"We Become God"

To prepare ourselves for the coming of the Spirit, be aware of what the Church is saying to us. We are children of God to the extent that we become “other Christs.” By Baptism, we receive what we have learned to call “sanctifying grace.” We talk about being “in the state of grace.”

But grace, as then Cardinal Ratzinger clarifies, “is not something that comes from God; it is God himself. Redemption means that God, acting as God truly does, gives us nothing less than himself. The gift of God is God – for who as the Holy Spirit is communion with us. ‘Full of grace’ therefore means, once again, that Mary is a wholly open human being, one who has opened herself entirely, one who has placed herself in God’s hands boldly, limitlessly, and without fear for her own fate. It means that she lives wholly by and in relation to God. She is a listener and a pray-er, whose mind and soul are alive to the manifold ways in which the living God quietly calls to her. She is one who prays and stretches forth wholly to meet God; she is therefore a lover, who has the breadth and magnanimity of true love, but who has also its unerring powers of discernment and its readiness to suffer.”

“Luke has flooded this fact with the light of yet another round of motifs. In his subtle way he constructs a parallel between Abraham, the father of believers, and Mary, the mother of believers. To be in a state of grace means: to be a believer. Faith includes steadfastness, confidence, and devotion, but also obscurity.”[1]

That said, and understanding that we, creatures like our Lady, are called to be filled with grace, and therefore, to be filled with God, I transcribe today’s reading from the Breviary (Tuesday of the 7th Week of Easter) from St. Basil the Great (c. 350):

“Through the Spirit we acquire a likeness to God; indeed, we attain what is beyond our most sublime aspirations – we become God.”

[1] J. Ratzginer, “’Hail Full of Grace,’ in Mary, The Church at the Source, Ignatius (2005) 67-69.