FAITH

Living under the realm of God, the aegis of God.

HOPE

The ordering of your life to a transcendent good, beyond this world.

LOVE

Love is the Divine Life

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Nature = things of this world, the world of our ordinary experience, our ordinary goals, the things we think will make us happy, the things we are interested in day to day; i.e., desire and pursuit of wealth, pleasure, honor, power. Is there anything wrong with this? No. The Catholic reading of this is that nature is good, but God’s Grace builds on nature, and transforms nature; there’s a breakthrough of a new world: the world of God’s life. Here we speak of the Theological Virtues.

When the Divine life breaks in, we are invaded by faith, hope and love.

= we are born again, we are born from above. A new perspective, mind, vision, way of being breaks in.

Now, nature remains, but nature is transfigured, elevated for God’s purposes. Jesus reorders our life to greatness, beyond our imaginations.

The problem is when we reject this invasion of grace and get stuck with the ordinariness of nature, things of this world, so we don’t fully live.

It takes a transformation of consciousness to get this. Let’s look at the Bible’s example of Nicodemus. Nicodemus at first took the metaphors of the spiritual order and dumbed it down to the world’s order, which is what many people mistakenly do today. We translate them down into the language of ordinary experience, and we thereby miss them and don’t get what’s going on.

Baptism = drawn into a new world, you become a child of God, not just a child of the world.

Unless you're lifted up into the Spirit, in Baptism, Confirmation, the Eucharist, you won’t enter what Jesus calls the Kingdom of God:God’s way of ordering things, God’s way of seeing things. That’s why the sacraments are so dramatically important.

What's born of flesh vs. what’s born of flesh: Spirit will contain flesh, will elevate flesh, will bring it up into a new context. That’s the right relationship between flesh and spirit.

We can allow the wind to fill the sails of our life: the breakthrough of the Holy spirit. What are these sails? The Gifts of the Holy Spirit. Infused in our souls at Baptism, increased, strengthened and confirmed at Confirmation, to prepare us to enter the Divine life most fully here on earth, through the Eucharist.

The purpose of God giving us his only begotten Son is to draw us up into the Divine life. [John 3:16]

Once that happens, we see everything differently, we feel everything in a different way. We have different aspirations, we understand our lives differently. We see with the eyes of Christ.

Wealth, pleasure, power, honor: the goods of the world remain, but now they are transfigured by the: Wind, Light, Son of God, whose broken into our lives. That’s the whole spiritual life, the whole spiritual order. We can pray for it and we should. The Wind [Holy Spirit] blows where it wills, but we can ask for it. When it comes, cooperate with it. Get on board; open the sails that they might be filled with this Wind, the Holy Spirit.

Bishop Barron on Being Born Again