Our lifelong Christian formation

We need to understand that our Christian formation will take our whole lifetime. This should come as no surprise to us, since our ultimate goal in life is none other than for each one of us to be “alter Christus,” another Christ. And can anyone dare to say that he is Christ-like enough?

This is what God wants us to be, since we have been created in his image and likeness. And Christ who, as the second person of the Blessed Trinity and the perfect self-image of God, is the pattern of our humanity as well as our savior and restorer of our God-like image after we spoiled our original creation through our sin.

We need to go to Christ. For his part, Christ is doing everything to bring us back to God from whom we come and to whom we belong. We need to spend time to know Christ better so as to love and serve him as is proper to us, being children of God.

We can be sure that that time spent with him will certainly be no waste of time. In fact, it will be the best way we can spend our time, because we would be with someone who really matters in our life.

Besides, it will be a time of good rest, since Christ himself said: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.” (Mt 11,28) A time exclusively spent with Christ through some means of formation will help us recover our strength and regain our proper bearings, so we can continue serving him through the usual duties of our life.

To be sure, Christ is giving us everything we need to be “alter Christ us.” We just have to foster a strong desire to be like him, to follow and identify ourselves with him. We need to make some improvement in the different aspects of our Christian formation: human, spiritual, doctrinal, professional and apostolic. There will always be room for improvement in these areas.

Toward this end, we have to take advantage of periods of vacation and holidays to attend to our continuing need for Christian formation. We need to have a plan for this, perhaps consulting experts to draw the appropriate plan for us, and seeing to it that the relevant time table and materials are clearly spelled out.

We have to have the proper disposition for this. If we are truly concerned about this matter, we can always find time to attend to this need, taking advantage even of our leisure time to read and study relevant materials.

We should make full use of our mind and heart in attending to the means of formation. For this, it would be good to keep clearly in mind what God and the others, whom we all have to serve, continue to expect from us. We will never run out of motivations to keep us moving and to demand more and more from us.

We always have to remember that our march toward full development and maturity, human and not to mention Christian, never ends in this life. It’s supposed to be an ongoing affair, a work in progress. We should never say enough.

The duty to take care of formation is coterminous with life itself, which will always give us lessons. And that’s because the basics and essentials, the absolute, old and the permanent truths,which we may already know, will always have to cope and somehow need to get enriched by the incidentals in life, by the relative, innovative and changing things.

In his second letter, St. Peter urges us to go on with our formation: “Strive diligently to supply your faith with virtue, your virtue with knowledge, your knowledge with self-control, yourself-control with patience, your patience with piety, your piety with fraternal love, your fraternal love with charity.” (1,5-7)

And as we all know, charity is a never-ending affair, ever making new demands on us, and introducing us to more aspects, dimensions and challenges in life. It will always push us to do more,to give more, to be more.

Besides, given the rapid pace of developments in the world today, can we think that we can afford to sit pretty and rely simply on what we have learned so far? Not only that. If we realize more deeply that our ultimate goal is communion with God and with others, can we ever think that we already have enough formation to reach that goal?

We should take this duty of our lifelong Christian formation seriously.