Why me?

IC XC
✙
NI KA

This is a thinking through on the morning walk. Humanity, made in the image and likeness of God, male and female, that’s it. When you were conceived, a soul was created for your body, your DNA dictating your maleness or femaleness. Soul and body are a unity. Your DNA changed your soul. There is no such thing as a “female soul trapped in a male body” or vice versa. The Soul and the Body are one and the latter dictated your reality to the former. To say the reverse is some kinda of gnostic, some kind of “spiritual but not religious” codswallop. But as Catholics we’re past that.

OK, so Males and Females.

Where’s the rest come in? What’s the root of our problems? I can’t begin to diagnose our issues, but I can speak from first person experience of brokenness. It may transfer well to others or, honestly, it may not. No need to absolutize with the pattern of the garment or the cloth from which the garment was made. But I can talk about my garment for a bit. If soul-and-body are a hylomorphic unity, as the Church teaches, then garment in this metaphor is something else, something secondary. It’s something that comes after and, for my purposes, it’s anything that comes after that hylomorphic unity is formed at the moment of conception. You are a whole person at that moment. You are not viable (outside your mother’s womb) you are not anything but a world of potentiality with one bit of act already accomplished. Another way of saying this is you are all the human person, but immature. The garment is what comes later.

Some of the garment we are given, some we make for ourselves. Some we get as hand-me-downs from our parents and others. Some we add on late in life. But it is a garment under which our human person grows and matures as fully as a plant grows in a greenhouse, a pot, garden, or in the wild. The plant was all there in the seed, all along. The selections made for it (garden, or in the wild) may change how it grows, but the plant was there in the seed all along. A person with a certain color of skin grows up differently in America or in another country. Race (as we understand it) is partly genetics in the color of skin or eyes, but almost entirely learned and thus different from place to place. Our sex is the same way: we know what we are genetically, but how we express it is cultural. And in both of these areas, we may be broken as well.

In the soul, by virtue of the inherent dignity God gives to his Living Image on Earth, there are charisms: certain strengths and blessings given to you. Schooling may uncover natural aptitudes, but all of these are gifts God gave you rather than someone else who, in the same womb, the same house, the same family, has different gifts. This one can cook. That one will be athletic. This one can read everything, that one is more of a “visual learner”. Some of these gifts will be seen by your parents and developed. Some may be ignored. Some may be schooled into better focus. Some may be schooled out of focus entirely. But they are still there. More charisms arrive at baptism and chrismation or confirmation. These tend to be “religious” ones but they are no less real than the mental ones nor are they any less gifted. Even your physical beauty is a charism. Your being, too. You are you by God’s gift.

We are used to thinking of Charisms in a specific context, but literally everything you have is a Charism. Everything. Even the things we think of as bad: “all things work for the Good of those who love the Lord,” says St Paul. All things. All is grace: all is a gift, a Charism.

God had no reason to give you the spiritual charisms or the mental ones, or the physical ones… no reason at all except he loves you infinitely and there’s nothing to do except say “thank you”.

Thank you.

OK.

Now, what? I got some more posting to do, but spoiler alert: there’s a connection between “Charism” & “Cross” & “Curse”.