Choosing the best for ourselves

Baptism inaugurates us into the life of Christ, and the other sacraments increase that life in us. We are meant to grow daily in this dimension of Christ-union. In the process, many seeds in us have to be relinquished and let fall into the good soil of his love if we are to bear those fruits of his Spirit for which we were made. We have to invite and submit to change.  We have to agree to the pain of renouncing one good in order to embrace a higher one. Constantly we have to be dying on one level in order to be reborn and renewed on another. - Barbara Dent, My Only Friend Is Darkness

In the process of discovering who we are, which is an important journey for us, we often lose sight of the more important quest: who is Christ, who are we in him, and how are we to come to the fullness of who we might become in him? Our society teaches us to embrace - even to indulge - parts of ourselves that we should really let go of. We grab that one snippet of Polonius' advice to Laertes, "To thine own self be true," and apply it to mean that the greatest betrayal we can commit is to not be the person we've decided we are.

A greater one is to not become the person we might be because we are unwilling to understand ourselves critically in the light of God's love and calling for us. Yes, "God loves me just as I am," it's true. Yet we often apply that to mean that we should embrace and celebrate even parts of ourselves that are not God's will for our lives. These are seeds which God would have us discover about ourselves specifically so that we might let them fall to the ground and die so that we might become the sacred saints he is calling each of us to be.

And this is especially challenging when the part of ourself that should die appears to us to be a good or desirable thing. A driven professional can accomplish great things in the world of commerce and greatly aid the fiscal means of a broad spectrum of her coworkers, yet eventually discover that there is another, humbler work to which she is truly called. An athlete with freakish physical talents works relentlessly to reach the pinnacle of his sport, yet discovers along the way that his fame and glory will fade to painful, aimless nostalgia unless they are woven into the fabric of the greater tapestry of his entire life. In our day, it has become commonplace for those prone to a vast array of sexual expressions to attribute their choices to what they consider a nobler motivation than others who have chosen the exact same set of actions for their own reasons.

My greatest admiration is for those who struggle against a personal weakness that others would advise them to embrace for the sake of being true to themselves. I've recently read a couple of articles by men who are trying to reconcile their same-sex attraction with their calling to personal holiness. The process of letting go of part of ourselves - especially a part that we consider a treasured gift - so that we might become more fully the beloved son or daughter which God wants us to become for our own greater good always hurts. And it can feel impossible for us, especially when we are struggling to believe that God loves us so unfathomably, that God does indeed know better than we do what is best for us, that God has made no secret of what that is, and that God does not in fact wish to punish us for who we are but really desires us to become all that we cannot become if we embrace that which is contrary to God's will for us. We do not trust in God's love for us, though. When we believe in God, we mistake him for being too much like us in the selfish way that we love, when there is no selfishness in God's nature whatsoever.

Indeed, God gave up God's very self in order to become what we needed to become fully our self.

So when we discover some gift that seems precious about ourselves, the first question we should ask is how we can offer this precious gift to God in a way that leads to our sanctification, our continued transformation in him, rather than wrapping our arms tightly around it in a refusal to submit it to God's will.