Are You Who You Were Meant To Be?

How many of us live the way God intended for us to live? How often do we do what is easy instead of what is right? Do we even notice the slow death of our spiritual lives as we engage in sinful behavior?

Saint Paul was set apart, in his mothers womb, to proclaim Christ to the world. Yet as an adult he lived in exactly the opposite way. In his zeal for his ancestral traditions he persecuted the followers of Christ. His encounter with the Lord outside Damascus transformed his entire existence, restoring him to the person he was meant to be, the person God set him apart to be.

By raising the dead Jesus shows that He is the sovereign Lord of life and death. He does not use gestures or incantations, He merely commands the young man, “arise.” And as impressive as this was to the onlookers it is secondary to the power of Christ to restore us to spiritual life. Raising the dead and healing the sick are simply signs of the true miracle, freeing us from spiritual death caused by sin.

Which is easier to say to the paralytic, “Your sins are forgiven,” or to say, “Rise, pick up your mat, and walk?”

It is through the Lord, Jesus Christ that we find our true selves. If we are dissatisfied with our lives, or feel that something is lacking we need only turn to Him to find the person we were set apart to be.

God has a plan for each one of us, but all too often we run away from it out of fear or ignorance. Instead, we should trust, trust that our Father knows what is best for us even if we can't see it.

Upon the death of her father, Saint Catherine of Siena had a mystical vision in which she saw herself espoused to Christ. The remainder of her life was spent on the public stage as an itinerant peacemaker, a papal representative of sorts, spiritual counselor, theologian, and tireless letter writer.

She actively embraced a group of laywomen of the Sienese community who were loosely associated with the Dominican Order referred to as “mantellate.” She quickly attracted a large number of close companions who became known as her “family,” they in turn called her “mamma.”

In addition to the members of the mantellate, her family consisted of diverse lay men and women, nuns, monks, and priests. One such person was a young man named Stefano Maconi. From their first meeting he became one of her closest and most important disciples.

When Catherine went to Rome, Stefano, for some reason, did not go with her. Perhaps it was because Catherine encouraged him to became a monk but he was resisting the call. Nevertheless Catherine wrote many letters to him during her last months in Rome, letters in which she continues to encourage and plead with him to be who God meant him to be.

“Cut the bonds that hold you, do not merely loosen them,” she wrote in one of her first letters to Stefano. “Resist no longer the Holy Spirit that is calling you – for it will be hard for you to kick against Him. Do not let yourself be held back by your own lukewarm heart, or by a womanish tenderness for yourself. Be a man and enter the battlefield manfully.”

Stefano, however, despite his personal devotion to Catherine, felt for a long time no vocation for the cloister. She continued, as we see in her letters, to urge him with increasing insistence: but his hesitation was ended only by her death. He hastened to Rome at the last, urgently summoned, in time to see her living and to receive her last words. Her dying request did what her entreaties during life had failed to do; the brilliant young noble became a Carthusian monk. At a later time he was made General of the Order. Devotion to the memory of Catherine was the inspiration of his life after she left him.

In this age of “finding oneself,” we tend to look everywhere except the one place that has the answer, the one place we find our true selves, that place we enter when we give up our selfish wants and desires, and turn our lives over to God. We may not be able to see the whole picture, but that doesn't make our part in it any less significant.

“Be who God meant you to be, and you will set the world on fire.” Saint Catherine of Siena

Pax Vobisum