The Gospel of the Lord.
Praise be to the Lord Jesus Christ.
Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
In our series on Franciscan spirituality, we're continuing today our talks on the human person.
Last time we spoke of the Blessed Trinity and the eternal selfless giving and receiving between the three divine persons.
Today we'll try to see how this relates to us and what we called the other day our relative subsistence.
The human person is created in God's image and likeness, is gifted with subsistence, indivisibility, and incommunicability, the autonomous source of our actions.
And, the human person is relative by nature, meaning that we have a participated subsistence that's communicated to us by God continually and in every instance of our lives.
Even though in himself man is complete, total and inviolable, he has a necessary and actual relation with the being of God, who's always giving of himself without ever becoming impoverished.
And, the precise point in which the human person inserts himself and communicates with God, the divine source of his life and his subsistence is certainly interior.
It's in the spirit, which is the vital principle of our very being.
However, since man is the meeting point between the world of matter and the world of the spirit from his interior world, man opens up to communicate with both the spiritual world and the material world.
He communicates with the material world in order to tame it, to have dominion over it and spiritualize it too.
He communicates with the pure spirit, who is God, in order to subsist and grow in his own being, to perfect himself essentially.
Spiritual subsistence doesn't close man off in himself, it opens him to God, and God interiorly sustains him, as it were.
So man is joined to the material world, but he's not submersed in it.
He can raise his voice to God, unchaining himself from the passions of the material world that tie him down, and launch himself out in his spirit towards the infinite.
In his relations with God, the human person finds his consistency.
His pole is the blessed Trinity.
The likeness with God and intimacy with him are the measure of our perfection, the perfection of the human person.
Our activity, therefore, is based on an intrinsic and perennial receiving and giving, in which our relations with God consist.
We receive from the Trinity all that we are, our existence, the elevation to grace, our sanctification, but our relations are through the Word incarnate.
As people, we are created according to his image, the image of Jesus Christ.
And the dominant motive of all the manifestations of Jesus is the gift of himself.
Why does he manifest himself?
To give himself, which is actuated in his life.
It's revealed in his teaching and in his miracles.
It becomes bloody on the cross, and reaches the greatest possible extreme, actually, in the Holy Eucharist.
He gives himself completely to the Father, and he gives himself to us.
As man, he gives himself to the Father as a perfect holocaust.
As God, he gives himself to us through his humanity.
But it's always the person of the Word that gives himself completely, along with the humanity that he's assumed.
So if the human person has received anything, then they, then we, must freely give everything, imitating Jesus.
The highest expression of our human activity, of ourselves, really is love, charity.
The giving of self to the other, with a capital O, giving ourself to God by means of Jesus.
Father Ciccarelli, in his Franciscan spirituality book, says that, at the root, or at the heart of every person, there's an irrepressible force of expansion, a mysterious need to give ourselves to someone with a capital S.
Someone who's similar to us, but a lot greater than us.
There's a need to give ourselves to the absolute, to the most perfect being.
It's an invitation from a personal God.
God calls, and we are called to respond to that call.
God calls, giving himself to us, we must respond by giving ourselves to him, and to our brothers and sisters, for love of him.
In the gift of ourselves to God, we fully conquer our liberty.
We enrich our being.
We cross the frontier of our limited ego, and we're introduced into the world of eternal love.
In the gift of self to the family, to our country, to our neighbor, man responds to the call of God, who makes him his collaborator in time.
And it is a social calling in that respect.
It's a double aspect of a single donation, which is really realized vertically towards God, and horizontally towards others, towards our neighbor.
No one can truly find themselves unless they truly give themselves to Christ and to their neighbor for the love of Christ.
Let's ask Our Lady today for the grace to do precisely that.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.