The below article is a reflection from a homily on the Gospels by Saint Gregory the Great Pope (Hom. 14, 3-6: PL 76, 1129-1130)
What beautiful words to remind us that we are not pure spirits, but that we are human beings; and, as human beings, we must seek the Lord through and in our humanity. This is why we hear in this work of Saint Gregory the great, “I assure you that it is not by faith that you will come to know him, but by love…” Look at the life of Jesus to see what love is. It is His life that mingles together human love with divine love: and just as Christ has permanently attached his divinity to our humanity, so too, is our pursuit of Him is divine love mingled with our humanity.
The act of becoming a saint is not the diminishing of humanity, but its fulfillment. We come to the realization that to love God properly means we must first love Him as human beings can love. If we want to love God perfectly, then we need to approach Him with a whole heart of human love, so that we can give Him that heart, and he can imbue His divine love into it and so give it back to us.
It is a great temptation to pursue Christ by denying our humanity. Brothers and sisters, to deny the flesh is not to deny our humanity (which through Christ has become divine), to deny the flesh is the sanctification of our humanity. Denying the flesh is destroying in our hearts the poisonous perversion of sin, which strips us of both our humanity and our divinity.
Therefore, the whole gamut of human love must be embraced, and the oriented to God. “Let us stir up our hearts, rekindle, our faith, and long eagerly, for what heaven has in store for us. To love thus is to be already on our way.” Furthermore, “No matter what obstacles we encounter, we must not allow them to turn us aside from the joy of that heavenly feast.”
In these words, we see that we must crown ourselves in agape, that our whole being may be led by God’s divine person. Our emotions, our wants, our desires, our longings, our laughter are all important parts of love. We must embrace them all and turn them to the face of God in agape. When we do this, we will see the purpose and end of our creation, which is for our whole personage to enter into the Trinity's eternal exchange of love.
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