Last week, we jumped into the deep end of Christianity by reflecting on the resurrection of your body. This week, I want to continue swimming in these deep waters so as to become more comfortable with their depth as well as delving into our eternal state in heaven.

For many people, thoughts of heaven consist primarily of clouds, harps, pearly gates, resting in peace, and joy-filled family reunions. These may be consoling images, but they don’t provide convincing motivation for living our life here and now. Imagine a 16-year-old boy, who is being pressured for sex by his girlfriend, thinking, “Hmmm…I really shouldn’t have sex with her because then I’ll lose my personalized cloud and harp in heaven.”

It’s not going to happen. And yet, every choice we make on this earth should be impacted by our ultimate end or purpose. We do this regularly in business. The popular saying, “Begin with the end in mind” exhorts us to have a visionary plan and strategic goals to guide our business decisions. Many parents do the same thing – they enroll their kids in club soccer, service clubs, and after-school tutoring by age 12 in order to achieve the strategic end of an Ivy League education.

The Church, too, adopts this same line of thinking in regard to our ultimate end. In a rather unknown but extremely valuable document from 1983 entitled, Educational Guidance in Human Love, (subtitled, “Outlines for Sex Education”) the Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education began its exhortation with these words: “True education aims at the formation of the human person with respect to his ultimate goal.” (emphasis added)

However, as we noted in last week’s blog, our ultimate goal and eternal happiness can’t be a soul divorced from the body. Here’s the direct quote from TOB Audience 66:6 that inspired last week’s reflection: “In fact, the truth about the resurrection clearly affirms that man’s eschatological [end of time] perfection and happiness cannot be understood as a state of the soul alone, separated (according to Plato, liberated) from the body, but must be understood as the definitively and perfectly ‘integrated’ state of man brought about by such a union of the soul with the body…”

Plato, not Jesus Christ, taught death as the liberating removal of the body so the soul can return to its “true nature.” On the contrary, Christ’s bodily resurrection testifies that the ultimate end of the body is not disincarnation but spiritualization and divinization. Or, to cite the full verse from St. Paul that we touched on last week,For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23).

There’s my favorite word again – gift! The gift of God to us, to our embodied human nature, is not only the immortality of the soul but the eventual immortality of our unique and unrepeatable body through spiritualization and divinization. What, then, does this heavenly process of spiritualization and divinization consist of?

First of all, we need to remind ourselves that in eternity there is no time. This is incredibly difficult for us to grasp since we exist only in time during this lifetime. In other words, we experience life as a series of sequential moments. When you “took the time” to read or listen to this blog, you knew you would have to dedicate 5 or so minutes to reading or listening to it. Why? Because you can’t take it all in at once. You have to read word by word by word, all the way to the end. It’s impossible to experience the reality of my blog – or a boxing match, movie, conversation, housecleaning, or fixing the darn car – all at once, but only as a series of sequential moments, one after the other.

In rare moments, though, we experience “losing track of time” when our whole being is engaged and absorbed in the reality at hand – catching up with a dear friend after 20 years of being out of touch; reading a captivating book for hours; adoration before the Eucharistic where time just seems to “disappear.” These are glimpses or “first fruits” of eternity where we no longer experience being time-bound but somehow liberated from the squeezing limitations of sequential existence.

What’s my point? A lag time exists between the separation of the soul from the body and Christ’s Second Coming and therefore an odd gap occurs between death and the resurrection of the body. But since eternity is the absence – or perhaps better, the fullness – of time, then souls in heaven aren’t looking at their watches, impatiently awaiting the resurrection of their bodies. Eternity is an eternal “now,” a reality vastly different from our experience in this earthly life (see TOB A68:2).

I apologize for what might seem like a L O N G detour into time and eternity. Every once in a while, I think it’s helpful to remember that our human intelligence doesn’t know everything, both on earth and in heaven. Scientists are baffled as to why bumble bees can fly because it seems to defy the laws of physics. Light acts as both a wave and a particle, which seems empirically illogical. It’s hard to comprehend how a human person could be a human person without a body in heaven – this goes against the “laws” of human personhood. These situations remind us that we don’t know everything (thank goodness!) and to walk humbly in a sense of mystery and reverence for what we do not yet know.

Now let’s go back to the two-step process of spiritualization and divinization.

I love St. John Paul II’s description of spiritualization in TOB A67:1, where he writes, “In the resurrection, the body will return to perfect unity and harmony with the spirit: man will no longer experience the opposition between what is spiritual and bodily in him.” Can you imagine this? Can you imagine your body and spirit as well as your intellect, will, emotions, imagination, desires, passions, and eros all united in a perfect dance of love that is effortless, creative, spontaneous, and life-giving? How liberating! How intoxicating to experience your body and soul as the two perfect lovers they were always created to be!

But, and this caught my attention, spiritualization is not the definitive “victory” of the spirit over the body, as if the spirit finally gains the upper hand over our unruly flesh. Rather, St. JPII says, the spirit will “fully permeate the body and the powers of the spirit will permeate the energies of the body” (A67:1).

My favorite image for spiritualization is a tea bag steeped in a clear glass of hot water. The clear water (the body) has been “permeated” by the tea (the spirit) so that the tea (the spirit) is uniformly dispersed throughout the water (the body). Just as the water is saturated by the tea, so, too, the body will be saturated by the spirit. Are they two or are they one? The answer is “both!” The water remains water – it hasn’t been turned into concrete or mud – all the while it is intimately united to the tea. The body remains the body – it hasn’t been turned into a point of light or an angel – all the while it is intimately united to the powers of the spirit.

However, spiritualization is only step one. It is the necessary prelude to the main event: divinization! The body is spiritualized so it can be fully divinized.

Divinization is an uncommon and often misunderstood concept among Catholics in the Latin Rite. For our brothers and sisters in the Eastern Byzantine Rite, divinization is their bread and butter. To use Archbishop Joseph Raya’s phrase, salvation in Eastern theology is seen as a “symphony of divinization.” God creates and redeems us in order to divinize us. (See Theophany and Sacraments of Initiation, pp. 68-69.)

Sometimes it’s helpful to look at what something is not before delving into what something is. Divinization is not that we are a god or become God by nature. We do not share the same Divine Nature as God nor does our human nature somehow change to become divine. However, we can unwittingly absorb these inaccurate impressions when we read some of the celebrated statements written by the early Church Fathers. Here are a few gems:

  • “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.” (St. Athanasius)
  • “…yet thereby it is demonstrated that all men are deemed worthy of becoming ‘gods,’ and of having power to become sons of the highest.” (St. Justin Martyr)
  • “…he who listens to the Lord, and follows the prophecy given by Him, will be formed perfectly in the likeness of the teacher – made a god going about in flesh.” (St. Clement of Alexandria)
  • “From the Holy Spirit is the likeness of God, and the highest thing to be desired, to become God.” (St. Basil the Great)
  • “If we have been made sons of God, we have also been made gods.” (St. Augustine)

St. Thomas Aquinas echoed these same thoughts when he wrote, “The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods” (quoted in The Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 460).

Even a contemporary Catholic writer introduces into one of his books phrases such as “…the ancient and surprisingly orthodox Christian assertion that God intends to make you a god”; “…fulfilling your destiny to become the god you were meant, by God, to be;” and “…because of our fallen humanity, we are, for now, broken gods in need of deeper healing.”

Finally, if we add to these statements the New Age belief that we are all manifestations of Divinity plus Buddhist and Sufi mysticism that claim our awakened consciousness is destined to merge with Universal Consciousness and thus achieve a Divine Oneness, then we can easily be misled and march down the path to our own divinity.

So right up front, let’s be repetitively clear: you are not God nor a god (sorry to break the news to you…). Divinization is not restoring you to your lost godhood, nor awakening divinity within your soul or consciousness, nor endowing you with a new, divine nature. The ultimate end of many of these beliefs is the disappearance of human personhood into Divinity through a spiritual fusion. But, as we saw last week, this is not the ultimate goal of Christianity: Your eternal union with God will not absorb your embodied personhood but will make you even more distinctively and authentically you in your masculinity or femininity! (cf. TOB A67:3)

What, then, is divinization? Stay tuned for next week’s blog as we finally delve deeply into divinization. In the meantime, I hope this week you will ponder incessantly the spiritualization of your body and how it might feel for the powers of the spirit/Spirit to fully saturate your whole being/body and motivate your actions 100% of the time. And remember…you are a gift!

© Katrina J. Zeno, MTS