As I shared with you in the last issue of this article, Maximus the Confessor espouses detachment as a means of achieving spiritual liberation which opens a person up to a divinizing relationship with God. Detachment is effective only when coupled, however, with an active doing of good, the practice of virtues. Love is really the bedrock of the edifice of divinizing virtues. Humans, Maximus states, are called to practice the virtues, particularly love – “one and the same universal: owed to God and attaching human beings to one another”. While passions and vices fracture the unity of human nature, love and other virtues restore being and, thus, prove salvific. Maximus says

Nothing is either so fitting for justification or so apt for divinization as mercy offered with pleasure and joy from the soul to those who stand in need.

Christ Himself walked the path of suffering and forbearance. Hence, the one who can do good and who does it is truly God by grace and participation. To partake of the virtues is to partake of God Himself, who is the most perfect embodiment of them all.

When you think about this you realize that God revealed to us how to live as human beings by coming Himself in the Person of Jesus to show us how to live.

For Maximus, the work of salvation needs to be deliberately internalized – in imitation of Christ – by every human being; this divinizing process takes place within the context of the Church. We can understand Maximus to be saying that the union that begins in this life, will be consummated in the age to come, after the resurrection of the dead. Maximus   further states: Holy Church bears the imprint and image of God since it has the same activity as he does by imitation and in figure. Thus for Maximus liturgy reflects the exalted moments of divinization which belong to future life, offering a preview of the longed-for beatitude, here and now.

So the Liturgy can and must become for us a moment of insight with regard to how we must live. If indeed we, like Jesus, offer our very life back to God in thanksgiving for the gift of life, we will change the way we think about life and will, indeed, embrace the way of living that Jesus modeled for us. His way of living, as you know, was one of unconditional love for all others, even those who hated Him and killed Him.

Hopefully the picture is becoming clearer to all those who read the articles of this Bulletin. The meaning and purpose of life is to come into deeper union with God. This is accomplished by making every attempt to consciously live like Jesus and to make every attempt to unconditionally love others and self. The way of living that Jesus showed us IS God’s way.