The sublime and supernatural life

THE feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord (cfr. Mk 9,2-10) should make us understand that like Christ we too are meant to be transfigured to the supernatural life with God. That is what God wants for us. For that end, God has given us everything, Christ himself, so we can be what he wants us to be.

We therefore should try our best to develop a sense of the sublime and the supernatural while still immersed here in the things of this world. We are meant for a supernatural life. Our human nature, with our spiritual soul that enables us to know and to love, and therefore to enter into the lives not only of others but also and most importantly, of God, urges us to develop a supernatural life.

It’s a life with God always. It just cannot be exclusively our own life, taken personally or collectively. It’s a life that depends mainly on God who gives us the grace that purifies and elevates our life to his life. But it also depends on us, on our freedom to correspond to this loving will of God for us.

We have to develop a taste and even an appetite for the supernatural life with God and of things supernatural in general. In this we have to help one another, because in the end, this is our common ultimate end in life—how to live our life with God, how we can be immersed in God even as we are immersed also in the things of the world.

To be sure, developing the sense of the supernatural and the sublime is not a baseless and gratuitous exercise. It is what God wants us to have, since we truly are children of his. It is not our invention. It is, first of all, his will for us to which we have to correspond.

We should not feel uneasy about this truth, because on the part of God, he will do everything to make what he wants of us to be fully realized. All we have to do is simply to go along with his will and ways.

This sense of the supernatural and the sublime will do us a lot of good. Even psychologically speaking, it is a tremendous help. Imagine the calm, serenity and confidence it can give us! Imagine the joy it provides us even as we go through the drama of our earthly life that is often described as a vale of tears.

But the good that it gives us far exceeds what it does to our psychological self. It is what shapes us into God’s children. It is a clear mark that our faith, hope and charity are strong and working. In short, that our spiritual life is healthy despite, and also because of, all the trials and challenges we will be facing in this life.

We should develop this sense of the supernatural and the sublime by often reminding ourselves of who we really are. That way, we would somehow be in a state of awe and amazement. We would somehow feel reassured that despite our limitations, weaknesses, failures and even sins, there is always hope to attain our original and ultimate dignity because God will always be on our side. We just have to put ourselves in his side too.

Perhaps as a concrete way of developing and keeping this sense of the sublime, we should cultivate the practice of thinking that we are entering heaven to be with God when we end the day and have our rest.