RCIA at Mother CabriniJ+M+J
To:RCIA participants
Subject: Summary of Chapter 1 of Father McBride’s Invitation: The Search for God, Self and Church.
Chapter 1: The Human Longing for God
“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you” (St. Augustine, Confessions, 1,1).
Introduction
God made us for Himself. He gave us, in our human nature, minds that thirst for the truth and hearts that long for absolute love. God is perfect truth and love, and so he made us to share his life forever. Only through Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, is this special destiny made possible (Jn 17:3; 1 Tm 2:3-4; Acts 4:12). Our faith journey to perfect happiness is toward the Father, through the Son, and in the Holy Spirit (Ps 105:3).
A. The desire for God is written on the human heart, because man is created by God for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness that he never stops searching for.
B. Human history shows man to be a uniquely religious being, in that his beliefs and behavior (e.g., creeds, codes, and forms of worship, various as they are) indicate man’s search for God expressed in every culture.
C. The human person is open to God’s presence and existence. Man is unique in creation, for through his openness to truth, beauty, goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience, his longing for the infinite and for happiness, he questions himself about God’s existence. In all this he discerns signs of his spiritual soul, the “seed of eternity we bear within ourselves that cannot be reduced to the merely material,” which can have its origin only in God (CCC, 33).
Key Concepts:
The human capacity for God: Man’s nature is unique among all creation in that he is created in God’s likeness (Gen 1:27), and God both knows and loves. Man, like God, can know what is true and freely choose to love what is good. The desire of every human heart is for happiness, which can only be found in God who is perfect truth and love. We are made to find this happiness in Jesus, who reveals the Father to us and sends the Holy Spirit into our hearts (Ps 62:2). We first enter into this happiness on earth, but its fullness will come only in heaven.
God created us to share eternal happiness with him forever (Jn 15: 9,11; Jn 10:10; Phil 4:4,7). God shows us signs of his desire for our happiness through his gift of creation (Gen 1:26,28-30), his providential care for us throughout history (Mt 10:29-31; Is 41: 13), and ultimately in his supreme gift of salvation through his Son, Jesus Christ (Jn 3:16). No created good will satisfy our desire for happiness, since God made us for himself. One of the saints said that we are born with a God-shaped hole in our hearts, and no matter what else we try to fit in that hole, only God himself can fill it. (Mt 6:33; Ps 42:1,2; St. Augustine, Confessions, 1,1 see above).
Made in his likeness, God plants in our hearts a love for what is true(Jn 8:32), an attraction to what is good (Ps 33:5) and beautiful (Ps 27:4), and the capability of entering into loving relationships with our fellow human beings (Mt 25:40). Through all these avenues God touches our hearts. Jesus draws us to him by this truth, goodness, beauty and love, manifested in his Incarnation, passion and resurrection (Jn 14:9; Col 2:9).
The Divine initiative meets the human longing: Man has a capacity for God which God implanted in our nature. However, through the act of revelation and his divine plan of salvation, God calls us to the life of grace which conforms us to Christ. This calling is God’s pure gift, over and above our natural capacities, elevating us to membership in God’s family, making us new creations in Christ, sharers in the divine nature, and a dwelling place of the Holy Spirit.
God never ceases to call us to himself, to share in the eternal joy for which He created us (1 Cor 2:9). We respond to this call by going to the Father, through Christ, in the Holy Spirit. We cannot respond on our own, but need the grace of the Holy Spirit who forms us as the Father’s children in Christ. God loves all men, and each is a precious creation in God’s eyes (Is 43: 1,4). Even though we have sinned, God still loves us and offers us the gift of salvation in Christ Jesus, which if accepted frees us from our sins, restores us to God’s friendship, and truly makes us the Father’s adopted children in Christ his Son (Jn 15: 15,9; Rom 8:15). We can see that the Father’s greatest proof of love for us was in sending his Son to be our friend and redeemer (Eph 1:3,4). Because Jesus is both true God and true man, He shows us what it is to be fully human (Jn 14:6). Jesus, in showing us the Father’s love, is always close to us and always seeks to draw us closer to him(Rom 8:35, Jn 15:9). He showed us his divine love to the fullest by entering history as man on our behalf and undergoing his passion, death and resurrection (Jn 15:13).
The following answer to question 6 in the old Baltimore catechism, “Why did God make you?,” sums up this chapter nicely: “God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him for ever in heaven.”