I ended this article in the last Bulletin with the statement that it is my belief that the Call to Holiness is truly a call to find our true self. I shared that Christians have for ages misinterpreted the words of Jesus, thinking that He suggested that we must never express who we really are, our true selves.

How sad for us and for the world. It is sad for us because we never find out who we are and because we think Jesus asked us not to, and so we mistakenly think that by living this way we are the essence of Gospel-people. And it is sad for the world, because the world looks at us and says (in a certain sense, rightfully so), “If that is what it means to live as a Christian, I don’t want it”! For all they see are people who do not know who they are and therefore cannot be real people or make a significant contribution to life. They see people who look as if they were the living dead both emotionally and spiritually, and who are proclaiming that the Gospel has done this to them. Indeed God only wants us to find our true self, the self He chose to create.

Christians who live with the notion that God doesn’t want us to find our true selves, cannot have much energy for service or for spreading the Good News, because most of their energy is unavailable to them. For the essence of life itself, spiritual life, abides in our new selves, which God gives in Baptism. And so, if we are not in touch with our true selves. We are not in touch with the principle of life within us. Such Christians have only enough psychic and spiritual energy then to make their way through each day. They think that their energy is being sapped by the difficulty of living their faith, but the truth is that they have little energy because they are not living according to the totality of the faith that Jesus taught.

I think even good people, those who desire to have a relationship with God, can be zapped of their energy if they think that God expects them to adhere to a whole bunch of rules and is only waiting to catch them doing something wrong.                 What do you think?