TH121 E RESPONDING TO GOD’S CALL BY BECOMING FULLY

HUMAN

Part I: WHAT KIND OF PERSONS DO WE WANT TO BE?

Chapter 1: Becoming Fully Alive: The Christian Vision of Humanity

Objective: After the lesson, the student is able to explain the basic goal or direction of the Christian
vision of humanity.

From “Searching God” to “Responding to God”

Welcome to the second subject/course in Adamson University’s Theology curriculum of “Faith

Journey towards Social Transformation.”

In Theology 1, Searching for God in the World Today, we saw that here in Adamson University,
Theology is concerned with the ordinary and the everyday life. We defined theology as a process or a
practice of consciously and methodically reflecting on our experience of God in the ordinariness of life
and in the social and historical events of the world. We tried to “do theology” using see-discern-act/pray
methodology. Ultimately, the goal of theology is for us to have a deeper and intimate relationship with
God-in-Jesus.

In Theology 1, we also talked about our everyday, the role of cultures and religion and how the
Christian searches for God’s loving and saving presence in the ordinariness of life. We spoke about
Revelation-Faith and how the Bible narrates the experiences of those who witnessed God’s marvelous
deeds in our world. In all of God’s action in the world, Jesus of Nazareth embodied God’s life and love
through his proclamation in words and deeds the Kingdom of God. His death and resurrection have to be
seen in that context: a life given for the sake of the Kingdom so that all may experience kaginhawaan or
salvation.

We ended Theology 1 by focusing on St. Vincent de Paul who tried to follow Jesus in his own
ways in his time. Today, we are also invited to retell the story of God’s life and love by following Jesus as
students.

Our present subject/course continues our journey of discipleship or following Jesus. Using the
“see-discern-act/pray” methodology, Theology II deals with what it means to be truly and fully human
from a Christian perspective. This is our way of responding to the invitation of God-in-Jesus whose
Spirit is ever-present and active in the world.

In particular, the course focuses on virtues or good habits in our personal and social living from
the Christian understanding of the human person. As disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, the virtuous person,
with St. Vincent de Paul and the other saints as inspirations for a virtuous life, and in dialogue with
Filipino and Asian cultures, the course seeks to help students acquire and develop good habits or practices
in a consistent way in everyday living towards becoming good persons in the light of the vision of
becoming fully human.

The first chapter introduces us to the Christian vision of humanity to which we are asked to direct
our lives.
Let us “SEE”

Let us now have the first step, to “see” our personal experiences.
Seatwork #1: “Happiest and Unhappiest Moments”

All of us have had our share of happy and unhappy moments. By happy, it does not necessarily
mean funny. There is a difference between happy and funny moments. Happy moments refer to those
experiences that give us a certain feeling of contentment, satisfaction or joy while unhappy moments refer
to those experiences of lack, sadness or pain. You are asked to think of just one (1) most happy moment
and one (1) unhappiest moment. Write your answers on the seatwork exercise below.

(Note: All seatwork exercises in this course should be hand-written on the hand-outs given to
you. Do not use any other writing material, except on the hand-outs, which will be collected and reviewed
by your teacher.)

Recall your happiest and unhappiest moments by describing the events and your feelings during
those events.

Seatwork:

1. My happiest moment as a person:

 Who were the people in your experience?
 What happened? What did you do?
 What did you feel or do during this moment?
2. My unhappiest moment as a person:
 Who were the people in your experience?
 What happened? What did you do?
 What did you feel or do during this moment?

Triad Sharing: Choose two classmates with whom you want to share your happiest and
unhappiest moments. Using your seatwork exercise, narrate your experiences to your classmates. While
listening, try to put yourself into the experience of your classmates and avoid making judgments and
giving advice. Simply listen with your mind and heart. Select one among you who will give a brief report
of your conversations. (This sharing shall take about 20 minutes.)

Class Plenum: (Reporters are called to give a summary of their sharing.)

Let us reflect and talk more about our happiest and unhappiest moments.
 What can we say about our happiest moments in life?
- What do we notice in our experiences of happiness as listed on the board?
- What makes us really or truly happy as a person?
- What is it within us that is affirmed or makes us feel good?
- What kind of persons makes us happy? What did they do to make us happy?
- How did we respond or react to those happiest moments?
- In what ways do those happiest moments continue to affect us today?

 How about the list of our unhappiest moments in life?

- What do we notice in our experiences of unhappiness as listed on the board?
- What makes us really or truly unhappy as a person?
 - What is it within us that make us feel unhappy?
- What kind of persons makes us unhappy? What did they do to make us unhappy?
- How did we respond or react to those unhappy moments?
- In what ways do those unhappiest moments continue to affect us today?

Synthesis: (by the Teacher)

Let us “DISCERN”

A. Experiences of Happiness and Unhappiness Tell About Our Deepest Longings as Humans

We do not do it every time but it is important to pause and ask ourselves what makes us happy
and unhappy. There are people who may have never thought about this and they just keep on reacting to
events and swimming in the tide of history. For people who think about those questions, even once in a
while, the experiences of happiness and unhappiness lead them to think about deeper questions in life:
Who am I? What do I really want in life? Where am I going? They begin to see patterns in the life and
when seen as a whole, it is like a painting on a canvas that signifies their lives and their purposes on earth.
They learn from their experiences and discover more about their true selves.
There is this story about a group of frogs who are living inside a deep well.

Day after day, and every night, the frogs jumped and croaked among
themselves. They do enjoy their everyday life: eating, conversing, playing, sleeping,
mating. They believe that the deep well is their world, in fact, they may not know that
they are inside a well. They look above and see a piece of the sky. But that’s about it.
Their world is the small space where they are and the blue sky, they thought it is part
of the well.

Until one day, a bird got lost and entered the well. Not knowing where she
was, she asked the frogs about the place. One of the frogs said, “You are in our
world.” The bird tweeted: “Which world?” The frogs stretched their tongues in
amazement if not confusion. The big frog said, “Well, there is no other world except
this one” (jumping around the deep well). The bird swayed her head. “You know
what?” she said to the frogs. “Do you know that I am a bird?” The frogs murmured
and jumped all over. “What’s a bird?” said one of the small frogs. The bird thought
of responding to the question but she ignored it and said: “Where I came from, the sky
is wider and bluer. There are grasses, plants, trees, and animals too, many and
different. There are also many kinds of insects and worms. Out there (pointing above
the well) is a big, big world.”

The frogs can’t believe what she’s saying because they thought that the bird was also
a frog, only that she has wings. “Anyway,” the bird said, “thank you for your
company. But I got to fly out to that world” (her beak point again to the blue sky).

When the bird left, the frogs discussed their experience with the bird. Most of
them did not believe what the bird told them about the “big, big world.” But a few of
them began to raise questions, “What if it’s all true? That there’s a world bigger than
where we are now?” So one day, this small group of frogs decided to climb the walls
of well. They piled up on top of each other and let the smallest frog to climb. His name
 was Buchukoy. Eventually, Buchukoy was able to jump out of the well. They waited
and waited for the smallest frog to come back. Tired of waiting, the frogs went on with
their everyday routine. They almost have forgotten about the bird although they were
anxious about what happened to the smallest frog.

Then one day, they heard someone croaking from above. When they looked
up, they got the surprise of their life. It was Buchukoy. From the top of the well,
Buchukoy croaked loudly (shouted) and with excitement and joy. And Buchukoy told
them what he had seen so far and that he was very happy. He was jumping around the
well as he narrated his experiences and the different kinds of creatures he has met. As

Buchokoy was joyfully telling his story, the frogs below had different reactions. Some
were in disbelief. Others were cursing the small frog. Still others were just silent
listening, not knowing what to think or how to react to the story of the small frog but
Buchokoy’s friends had their eyes grew wider and their tongues swayed and circled in
the air. And Buchukoy shouted on top of his lungs: “What the bird told us is all
true!”... (The end of the story, so far.....) [author: ESDG]

Let’s talk about this experience of the frogs and the bird.

 What strikes you the most in this story? Why?

 Whose reaction to the bird and Buchukoy got your attention? Why?
 What is the “truth” that Buchokoy discovered and was happy about?
 What insights can we get from the story about our life?

What have the frogs, the bird and Buchokoy to do with our topic on “Christian vision of
humanity”? Like the frogs, we tend to be contented with our present life, with our everyday activities and
preoccupations. We live in our own small wells. That well is not outside us, but inside us – the well of our
personhood. Until an experience shakes us up to raise questions about ourselves.

Experiences of happiness, fulfillment or joy tell us that these are closest to what it means to be
human. These experiences make us get in touch with our true humanity. We find happiness in being true
to ourselves when we loved, accepted, respected, given importance, and valued for what we are, with our
strengths and limitations. Happiness is in being ourselves. Happy moments make us realize that we are
fully alive.

There is however, the paradox at the other side - in our unhappy moments. Negative experiences
of sadness, rejection, sorrow and pain have two aspects. These experiences tell us that there are things
that are not supposed to be in life. No one among us is happy in being sad, unloved, sick, and in pain.
Deep within us, our inner selves protest against these experiences of negativity. “This is not what life is
all about!”

As we protest against these experiences, they tell us that we long or desire for something “more”
than the suffering we have. In these experiences of suffering, we have a glimpse of what should be in
life. In the midst of pain, we yearn for relief or healing, in loneliness we seek companionship, in poverty
we dream for abundance, in confusion we seek clarity, in war we hope for peace, and so on. The face of
protest has a corresponding face of affirmation. We seem to have an intuition of what it means to be truly
human, to be fully alive through our experiences of unhappiness.
 Hence, in both the happiest and unhappiest moments, we experience deeply our humanity. The
mystery, if we may call it this way, is that in both positive and negative experiences, we connect or
reconnect with other humanities. In moments of happiness, people celebrate the life we have
rediscovered, and in moments of unhappiness, people are beside us in sympathy or solidarity.

Those “depth experiences” (remember this word from Theology 1?) lead us to affirm that our
desire for a fuller life is also the desire of other people. It is not material things that establish the ground
of our interconnectedness to one another but those deep experiences, with their contradictions, that bond
us as a family of human beings.

Consider for example the floods that wreck lives of people or a war that kills innocent people, or
a woman who is sexually victimized. We do not know them personally but their experiences of suffering
open our hearts to be one with them. The same with the happiest moments, when we see people
cherishing moment in laughter or joy with tears, our hearts get warmed in delight. We are happy for a
friend who passes a subject and sad if the friend fails. We grieve at the loss of a beloved family member
or a friend, and we rejoice at the reunion of ties.

In the midst of joys and pains in life, we seem to know what we want to be as persons and as
communities.

B. The Christian Vision of Humanity

St. Irenaeus was a priest-bishop and scholar of Lyon (today in southern France) in the late second
century. During his time, there were Christians who believed that Jesus Christ was not a human being but
a pure divine God who took only the form of human flesh. These believers were called Gnostics (from
Greek word gnosis or “knowledge”) because they adhered to rigid meditations and prayer so that their
“mind” or spirit will know the truths of God. The ideas were not accepted by the Church and St. Irenaeus
took the burden to prove that the Gnostics were wrong in their belief in God and Jesus. He wrote:

The glory of God gives life; those who see God receive life. For this reason, God,
who cannot be grasped, comprehended or seen, allows himself to be seen, comprehended
and grasped by men, that he may give life to those who see and receive him. It is
impossible to live without life, and the actualization of life comes from the participation
in God, while participation in God is to see God and enjoy his goodness. (St. Irenaeus of
Lyon Adversus Haereses or Against Heresies)

St. Irenaeus wanted to show that God can be experienced in the everyday, ordinariness of life. It
is not only through the mind or the intellect that we can grasp the God who have decided to be “seen,
comprehended and grasped” by human beings. God can be experienced with all our human senses,
including our bodily senses because it is impossible “to live without life.” The desire of God, St. Irenaeus
said, is for humanity to “see God and enjoy his goodness” and those who live life in its goodness give
glory to God. He gave a famous statement to which St. Irenaeus will be remembered till today:

“The glory of God is the human person fully alive!”

This is how St. Irenaeus envisioned humanity. God is glorified when humans live life in its
fullness, that is, “to live life and enjoy God’s goodness.” St. Irenaeus was not novel in his ideas, in fact,
he reflected a lot on the writings about Jesus of Nazareth that was circulating during his time. He drew
conclusion of the human fully alive from his readings of the life of Jesus. It means that it was Jesus of
Nazareth who first proclaimed the deeper truth about human beings.
 The deeper truth about humanity for Jesus of Nazareth is the experience of the kingdom or reign
of God. We have heard of this concept in Theology I and we repeat here that this is at the center of the
life, ministry, and death of Jesus. Jesus spoke about God’s kingdom in parables, yet in a more vivid and
effective way, he demonstrated God’s kingdom through his actions by healing the sick, casting out
demons, showing compassion to the poor, dining with outcasts and forgiving sinners. He instructed not
only his disciples but all those who care to listen to know that the way to the Kingdom requires a change
of life (metanoia) where sharing, inclusivity, solidarity, and service, especially to the “least” and “lost”,
are the principal values of human living.

Jesus teaches about the Kingdom, both in its nearness or the here-and-now reality and in its future
fulfillment. He offers the Kingdom of God as the horizon against which life is to be lived out and it is the
goal to which all must point (Harington, 39). The best evidence for this present and future reality of God’s
Kingdom is Jesus’ own life, which lived out and practiced the values of the Kingdom. In other words, the
vision of the truly human who lives a fuller life necessitates the practicing or the doing of the vision in the
concrete circumstances of the present life. Such values and principles of he Kingdom of God is centered
on love, joy peace, mercy and justice.

C. Madaling Maging Tao, Mahirap Magpakatao

For Jesus of Nazareth, the goal of being human thus is to experience the Kingdom of God. In the
version of St. Irenaeus of Lyon of Jesus’ call, it is to live life fully alive by enjoying the goodness we
have received from God. The patron saint of our university, St. Vincent de Paul, a faithful follower of
Jesus, understood the call of living a life patterned after Jesus himself. He says:

 “One of the first things God will show us will be the reasons why He acted the way He did on
earth; for you see, God does nothing without some good purpose and only very justly; that’s
why we must be conformed to His Will in everything and adore His ever-admirable
guidance...”

For St. Vincent, or “Lolo Enteng” as he is fondly called by the Adamsonians, our life must
conform to the life of Jesus. To “conform means not only to imitate or to match up what Jesus did, but to
be the body of Jesus who acts in the world. It is to think as Jesus thinks, feel as Jesus feels, and behave as
Jesus behaves. Speaking to his fellow priests, Lolo Enteng reiterates the demand of discipleship: “We
should have no other intention than to follow our Lord and to conform ourselves entirely to Him that
alone is capable of leading us to the practice of the Evangelical Counsels.”

If only we were like the frogs and Buchukoy who dared to climb out of the well. We may
suppose, however, that it was not easy also for them to make a decision and be bold enough to change the
direction of their lives. Because life is not a straight line but crooked and winding, we do struggle through
the way towards the vision of the human fully alive. The Filipinos know this well:
 Madaling maging tao, mahirap magpakatao. (Tagalog)
- “It is easy to be born as human being but it is difficult to be a human person.”
- Or, “It is easy to be human but it’s hard to act like one.”
- Or, “It is easy to give birth to a human being, but it is hard to be truly human.”

1. What do you think of this Filipino saying?

2. Is this true or not? Do you agree or disagree?
3. What does it mean to be magpakatao?
4. What sort of actions, behaviours or practices will tell us that a person is marunong ó
magaling magpakatao?
5. On the other hand, what is the opposite of or contrary to marunong ó magaling magpakatao?
 In the next chapter, we shall discuss how the vision of becoming truly and fully human can be put
into practice in our everyday life.

Let us “ACT”

A. Summary
1) We need to pause in our everyday life to see our experience and raise questions about our
deepest longings in life: Who am I? What do I really want in life? Where am I going? By
thinking about these questions and feeling ourselves, we may see patterns in life and when
seen as a whole, it is like a painting on a canvas that signifies our life and its purpose on
earth.

2) Experiences of happiness, fulfillment or joy tell us that these are closest to what it means to
be human. These experiences make us get in touch with our true humanity. We find
happiness in being true to ourselves when we are loved, accepted, respected, given
importance, and valued for what we are, with our strengths and limitations

3) On the other hand, negative experiences of sadness, rejection, sorrow and pain have two
aspects. These experiences tell us that there are things that are not ought in life. Deep within
us, our inner selves protest against these experiences of negativity. “This is not what life is all
about!”

4) In these experiences of suffering, we have glimpses of what should be in life: in the midst of
pain, we yearn for relief or healing, in loneliness we seek companionship, in poverty we
dream for abundance, in confusion we seek clarity, in war we hope for peace, and so on. The
face of protest has a corresponding face of affirmation. We seem to have an intuition of what
it means to be truly human, to be fully alive, through our experiences of unhappiness.

5) In both the happiest and unhappiest moments, we experience deeply our humanity. The
mystery is that in both positive and negative experiences, we connect or reconnect with other
humanities.

6) From a Christian perspective, our deepest longings in life are intimately related to a desire to
live a truly and human life. In the words of St. Irenaeus, “The glory of God is the human
person fully alive!”

7) For Jesus of Nazareth, the deeper truth about humanity is the experience of the kingdom or
reign of God. God’s kingdom is the horizon against which life is to be lived out and it is the
goal to which all must point.

8) To live out the values of the Kingdom, we need to conform our lives to Jesus. Learning from
St. Vincent de Paul, to conform is not only to imitate or to match up what Jesus did, but to be
the body of Jesus who acts in the world.

9) Living a fuller life in the present is not easy, however. The Filipino saying challenges us to
develop practices that are aligned to the practices of Jesus: Madaling maging tao, mahirap
magpakatao.
B. Silence and Prayer

Let us have some moments of silence to reflect on the words of St. Irenaeus: “The glory of God is
the human fully alive.”

After our personal silence and reflection, we read together Psalm 8:3-6:

“When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which
thou hast established; what is the human that thou art mindful of him and her; and the
son of man that thou dost care for him and her? Yet thou hast made him a little less
than God, and dost crown him with glory and honour. Thou hast given him dominion
over the work of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet...”

We are all invited to offer any prayer for those who are having difficult times today to live a
fuller life. We may also offer a prayer for ourselves. After each prayer, we respond: “Diyos na
mapagmahal, turuan at gabayan mo kami sa tunay na pagpapakatao.”(All together....)

Let us all recite the Adamsonian Prayer.