THE SPIRITUAL LIFE

By Brother Joseph of Mary,

This is our fifth article in this series on the spiritual life. This article will attempt to inform and provide a basis for our reason to pursue the divine life in man. Why seek the spiritual life? Why serve God? Why have union with God? Why is it that a soul cannot be a comfortable bystander in the ever acting out of the absolute enmity between God and Satan? The reason has to do with our being and it’s nature and purpose. God is our Father. We are His children. We are like acorns destined for so much more than what we are. We are called to be oak trees. Your end is happiness, you obtain happiness from possessing truth and goodness, the greater the truth and goodness you possess the greater your happiness. God is the greatest good you can possess. You possess Him essentially and completely by doing His will perfectly. The mystics tend to this type of essential possession through mystical marriage. You can possess God many ways that are less than your potential. The reason we avoid evil and seek the good and the true is that is it our destiny. It is the reason we exist. That is the heart of truth in why we study and pursue the spiritual life. To seek God is to seek our happiness and so much more.

Our happiness depends upon our union with God. The exemplar we are patterned on is God. We are His image. God desires to perfect that image and dilate it. Why is this so? Simply put, God likes Himself. He should, since he is Goodness, Truth, Beauty and also Life and Intelligibility itself. God is not just good or possesses good like one can possess a pencil. God is Goodness and Life itself. Where God dwells there is goodness, there is life and all else that comes with His presence. God takes joy in expanding His presence in souls because God takes joy in Himself. This is not a conceited joy but the truth that God recognizes the intelligibility of expanding and glorifying all that He is and all that we can come to be, including our participation in His happiness.

If you want happiness, seek and possess God. If you do not know how to: practice virtue. Happiness is a byproduct of both virtue and the possession of your good and end. The ultimate, greatest good and end, is God. Riches, pleasures and honors are transitory goods that will never slake your thirst. You were made for the uncreated God. The above is a snapshot from the discussion by Aquinas on Man’s Last End, which end is full and complete happiness through a union with God that allows for the perpetual beatific vision. (Aquinas, 1 st pt 2 nd pt QQ1-5).

You were made to know, love and serve God. That service is not evil but good. Serving God is an operation. God is happy essentially and by operation. God wants you to serve Him by participating in this operation of happiness. Satan has perverted this outlook on service. We consider service demeaning, servile and diminishing our freedom. Consider how subordination to truth is never diminishing to our freedom. God is all-powerful, all knowing, all things. If so, then God can will me to hate Him and also will Himself out of existence – or so the evil one will tempt an argument to be made. Certainly if God cannot will us to hate Him or will Himself out of existence, then God is less that what He purports to be and His perfections are diminished by at least an extent that God cannot do these things, or so it appears at first blush.

The power and perfection of God must never be considered from solely a human standpoint as we understand power and perfection. We say that power is the ability to do all things good or evil, not so with God. God is all-powerful and also perfectly intelligible and would never engage in an unintelligible act. For God to will us to hate Him, or will Himself out of existence is such an unintelligible act and a step away from perfection and power. For the perfect do not act contrary to their nature and God’s nature calls for God “to be”. God told this to Moses when He self-revealed His name as “I AM”, indicating a being that ever exists. The Bible also tells us that when Man ate of the fruit of the tree that gave him knowledge of good, and now for the first time, the knowledge of evil, Man did not become as he hoped to be, which was like God, instead Man did take his first step away from perfect paradise and union with God. Here in the story of Genesis is an example of what effect the perversion of truth and right reasoning can perpetrate on the entire race of mankind. The remedy is Christ, particularly following His example of perfectly doing the will of His Father. Christ said His food was doing that will.