“Of her flesh he took flesh:
He does take fresh and fresh,
Though much the mystery how,
Not flesh but spirit now
And makes, O marvellous!
New Nazareths in us,
Where she shall yet conceive
Him, morning, noon, and eve;
New Bethlems, and he born
There, evening, noon, and morn
Bethlem or Nazareth,
Men here may draw like breath
More Christ and baffle death;
Who, born so, comes to be
New self and nobler me
In each one and each one
More makes, when all is done,
Both God’s and Mary’s Son.”
-Gerard Manley Hopkins,
“The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to the Air We Breathe”

Alright, the boss said the first post didn’t quite get all the way there on the magnanimity side of things, so let’s try again.

Last time, I said, “While humility says, ‘I can only do great things with God’s grace,’ magnanimity recognizes that, with God’s grace, I can do great things.” Not only are we called to do great things, but we must respond “always and everywhere,” either with greatness or with fading into nothing.

Ok, so that’s done...no...say more. Oh...um...alright…

The Japanese were not too far off when they said the Emperor was divine. The same sentiment appears in Psalms “For you have made them little less than gods, and all of them sons of the most high.” (Somewhere in Psalms...8, I think...). We as humans are capable of amazing things, by our nature alone. What other creature in the world can both develop 100 ways to use a peanut and figure out how to destroy the entire planet?

While the greatness of which we are capable merely as human beings is impressive, we can so often get lost in the mysteries of the world, of the cosmos, our minds, our sins, of ourselves--of course, that last one is the greatest mystery--that we lose sight of how great our blessings are and how truly great our call is.

C.S. Lewis (whom I perhaps treated too harshly last time) puts this best in The Magician’s Nephew: “You are a son of Adam and a daughter of Eve, and that is honor enough to raise the head of the lowliest beggar and shame enough to bend the head of the highest emperor.” We are only human, which is to say that we are fallen and in our fallen nature we lost our first innocence, lost the gift of original justice, and we bear the four effects of the fall: ignorance in the intellect, malice in the will, tendency to sin in our desires, and weakness in our capacity to resist taking the easy way out.

But we are also, in baptism, adopted sons and daughters of God. In the Redemption that He has already won for us and offers us freely, He gives the “power to become children of God” (John 1:14).

What does it mean to be a child of God? Well, let me pretentiously adjust my eyeglasses while I pull out the Greek.The word child used in John is υιος (Son) which is the same word used for Christ throughout the Gospels (ο υιος του θεου), and as Bishop Barron loves to point out, the phrase used for the Roman emperor. Then, in John 17, Christ has the lovely prayer that we might be one with Christ as He and the Father are one.

I am going to make the shocking claim that Christ meant exactly what he said. We are, in fact, called to divinity.

In the Eternal Word of God’s assuming human nature, there was some cross-contamination: Christ, the Son of God, took on everything in human nature but sin, and in return, gave us everything of himself except his divine nature. Grace--God working in our hearts to make us by adoption what Christ is by nature--succeeds in its purpose. By becoming more Christ-like, we are adopted into his divinity. God became man so that man can become God. Full stop.

We are called to share in the inner life of the intimacy of the Trinity for eternity. In doing so, we are not diminished to become less ourselves, like Cassilius and the other pawns of Dormammu in Doctor Strange. Rather, in shining forth the image of God in us, we become more ourselves: “An image of God the world’s never seen” before and never will see again, unique in all creation and beautiful (Danielle Rose). Our sin mars us and makes us as similar as a crowd of basic Northface-and-Uggs college clones. Only by living our life to the fullness of God’s glory are we made both more into Christ and most fully ourselves.

It is the virtue of magnanimity, brought to its fullness through the virtue of Charity, that drives us on even to this grandeur. Not only will we do the greatest thing that we can by our strength according to our human nature, but we will “do greater things than these” in Christ’s strength, as we rise with Him to the Father (John 14:12).

God made you precious, for union in love with Him and all the saints in glory.

Why settle for anything less?

Author: Joseph