You are not alone!

You are not alone!
In pursuit of the truth – www.cinopsbegoneblogspot.com - Sunday, February 12, 2012

For believers and non-believers, Pope Benedict XVI has a beloved love letter written in 1986.*

Men are created in the image and likeness of God (cf.Gen1:26-27). Heaven and earth meet in them. In them God enters into his creation; they are in a direct relationship with God. The Word of God in the Old Testament applies to every individual: “I call you by name; you are mine.”

Every individual is known and is loved by God. Every individual has been willed by God. The source of the deeper and greater unity among men lies in the fact that all of us, every individual person, fulfill the one same purpose of God, issue from the same creative idea of God. That is what the Bible tells us. Whoever lays violent hands upon a man lays violent hands upon God’s own possession (cf. Gen 9:5-6).

Human life is under the special protection of God because each person – however lowly or exalted, however sick and suffering, however useless or impotent, “whether born or unborn”, however fatally ill or abounding in health – because each person bears in himself the breadth of God, each one is in the image of God. This is the deepest source of the inviolability of human dignity, and it is ultimately this that is the foundation of every civilization.

Where man is no longer believed to be under God’s protection, to have God’s breadth in him, then people begin to asses him from a “utilitarian point of view.” The there appears the barbarity that tramples on human dignity. And vice versa: where it clear that a man is in direct relationship to God, then the spiritual and moral spheres are plainly in evidence.

In the New Testament, Christ is called the second Adam, the last Adam; he is called the image of God (e.g. Cor 15:44-48; Col 1:15). That means that it is only in him that we have the full answer to the question: What is a human being? Only in him does the deepest meaning of this prototype become apparent. He is the last man, and creation is, at it were, a preview for him.

Hence we can say: a human being is a being that can become the brother or sister of Jesus Christ. Even while we are preoccupied with the mystery of creation, the mystery of the grain of wheat that must die in order to truly to rise, truly to be raised up, to be truly itself (cf. Jn 12:24). Man cannot be understood solely in terms of heredity or of that isolated fragment that we call present.

Each person is oriented towards the future; only the future will reveal what that person really is (cxf.1 Jn. 3:2). “We must always look upon other men as persons with whom we shall one day share God’s joy.” We must see them as persons with whom we are called to be members of the body of Christ, with whom we shall one day sit at the table of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, at the table of Jesus Christ, as persons to be our brothers or sisters, and to be, with us, the brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ, children of God.

*Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Co-Workers of the Truth, Meditations Daily, Feb. 6th.