The call to holiness is, as I have been trying to articulate, is call to real and true union with God. And, as I have tried to suggest, this must be an unending process since God is infinite. We believe that this union is realized by the working of the Holy Spirit, but until it is reached man is involved in a prolonged effort of purification – an effort of personal transformation.

This growing in our union with God is achieved by our efforts, which are reinforced and facilitated by the help of God’s Spirit, to bring our human powers of knowledge, love and behavior into ever greater unity with the knowledge, love and behavior that Jesus manifested.

Jesus is our model. The call to holiness is a call to genuinely try to imitate Him. This requires, as one might guess, an active effort to increase our knowledge of how Jesus thought and lived.

Knowing that human behavior is driven by human thinking, we discover how Jesus behaved by how He thought. His thinking is clearly expressed in His teachings. Perhaps the one summary teaching that best describes his thinking and, therefore, His behavior is that which has become known as the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you! This simple statement sums up the way that Jesus lived. It states clearly that you don’t base how you treat others on how they treat you. It implies quite clearly that everything we do is UNCONDITIONAL. We love, forgive and treat others unconditionally, that is we don’t treat others on the basis of how they treat us. Living this way is truly transformational – it changes us in the deepest and profoundest manner.

So the call to holiness is the call to live in a manner that is based on our beliefs and not on how others treat us!