As I related several weeks ago, I believe that a truly vibrant parish is one wherein the majority of regular members understand that they are called to holiness and find ways to support one another in that pursuit. So during the last several issues of the Bulletin I have been attempting to flesh out what I understand about our call to holiness. I truly believe that the call to holiness is a call to recognize God’s image in us and to understand that our work during this lifetime is to develop His likeness. The only way that we can develop His likeness is to imitate Jesus. Jesus was and IS the image and likeness of God.

So we have a concrete example in the person of Jesus what it means to be in God’s likeness. When a person is like God, he is a person who demonstrates behaviors that reflect God’s attitudes about humanity and creation. Perhaps the most important attitude that is truly of God is the attitude of unconditional love for others regardless of how they treat you. We see this exemplified over and over again in the life of Jesus.  He refused to hate or reject anyone, regardless of how they treated Him.

This is perhaps the most difficult godlike attitude to develop for most humans. Our natural instinct seems to direct us to treat others the same way that they treat us. This is not godlike!

Perhaps the best way to begin to develop an ability to unconditionally love others is to first decide that you will not judge others and always presume the positive intent of others.

While this may seem easy at first blush, I suspect this is more difficult than most think and probably is the underlying cause why we humans find it so difficult to unconditionally love others. When and if we judge others to be wrong, sinful, not like us, or stupid, we will find it difficult to love them. Sometimes we even find ourselves judging others because of what friends or other people in our society say about them (Its similar to the phenomenon of bullying we see happening in our schools. Kids convince one another that a certain student should be judged and harassed and the social pressure of wanting to be a part of the group, seduces even good students to engage in bullying).

For people to truly develop the likeness of God, they must be strong in their convictions about how God wants them to live as humans and courageous to stand, at times, alone in the crowd. Jesus did it and history tells us His followers imitated Him, even unto death!