Praise be to Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
And on this new year, we're continuing our series on Franciscan spirituality.
Today we're going to begin talking about the human person and how we as Catholics, and specifically as Franciscans, understand what it means to be a human person.
It's from the concept of the soul as being the most noble of all the forms that Franciscan thinkers arrive at the concept of person.
Our soul is the highest or greatest reality in the created visible universe.
It's a reality which surpasses the matter that our soul is immersed in, meaning our body, but at the same time our soul is a reality that transcends and hovers on the horizon of time and eternity.
Franciscan thinkers speak of two essential characteristics of the human person.
First is our intrinsic indivisibility and incommunicability.
The second is our capacity to give ourselves to other people.
With our indivisibility we belong to ourselves so you can't divide me, who I am.
With our incommunicability we cannot be reduced to someone else, meaning I can't communicate who I am to someone else.
They're them, I'm me.
Our ability to give ourselves is founded on the capacity to pour ourselves out as it were so that we're not just focused on me, myself, and I.
I can open myself to others, communicate with them, give myself to them.
We see the source of personality in the books of Exodus when personality first, we see it first and foremost it belongs to who?
It belongs to God actually.
Personality is a sign of God's very being in his highest degree of perfection.
The Lord said to Moses in Exodus 3:14, I am who I am or I am that I am.
In the New Testament the word incarnate reveals himself as a person as well in a similar vein.
Jesus says to his disciples in John 13 verse 19, he says, I tell you this now before it takes place so that when it does take place you will know literally that I am as I am.
John of Angels comments on Jesus' words saying that Jesus there is calling himself a person distinct in the Trinity and connecting his affirmation of himself to that great I am found in the book of Exodus.
Jesus is saying in that verse that he is God essentially.
And us human beings are beings with a small B because we were created by being itself with a capital B.
And in a certain way, we actually participate in the nature of God's being.
We are persons because we are works of a God who is personal, whose nature subsists in three persons.
And we participate relatively speaking in this personal being which in God is perfect and absolute.
That's the origin of our greatness essentially.
And just as a side note, as persons, our deepest desire is for love.
God too has the same desire we have.
You desire to be loved.
God desires to be loved.
Jesus desires our love more than anything.
And one day when you realize that both of you, you and the Lord have in a certain sense the same desire, that will help you to draw closer to him.
That will help you to love him more.
It will allow him to fill you more with his love as well.
So we're not saying that God as God needs us or that he's incomplete without us.
No, because he's not lacking anything, otherwise he wouldn't be God.
But through Jesus Christ, we see that God desires us to love him as he loves us.
He desires to be loved even more than we do.
He's just looking for someone to respond to his love.
He's hoping that you'll be the person to do that actually.
You desire to be loved.
God desires to be loved.
Put the two of you together, that's a recipe for true holiness actually.
So let's ask our lady for the grace to see ourselves more from God's point of view, which is a much better view of the human person than what the world offers.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.