Rarely do we have the opportunity to genuinely take the time to consider what the entire purpose of this life and this world actually is. Why do we bother waking up every day, working from morning to night, balancing relationships and other necessities of life? Do we do all of this in the hope that one day we won’t need to do these things? Do we only survive so that we might fill our free time with leisure? And if life is only this, why even bother trying to maintain a life in those eras in history when leisure time was not possible? We were created for a reason, placed in this world and this time for a reason, and deep within our hearts, we are still oriented towards discovering that reason.

To first answer this question, we must first ask why God created the world in the first place. He created the world and its inhabitants for the same reason He created the heavens and those angelic beings who occupy the closest spaces to Him: His love was too perfect and too great to be contained within Himself. Love is by its nature creative and generative; and, although it may find its wholeness and completeness within the Trinity, God willed the creation of other beings so that His love could extend to them and that they could extend His love back to Him. We did not need to be created. We did not need to be loved. Our mere existence is a gift, far preferable than non-existent, yet so wonderful for what its potential could be. Essentially, God created the world because of love. So if we are to return to the question of what the purpose of our own lives are and our own world is, we ought to have the exact same answer - love. However, our journey as creatures is far more complex than simply coming into existence and occupying a space while infinitely reciprocating the love of our Creator; we brought sin into this world, an action made through free will, which is yet another gift of love from God. Even in those mistakes we may have made that cause our journey in life to become more complicated than it ever had to be, God continues to shower us with gifts of exponentially greater love; because of our sin, He sent His only begotten Son to make His love for us even more intimately known according to our human needs. Because we dared to consider His love not enough for us, He gave all of it to us in the most perfect form through Jesus Christ.

Everything that makes life worth living, every bit of motivation that humans had since our creation to get up and live life on a daily basis, all of the things that we have subsequently created on our own with the gifts God instilled within us, all of it was leading us to the moment when we would come face-to-face with God Incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ. God created the world to give us His Son. God called Abraham so that one day we may know Jesus. God inspired David and Solomon to construct a Temple so that they might eventually come to know His presence in Jesus. God moved the heavens and the earth, the sun and stars, working within each individual human soul before and since so that all of us may come to know Jesus. The whole purpose of life itself is Jesus Christ, the Second Person who makes God physically, intimately, and infinitely knowable for a human being. As Paul tells the Ephesians, he alone is the sum of all things, the destination of all journeys, the reason behind every act of Divine Intervention. Despite all of our failings and all of our ingratitude, we now have the opportunity to arrive at and accept the gift of the purpose and meaning of life in the person of Jesus.

Because religion requires the participation of divinity interacting with humanity, it can be pretty difficult to fully accept all of the claims that are associated with it. On top of this, religions are often incompatible with each other, meaning that all except for one are going to be lies, or all of them are lies. The claims of many religions are nearly impossible to verify because of the nature of religion: truths about the world are revealed supernaturally from heaven. For many religions, there is no need to verify their claims with that which exists in the natural world; if God simply tells us something, we ought to accept it as truth. Sincerely, true Christianity is different. Christianity should be first seen as the culmination of the history of Israel before the final destruction of the Temple. Additionally, Christianity has affirmed that public revelation has ended; anything more is only at most worthy of belief, unable to alter and define dogmas on their own. 

As Christians, we accept the Church as it is understood through Scripture, which in Paul’s letters and in the Acts of the Apostles, reveals that the earliest Church leaders opened up the doors of the Church to Gentiles rather than keeping it exclusive to Jews. Paul even states that the mystery of Christianity being open to all people, Jews and Gentiles alike, was made known to him by revelation. How can we trust him? Couldn’t he have simply made the exact same case when it came to any other decisions the Church tried to make, allowing him to design the Church according to his own will? The reason why we can feel secure trusting in Paul’s claim about revelation and the decision-making of the early Church acting under the direction of the Holy Spirit is because we also have the life and teachings of Christ fully available to us in the Gospels. We can make educated assumptions as to what Christ may have willed beyond purported revelation. In the case of opening up a relationship with God to the Gentiles, we know that even Christ did that - he went to the Samaritans, and served and invited them. He went to the pagan territories and, after testing the faithfulness of those pagans, blessed them and answered their prayers. Revelation is actually revealed to us in two ways: the more apparent way through a definitive declaration from the early Church, but even more so in the life and teachings of Christ himself. There are no new revelations to be handed on to us, but we can better understand the revelations Christ shared with us by trusting those to whom he has revealed himself. 

Revelation, and the doctrines and dogmas that flow from it, can all be found intrinsically in the Gospels. These come from Christ himself. These come from Scripture. When Peter asks Christ if his message is meant for everyone or just those closest to him, Christ responds by saying that his message is for those who are willing to take on the responsibilities given to them by God. Our religion is founded upon the real world and God’s participation in it; our beliefs are based on revelations from Heaven, but can be verified historically and literarily, in the life of Christ and in the Scriptures. If you want to know whether or not the claim of revelation is true, ask yourself: what did Jesus have to say on the subject? How is this found in the thousands of years of Scripture that existed even before him? You will find that the fruits of true and authentic revelation are exponential, and deeply rational. God instilled within us an intellect; He desires that we use it when trying to listen to Him. 

At the heart of love is sacrifice. Parents sacrifice for their children. Husbands sacrifice for their wives, and wives sacrifice for their husbands. Friends sacrifice for their friends. Sacrifice is integral to love because love is an act of the will for the benefit of another that truly asks for nothing in return. To sacrifice is to give something up, not to get something back or exchanged. It should make us curious, then, to acknowledge that all religions in the past, even those based on vengeful and violent gods, were based on the necessity of sacrifice. Consider an ancient religion that sacrificed human beings to placate their gods and to prevent natural disasters. This is a warped and disordered view of sacrifice and offering, but their intention is the same as a Judaic high priest offering the sacrifice of the altar in supplication to the one, true God: we give over what we have so that the divine acknowledges us.

There is no greater expression of acknowledgement than love. When the priests would offer the sacrifices in the Temple, they were asking only for acknowledgement; God responded not just through acknowledging them, but by loving them and their people. At the heart of love is sacrifice, and at the heart of religion is sacrifice: at the heart of religion is love. Religion, sacrifice, and love were all fully realized and expressed in the offering of Christ on the cross. What better way for God to acknowledge His creation than to send His only begotten Son to us to teach us and to guide us on what it means to be human? What better way to show His love for us than to sacrifice to us? In what other religion throughout human history has the God who should be the recipient of sacrifice instead offer His entire self to His subjects? The Jews would offer sacrifices of holocaust in the Temple, which meant their animals were completely burned, and the smoke rose up to meet the nostrils of God as a pleasing fragrance. It was a true sacrifice on behalf of the Jews because their offerings were destroyed in the process, making it impossible to salvage after the sacrifice was offered. This sacrifice was acknowledged by God because it was through them that he gave back to them what St. Paul refers to as “a fragrant aroma” - the sacrificial offering of Jesus Christ.

So what about religion today? Sacrifice no longer seems to be tied to religion, even though it was the most necessary element at every other point in history. The modern shift away from sacrifice to philosophy or contemplation is not applicable to Catholicism - we still have sacrifice, and it is in fact the same sacrifice as that perfect expression of sacrifice, religion, and love. Even more perfect in our sacrifice is that by participating in the sacrifice of the Mass, we exponentially multiply the love of that original sacrifice by offering ourselves as fragrant aromas to God in our behavior and in the embrace of our own daily crosses. Consider when a woman who had spent eighteen years crippled by the spirit of sin is lifted up by Christ. For many of us, we have been spiritually crippled for far longer than eighteen years. Christ saw you in your suffering and has offered to lift you up, not just for your sake but also for the sake of being lifted up to God just as the sacrifices were. If you are willing, you can allow Christ to make you a fragrant aroma to God. Be lifted up, and bring with you all those little sacrifices and sufferings you carry with you in your life. Those are the offerings of your love.

By the very nature of our creation, God has instilled in us the ability to model His own love for us in how we love our neighbors. Humans are not meant to be alone. We are not meant to separate ourselves out of convenience; we need others to help fill in the gaps we might have in our personalities, our abilities, or in the areas we need to grow. It is only when we are working together for the common goal of glorifying God that we become “perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect.” We always speak about how the Catholic Church is divinely protected in its trajectory in this world, but we forget that we, as a collective of Christians, are the Church. The only way in which sin has no power against us is if we work together to glorify God. But this does not need to simply be done in the context of gathering together at a church; we are called to dedicate our lives to this type of model because it is ultimately the only way we are able to get into Heaven.

If the Church is protected against being destroyed by sin because we are working together for God, then we should consider those other areas in life that model our behavior as the Church. The family is the most clear way to envision this: family is the domestic Church, and it is uniquely found as both a model for the Church as a whole and the foundation of the Church in which we participate. The first experience Christ had with working in a collective for the sake of the whole was in his own family, with Joseph at the head and Mary as his mother. Every Christian marriage is a direct participation in both the Heavenly union and in the Church; there is a head, there is a mother, and there is a spiritual recipient of these roles in the children. St. Paul unpacks the purpose of a Christian marriage as the most perfect way in which we can individually experience the necessity of living for others. Marriage teaches us what love is, both in what is expected of us in our roles in the marriage and in the physical manifestation of marital love through the children. Like Christ for the Church, it is a husband’s duty to have responsibility over his whole house, to guard and protect his bride and to teach his children. Like the Church for Christ, it is a wife’s duty to serve her husband so that he may be free to love her unconditionally and to form her so that she may in turn form their children at their most impressionable moments.

We have spent our lives as spiritual children. Eventually, there comes a time when we are called to leave home, to find the one we should marry, and to start our own families. The same applies to our spirituality. We cannot remain mere recipients of Christ’s love for us our entire lives. Eventually, we have to take what love he gave us, go out, and share it with others. Like any good father, this is exactly what he wants. He does not expect that the love he shares with you will be reciprocated entirely back to him, because he desires that it be used towards others. This is the foundation of the necessity of community. Christ loves us, we love our neighbors, our neighbors love others, and we all give back our collective love to the one who first shared it with us. It is so complex, yet so simple - love begets love, and the more you accept Christ’s love for you, the more you will be able to love others. The mystery which Paul refers to is that this love is a direct model of Heaven itself. Like Christ tells us in the Gospel, the smallest bit of love flourishes into the entirety of love itself. Start small, focusing on the ways in which you can model Christ’s love for you. This is the beginning of your participation in the Divine.