What Kind of Person Are You?

In yesterday's reading (John 1:19-28) priests and Levites asked John, "Who are you?"  John immediately told them he was not Christ.  He said he was "the voice of one crying out in the desert, make straight the way of the Lord."  In other words, in speaking he was speaking on behalf of someone else, of God, the one who called him to prophesy.  And in today's reading (John 1:29-34), John repeats what God had told him about Christ, the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit: ". . . the one who sent me to baptize with water told me, 'On whomever you see the Spirit come down and remain, he is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.' Now I have seen and testified that he is the Son of God."

A marvelous example of a person, John the Baptist.  In all his rough simplicity John's uniqueness and "voice" as a human being emerged from another, God, speaking through him. 

Jesus himself spoke only the words of his Father.  He counted himself "sealed" by his Father in his baptism, and promised that what his Father made known to him, he in turn made known to his apostles and disciples. (John 15:15)

A person literally is a "per-sona", a speaking through.  I become a person when I speak on behalf of, give voice to, another.  That other, for Christians, is Jesus and his Father, and all they stand for: justice, mercy, forgiveness and love.  The voice that makes us persons is participation in the grace of the Holy Spirit of that Trinitarian relationship.  It is a harmony, a dancing with a divine partner, in beauty.  Grace makes beauty and helps to re-make the sinful world we live in.

Dante had a similar comprehension of his craft.  In the Purgatorio (24:522-54) he wrote (speaking of his poetry, which captured his persona): "I am one who, when love inspires me, take note and, as he dictates deep within me, so I set it forth.

The same understanding is voiced by the saints, e.g., Mother Theresa, "I am God's pencil."

How do we hear that voice and repeat it in our lives, thus becoming persons?  Adriaan T. Peperzak, in his The Quest For Meaning, at p.44, writes:

To follow Jesus does not lead one away from das Man, but purifies one from Sin, that is, from the loveless, arrogant, and idolatrous concerns that imprison individuals within themselves.  The turn of heart demanded by Christ is the acceptance of Love as the unique and overall secret of heaven and earth.  Since the very existence of the Son is the result and proof of God's absolute and complete self-giving, the Spirit in which the Father generates the Son repeats this gesture in the complete self-giving of Jesus' Passion, for which the Christians say thanks when they receive it in the eating of his body and the drinking of his blood.  The gratitude expressed in this eucharistia is translated into practice when their involvement in body, world, and history shows itself inspired by the same Spirit through a self-giving equally complete insofar as their deaths reveal in retrospect how their entire lives have been lived in love.

Turning away from the idols -- that is, the divinized powers of Money, Fame, Knowledge, Pleasure, or Autarchy -- presupposes the acceptance of an infinite desire that is met by the love revealed in Jesus Christ and the saints.  Conversion to Christ is therefore unconditional receptivity, acceptance, and recognition of the most incredible, yet most desirable, gesture of a God who accepts human involvement in everyone's world and history.  Instead of the pleasures and pains of idolatry, confidence, joy, and peace become possible because of the absolute and total self-giving that enables desiring humans to live without finite gods.  Though not engaged in sin, the saints are no less involved in the affairs of bodies in the world and their everyday activities, albeit in a different manner.  Purification has now received a new meaning:  growth in the practice of the truth that "tout est grace", including existence, world, and history itself.  Not onlyl forgiveness, protection, guidance, and fulfillment, but creation itself are received as gifts of the Spirit, that is, as expressions of God's internal communication. 

(emphasis added).

Today's first reading reminds us of the same need for purification.  John (1 John 2:29-3:6) says to be like Jesus is our hope and "[e]veryone who has this hope based on him makes himself pure, as he is pure."

May our prayer be to be pure voices of Jesus in the world.  Then we will be real persons.

The surrender and acceptance entailed in living in Christ is well shown, in my view, in Leonard Cohen's "If It Be Your Will."