What is it that we need and cannot seem to find it?

What Is it that we need and cannot seem to find it? 

Placing the following attributes of life in a position of easily grasping are there for the desire of understanding God’s gifts on his level of sharing his divinity.  First, we might ask, “how can we finite mortals ever share God’s divinity?”  To answer that the cloud of doubt must be removed through faith.  We find faith through belief in the trials that Christ endured when he did not need them.

The sought after attribute of faith is always on the minds of anyone who has allowed the pressures of this life to become a ruling factor that turns us away from God’s presence.  Faith cannot be orchestrated within us if we refuse to believe in its power to remove the mist of doubt that wants to corrupt that very belief.  

How then can we develop this attribute of faith if everything we see or hear attacks our sense of negative thinking vs positive actions?  If Christ, in his human nature, would have allowed the barrage of disbelievers’ negative approach to his ministry, we would not have a fulfillment of God's forgiveness.  We cannot forget that the two natures of Jesus were not at odds with each other.  The CCC is very clear on this where it states;  Because “human nature was assumed, not absorbed,” in the mysterious union of the Incarnation, the Church was led over the course of centuries to confess the full reality of Christ’s human soul, with its operations of intellect and will, and of his human body.  In parallel fashion, she had to recall on each occasion that Christ’s human nature belongs, as his own, to the divine person of the Son of God, who assumed it.  Everything that Christ is and does in this nature derives from “one of the Trinity.”  The Son of God therefore communicates to his humanity his own personal mode of existence in the Trinity.  In his soul as in his body, Christ thus expresses humanly the divine ways of the Trinity:  (CCC 470)  The Son of God…worked with human hands:  He thought with a human mind.  He acted with a human will, and with a human heart he loved.  Born of the Virgin Mary, he has truly been made one of us, like to us in all things except sin.   (footnote to 470).  

When the grace of God becomes a reality, even though we may not feel it, we must at least recognize it wouldn’t be there without the faith we just experienced.  Grace is the only attribute that will get us into heaven, the one and most perfect entity that we cannot earn, bargain with God about it, and certainly will never find any possible assent to its presence unless God accepts our faith in him.  

Grace is first and foremost the gift of the Spirit Who justifies and sanctifies us,  But grace also includes the gifts that the Spirit grants us to associate us with his work, to enable us to collaborate in the salvation of others and in the growth of the Body of Christ, the Church.  There are sacramental graces, gifts proper to the different sacraments,  There are furthermore special graces also called charisms after the Greek term used by St. Paul and meaning “favor,” “gratuitous gift,” “benefit.”  Whatever their character - sometimes it is extraordinary, such as the gift of miracles or of tongues - charisms are oriented toward sanctifying grace and are intended for the common good of the Church.  They are at the service of charity which builds up the Church.”  (CCC 2003). 

Finally, we learn Truth when the most essential attribute is found in personal suffering.  Most people will not adhere to this unwanted part of what we may need to achieve the wanted essence of spiritual life.  However, in spite of God’s grace that is needed to enter heaven, the one essential image before us to find heaven’s gateway is the Cross.  Even if we can see our cross ahead of us, without personal suffering we will never be able to grab hold of it.

Our redemption that came through Christ on the Cross he needed to endure the personal suffering that was the prime path to find the tree that he was nailed to, willingly.  

Now, however, “we walk by faith, not by sight:”  we perceive God as “in a mirror, dimly” and only “in part.”  Even though enlightened by him in whom it believes, faith is often lived in darkness and can be put to the test.  The world we live in often seems very far from the one promised us by faith.  Our experiences of evil and suffering, injustice, and death, seem to contradict the Good News;  they can shake our faith and become a temptation against it.  (CCC 164).

Union with the passion of Christ.  By the grace of this sacrament the sick person receives the strength and the gift of uniting himself more closely to Christ’s Passion in a certain way he is consecrated to bear fruit by configuration to the Savior’s redemptive Passion.  Suffering, a consequence of original sin, acquires a new meaning; it becomes a participation in the saving work of Jesus.  (CCC 1521).  

Finding the answer to what we need is found in Faith, Grace, and Personal Suffering!

Ralph B. Hathaway