, but to approve His Plan, and to approve it so strongly that it becomes humanity’s own plan as well. “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends”. (John 15:15)
When God adopts us as His children by His Sanctifying Grace, this is more than a metaphor or maudlin language. A child receives life from the father, and becomes like the father, doing what his father does. God made humanity to help Him with His Plan. This tilling and keeping of the rest of creation, working for the ever greater manifestation of God’s Glory, is to do what God has done, albeit in a limited way. God cares for us enough to not simply pretend to accept our will, our help, and our work, but He has planned for us to work with Him. Our work, and our aid to the rest of His children, He has allowed to be profound and real. Married life is more than two human beings living together, it is a sharing in the work of God.
How does being holy help my marriage?
The fact that we are in God’s image, meant for a relationship of love with others, has a profound effect on our understanding of what it means to be a human being. “God inscribed on the humanity of man and woman the vocation, and thus the capacity and responsibility, of love and communion. Love is therefore the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being. (Familiaris Consortio, 11) ” When God created the universe, He called it out of nonexistence by an act of His Will. By this call He shared His own Goodness. This call not only creates man, but leads him on and urges him to love. The deepest desire of the human heart is to love and to be loved in return. “The reversal of pride is the self-abasement of God…His Way of being God challenges our way of being human” (Fr. Nicholas Buttet, quoting Benedict XVI, in Adoratio, 117).
If God is the greatest of all things, and if we truly love someone, we will not be satisfied in simply in giving them gifts, letters, or even ourselves: we will seek to help them reach God. In one’s married life, the marriage can’t simply be inward focused, but an aid to the greatest Good possible, to the One that never fades, or lessens, or ends.
Marriage when founded in the love of God is meant to strive to be without the things that harm each other: pride, selfishness, or thought of using the other. Established in grace and friendship with God they couple helps perfect the other, in human love aided by supernatural grace. It becomes a love for each other, and most especially for the greatest of reasons, that is, for God’s Sake and His Glory and not just for small reasons, like a shared love of cartoons. Bl. John Paul II described marriage as “the primordial sacrament”, by which Adam and Eve revealed the Divine to each other in and through their physical human natures. (ToB, 6 Oct. 1982) Their marriage – and all human marriages – “continue the work of creation, but at the same time it expresses the Creator’s salvific initiative” (ibid), it points to Life with God in Heaven.
Vocation
What is a vocation?
A vocation is a path and call to holiness. It is the place where God asks us to work and help each other in a particular state in life. God thinks about each person individually and loves them as individuals. He therefore asks them to act as individuals, and calls them to a particular place in His Church. Since holiness is the union of the Will of God and the will of man, by entering joyfully into one’s vocation, one becomes holy, enters into the path of holiness.
A vocation is not simply entered into because of human emotion, or even human love, but becomes an act of worship for God. By it we respond to His plan for us. Since He Created us, and since following His Will leads to Happiness, our vocation leads to our ultimate happiness in Heaven, and the greatest good for those around us, even if it is a struggle on earth.
Why does God give each person different vocations?
God could have made everything exactly the same. But He didn’t. God is so Good, so wonderful, that no created thing can perfectly receive all that He Is, all of His “Good News”. He decided, therefore, to let each thing have a particular and special share in Himself, to receive its own piece of His Goodness. The whole universe together can share in His Goodness, can Glorify Him, far better than any individual thing on its own. Each thing, and this is especially true of each individual human person, has a unique place in His Plan. This unique place is one that no one else can fill, because they were given a unique gift, a unique sharing in Himself.
Why should I follow my vocation?
CCC 1700, “The dignity of the human person is rooted in his creation in the image and likeness of God (article 1); it is fulfilled in his vocation to divine beatitude (article 2). It is essential to a human being freely to direct himself to this fulfillment (article 3). By his deliberate actions (article 4), the human person does, or does not, conform to the good promised by God and attested by moral conscience (article 5). Human beings make their own contribution to their interior growth; they make their whole sentient and spiritual lives into means of this growth (article 6). With the help of grace they grow in virtue (article 7), avoid sin, and if they sin they entrust themselves as did the prodigal son to the mercy of our Father in heaven (article 8). In this way they attain to the perfection of charity.”
Our happiness, then, is a gift from God. God made us, and made us to be happy. We proclaim His greatness by our very existence. This realization should banish the least suspicion of creation as a selfish act, because to be directed to His Glory is to be directed to greatness, happiness, and goodness. To follow our vocation is to learn to become great.
Vocation to Marriage (call from God)
Is marriage a vocation?
Marriage is a vocation, a call given by God and a path to become more and more like Him. In it, a man receives one woman from God who becomes unique to him. She becomes his wife and his task to bring her to holiness and to God, likewise a woman receives one man from God who becomes unique to her. He becomes her husband and her task to bring to holiness and to God. Together they have the task of receiving lovingly the family God wishes to entrust to them – to help Him in the creation of new persons destined to glorify God for all eternity, to build up His Church in the souls of those around them, and as a family to help make the world a better and more beautiful place.
The matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life, is by its nature ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring; this covenant between baptized persons has been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament. CCC 1601.
What is essential for the vocation to marriage?
It is between one man and one woman; it is a partnership; it is a partnership of the whole of life, meaning lasting as long as both are alive, exclusive, and encompassing a union in both soul and body. It is open to new life, and to the care of the children resulting from their mutual love, and recognizes that the Sacramental aspect gives new obligations as well as new glories to the marriage.
What is the goal of the vocation to marriage?
In the end, marriage is about Heaven. It is helping the other reach Heaven and helping their children reach Heaven. This is the path by which a married person becomes holy, able to love better and to love. God gave it for the good of the spouses and for new human life to come into the world in a cradle of love.
Why do I need to prepare for my vocation to marriage?
Marriage is a great good and a serious endeavor, we need to put the necessary time and effort to get ready for it. Any good thing deserves effort and care – in matrimony the couple changes the state of their life. They become a couple, literally “one flesh”
As beautiful as marriage is, it is also difficult. Often this is due to own weaknesses. Marriage is a school of sanctity, where we learn how to become less selfish and self-serving. The more of our sins and failures we expose and begin to fight against, the easier it will be to be united in holy love.
The culture around us makes marriage many times more difficult because it doesn’t see marriage as a life-long commitment, as unique and unbreakable. It doesn’t recognize the connection of marriage and holiness, nor even between marriage and children. Since the culture has been teaching us, and training us in unhealthy ways, we need to prepare for marriage in good and holy ways.
How do I prepare for my vocation to marriage?
This period of preparation is a time for study, growth in virtue, and a real striving for holiness. It is a period of conversion and purification from sin. Two essential elements are prayer and the worthy reception of the Sacraments – undertaken as deliberate preparation for a lifetime of marriage.
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