The Fullness of Life in Christ
The unifying principle of our life is the spiritual life, a life that tends towards God, towards union with Him. This is not a life directed to the clouds, but to Christ, who is God. He is our perfect fulfilment. He is the fullness of God, and the fullness of human life. When we say that we tend towards God, we are not saying that we wish to abandon this world, even though it has its ugliness. Rather, we affirm that we desire to reach the fullness already realised by Christ, in Christ. As St Paul declares, “in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col 2:9). If we long for joy, happiness, and beatitude, they are attainable in Christ, in whom this fullness abides. His hidden life of thirty years is itself a sign that such fullness can already be lived on earth, without the necessity of death to reach it.
The World as We Receive It
The world into which we are born is far from perfect. It bears the traces of God who made it good from the beginning, and yet it also shows what humanity has made of it: at once beautiful, imperfect, and at times disfigured. All that surrounds us—society, history, civilisation, culture, laws, daily life—contains both something of the beauty of God and something of human distortion: what is noble, what is less noble, and what is at times ugly.
Discovering the Depth of the Human Person
Gradually we discover that we are beings of depth. As Blaise Pascal wrote, “Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed” (Pensées, 347), fragile, yet capable through thought of embracing the universe. Long before him, St. Augustine marvelled at the mystery of the human person: “Men go to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad sweep of rivers, the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not” (Confessions X, viii, 15). The more we advance in life, the more we discover the greatness, the depth, the mystery of what we are. Our anxieties and uncertainties reveal that within us there is far more than appears on the surface.
Psychology itself bears witness to this. Immersing oneself in the writings of Carl Jung reveals an immense inner universe: his exploration of the depths of the psyche is astonishing in what it uncovers. Yet the saints speak with even greater clarity of the magnitude of the human person. St John of the Cross, for instance, describes the soul/spirit as an immense capacity for God, which only divine grace can fill. Humanity carries depths of which it is often unconscious—and because of wounds received, these depths are not always luminous, but sometimes shadowed.
Capax Dei: Humanity’s Infinite Horizon
This recalls the fundamental truth, often repeated: the human being is created “in the image and likeness of God” (Gen 1:26). The traditional corollary is that man is capax Dei, capable of God. To say this is to say that humanity is, in a sense, almost infinite, because destined to be the dwelling place of the Infinite. If the glove is shaped for the hand, the human being is shaped for God Himself. Only God can quench this thirst for infinity. Conversely, if one refuses the Infinite, one suffers from narrowness, darkness, fragmentation, and the anguish of emptiness.
A Fragmented World
In former times, particularly in Western Europe, culture, civilisation, and daily life retained a certain unity. The visible centre of every village was the church. That world is gone, yet it bore witness to a principle of unity which, despite imperfections and abuses, gave coherence from above. Since the Second World War, we have left that world behind. New liberties have been embraced, and the unifying principle—the divine, Christianity—has been abandoned. Those born into this new era find themselves in a fragmented world, a civilisation progressively disintegrating, its moral and ethical foundations eroding in every sphere: marriage, science, law, politics, commerce, ecology, finance. To fragmentation has been added degradation and dissolution.
Nostalgia for Stability
Those who experience a profound conversion, who receive the grace of meeting Christ, are born into this fragmented world. They live fragmentation in their very being. To follow Christ, they must cling to guides, landmarks, and points of orientation. The divided and disoriented person seeks fixed points. When Christ calls him, he discovers remnants of Christian civilisation: cathedrals that astonish him, liturgies that lift his spirit, writings that shine with clarity and order, echoing the stability of a world once unified and open to the divine. Drawn by their solidity, he clings to them, looking backwards with a kind of historical nostalgia, seeking what is stable, reassuring, and sacred.
The Temptation of Idolatry
This is not without danger. The fragmented person, fragile and wounded, easily absolutises what he can touch. He risks mistaking the husk for the fruit, the medium for the end. A stained-glass window is meant to transmit light, not to be possessed. Likewise, the past, though precious, is a sign, not the substance. His hunger, if unpurified, becomes a form of spiritual greed.
And yet Christ calls him further. Faith, the Creed, the Catechism, the moral teaching of the Church, the liturgy, and the Scriptures—all these are solid and life-giving, but they are not Christ Himself. They are means, not the end. As the Risen Lord said to Mary Magdalene, “Do not cling to me” (Jn 20:17). These realities are precious, but they must not be idolised. One must go deeper, allowing the Spirit to lead beyond them into Christ Himself.
Christ the True Principle of Unity
The true unifying principle of our life is Christ. Yet to reach Him requires an act of love that transcends possession and idolatry. Faith animated by love launches us towards the poor and naked Christ, who has nowhere to lay his head (Lk 9:58), who Himself becomes our rest. He alone reunifies our fragmented being. He gives us the Holy Spirit, who accomplishes within us the work of integration. He teaches us not to rely upon created things, however holy, but upon God Himself.
As Pope Benedict once observed, “Christian faith is not an idea, not a morality, not a system of dogma, but an encounter with a person, who gives life a new horizon” (cf. Deus Caritas Est, 1). St. Paul had already written: “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor 3:6). The Catechism itself begins its fourth part with this great reminder: everything it has presented only comes alive in the context of relationship with Christ. “Great is the mystery of the faith!” The Church professes this mystery in the Apostles’ Creed (Part One) and celebrates it in the sacramental liturgy (Part Two), so that the life of the faithful may be conformed to Christ in the Holy Spirit to the glory of God the Father (Part Three). This mystery, then, requires that the faithful believe in it, that they celebrate it, and that they live from it in a vital and personal relationship with the living and true God. This relationship is prayer. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2558)
Signs Leading to the Depths
Our fragmented lives are thus called to follow their true unifying principle: Christ. He is the way that leads us out of division and darkness into light and divinity. As St. John writes, “These [signs] are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have Life in his Name” (Jn 20:31). The signs exist not for idolatry, but to lead us into the depths of union, where from our heart “shall flow rivers of living water” (Jn 7:38).
The journey of reunification is therefore a journey from above, guided by Christ, nourished not by the husks but by the fruit. He Himself is our food, our centre, the principle that holds us together. Our path is not towards idols, nor to vague skies, but towards Christ Himself, who is both our God and our heaven, our eternal dwelling.
Advancing Towards the Fruit
Let us therefore advance, avoiding the husks, reaching always for the fruit. For Christ is within reach, every day, through loving faith. He is here, He is in us, He is our heart and our centre. He is the unifying principle of our being.
A unification of our being and of our life, despite the fact that we live in a fragmented world, is absolutely possible. There is a great need to learn about the Unifying Principle of our Life—Christ—how He works, and how He desires to work within us through His Holy Spirit, i.e. his Love. A centred and unified life is possible, even in the midst of the fragmentation that surrounds us.