Why God made me: a splendid destiny

This life, in all its passion and possibilities, is a passing thing. Photo: Tima Miroshnichenko

“God made me to know Him, love Him and serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him for ever in the next.”

That is the Catholic's deepest reality, the reality of the eternal God. In respect of that reality every other natural or intellectual fact is secondary and subordinate. Certainly he regards such natural things as real and as valuable, but he does not rest in them as in his last end. He regards them somewhat as a ship in which he is for the moment travelling, which he knows that he must presently leave.

He acts in the spirit of that saying of our Lord which is inscribed on a gateway in Northern India: "This world is but a bridge; pass over it, build not thy dwelling here". His soul tends continually forwards and upwards. 

Karl Adam, The Spirit of Catholicism.

Jesus, our Lord and God, told his apostles:

Father, I have given these little ones your word,
and the world has hated them
because they do not belong to the world
any more than I belong to the world.
15 I am not asking you
to take them out of the world,
but I do ask you
to protect them from the evil one.
16 They do not belong to the world
any more than I belong to the world.
17 Consecrate them in the truth.
Your word is truth.
18 As you sent me into the world,
so have I sent them into the world.
19 And for their sakes I consecrate myself,
so that they too may be consecrated in truth.

                                      The Gospel of John 17:14-19

It's also John, in his first letter to the early Christians, who captures that other-world principle most directly. He writes:

Do not love the world or the things of the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires if the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but from the world.  

Paul has many such words of warning about the trap in the form of submission to the lifestyle of any era, this being the simplest: "But our citizenship is in heaven". 

Peter, too, sees our situation as that of sojouners/pilgrims, the task of each being to abstain from the passions of our weakened nature during our time of exile. 

Peter highlights our true destiny when he tells us: 

God has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. 

Our goal, then, is glorious. In this life we work on making true on our existence as sons and daughters of God our creator by answering the call to deification, union with God (theosis), that is announced in the revelation of our being made in the image of God. Though we struggle during our life with those passions that belittle us, when we die we will be completely able to respond to God's energies in our face-to-face relationship with God.  

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