“Learning to be a gift of self”

A talk given to young people at “Embrace the Grace” conference in New Norcia, December 2006.

1. Mystery of man as a person and his personal development.

"Man is precisely a person because he is master of himself and has self-control. Indeed, insofar as he is master of himself he can "give himself to the other."

"In inter-human relationships, therefore, the disinterested gift of self (of the person) stands at the basis of the whole order of love and the whole authenticity of love. The human being as a person is capable of such a gift. Moreover, a personal gift of this nature does not impoverish but enriches the giver." (John Paul II)

Male and Female are created by God in his image and likeness. Although we are in his likeness, we must remember that we are not God, but as the beings that we are, we are called to live in God's very love. The Church has explained why the word ‘person’ is the best word to describe what man is. The word is similar to the word ‘personal’, which means something which is our own and something unique or special to ourselves. To be a person therefore means we are personal towards somebody and personal for somebody. That somebody is primarily God and secondly our neighbor.

Lets consider for a moment what it means to experience being a person. If I ask around the room who are you ? What responses would I get? Some would say student, surfer, musician, priest, school kid and so on. But can you see that these are things that you do, they are in a sense a job or pastime that you do and that you either become happy doing them or are not happy doing. But they are not really who you are.

If you sit down and consider the question who am I, and you sit very still trying not to think, then in that split second space, between where one thought becomes another, you can see that you are really a somebody that is aware of the senses of taste, touch, smell, sight and hearing, and that also generates inner feelings as emotions and thoughts. So really all that each of you really are is awareness. Who Am I? I am awareness and conscious of it.

Each has an inner most secret life:

1. This is what we personally know and think

2. This is how we personally really feel with the real personal emotions

3. This is what we experience inside

These thoughts, feelings, emotions, are sometimes very difficult feelings and experiences to be able to name, they are confusing, we can’t easily put these experiences into words, this is especially so for young persons, sometimes we are not even aware of these emotions in ourselves, not conscious of them, they alter our behaviors and without our permission even affect our friendships with others. If this was not hard enough, each person also has to relate himself to other persons, in all their human and spiritual dimensions and also not forgetting in the first place to relating to God, who is a very special personal Father to us. The word ‘God’, already implies otherness, something other than human. We know we are not alone, we need to understand how to have peace with this rich experience of the inner life in order to give it to God and to others.

There is also the outer life, the person which people show to other people to feel better about themselves or more acceptable to them, or who we want other people to see us as. So for instance a person who likes Eminem or Paris Hilton soon wants to become Eminem and Paris Hilton and begins to act, think and talk like Eminem or Paris Hilton. This new false person who they in a way show off with and begin to act out as being, is not actually them. So this is why in the Bible it says “Children keep yourselves from the idols”. When we say somebody is a show off, it’s when they try to be more wonderful or clever or exciting then they actually feel inside in order to be accepted. They could be imitating somebody on TV, a friend, whoever it is, its not Jesus. When we imitate a false person, or be who we are really not, it means that the rich experience of me, the person who I really am inside, is not being shown to the world outside of me, to the people around me. I then cannot say that my inner life and outer life together, at the same time is who I am meant to be. If God says I am meant to be a person, in the image and likeness of God, and I know that I am not, how will I ever find happiness and peace with both my personal inner experienced life and my outer life, which is my interaction with others?

But in that inner life and the outer life we show, God must have the most intimate home. The Holy life of God inside a person is the only choice for a person to choose to follow and although at first we learn to imitate Christ by trying to follow his example, eventually we must take the grown up decision to actually be Jesus for others, out of love for Him. I repeat, one day, and it may as well be right now, you will have to take the grown up personal decision, all by yourself, to love Jesus and follow His commands, without making out as if they are too difficult for you, because anyhow you are meant to do it together with God and its impossible to perfect yourself, by yourself alone, without Him.

All the emotions, all the feelings, all the thoughts, all you experience, all the senses of taste, touch, smell, hearing and sight, all your awareness, all you can be conscious of, all these are a gift of God to you. This is who you are, this is who the person is and who your neighbor is, because he also experiences what you do. God gives all of this, so that you may experience the beauty of this world, the intimacy, the friendship, the experience of prayer, the love for God and love for others. This is what you must use these for. When you try to do that, you are pleasing to God, and he will help you. If you don’t realize this truth about your inner and outer life, you will not find God in all things.

If you don’t stop pleasuring the senses and emotions for your own selfish satisfaction by using people without considering their needs, masturbation, over-eating, immoral movies, dirty magazines, music that sounds good but has an non catholic - inhuman message which confuses and leads to different kind of destructions. You will not be able to find God, because you are choosing to use your senses, emotions and your awareness in a way that God never intended them to be used. So to answer the question: Who is my neighbor?

The answer is, he or she is another like me, a person full of awareness and consciousness, conscious of themselves and of others like me. There is no difference between us, only the sameness of being in the image and likeness of God. Love them, love yourself, both as little children of God.

Lets now look at friendships with our family friends neighbors and enemies and the way we talk to each other and treat each other.

It’s simple, never dare to talk to anybody without utmost love and respect, always calmly, never shouting. Never use your tongues or minds to manipulate, deceive or lie, don’t swear or talk or think dirty things because out of the same mouth and thoughts you also pray. If you sense any negative emotion within you when you talk to another person, any anger or frustration, stop talking calm down, and try again with love and peace. For people who have trouble with being real, we must have sympathy and love because actually many of them are not even aware that they are showing off, they do it to feel good but are sometimes not really conscious that they do it. So we must love them and gently explain these things to them, if they will listen.

If you don’t lose your facade, your false-self, your masks, you will not find God. Don’t fall into a complex, don’t worry, it’s easy to become real, but speak to your priest or spiritual director about it. May you learn something about your inner life and outer life right here and right know, God loves to be there with the real you, for wherever you are there God is too.

God calls us to a "self-realization". John Paul II reminds us "The person is realized through love." We cannot understand the person as a person if we do not have and choose to exercise our human freedom to give to others. The Pope says: "If man does not commit himself to becoming a gift for others, then this freedom can become dangerous. It will become the freedom to do what I myself consider as good, what brings me a profit or a pleasure, even a sublimate pleasure."You must be aware then that love directed to the wrong things is supremely dangerous. John Paul II realized that a finite creature given such powers is one of great dignity, of great worth.

So slowly, gently with a lot of love for yourselves and also to all others, learn about yourselves, your emotions, your thoughts, master them, don’t be scared of them, don’t be scared of yourselves or unhappy with who you are, just do what is right, wise and sensible.
See that the real you is greater than the taste, touch, smell, hearing, sight and emotions. You are not who the world tells you that you are, you are who God intended you to be. So be.

2. Man in the light of the mystery of God

Pope Benedict XVI reminds us that we are “not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.” Therefore each of you has a special vocation: a singular, unique place in the cosmic drama of God’s creative and redemptive purposes. Each one of you is an actor/actress in a drama with eternal consequences. And each one of you has a distinctive role to play in that drama. No matter what we will be doing tomorrow, or next week, or next year, however, there is a lesson for you: Don't think of your life simply as a "career.“ Think of your life as a vocation – vocation to love. God has something unique in mind for each of you. There is something singular that each of you brings to the making of history. Think of your life in those terms, and you'll never fall prey to the most deadening of temptations: the temptation of boredom which is so destructive. Existence without passion for life and love leads to various addictions and spiritual death.

Each of you lives a life that is structured like a drama. Why? Because each one of you lives, every day, in the gap between the person you are today and the person you ought to be. That's a dramatic situation. Closing that gap - becoming more the person I ought to be - is the drama of daily life. Each individual person, however, from the moment of conception is willed for his own sake, not as a means of something else. Each has eternal life as his immediate destiny.

In the designs of providence, there are no mere coincidences. Every human life is of consequence. Every human life has inherent, built-in, inextinguishable dignity. Every human life has infinite value. There are no "ordinary" people. You have never met, played, studied, or argued with a "mere mortal“. Everyone you have met in your life - everyone you will meet in the years ahead - is someone with a dignity beyond measure. Everyone you will ever meet is a someone with an eternal destiny. To live that truth is to live life at its most bracingly, engagingly, thrillingly, human. To live that truth is to live life as the adventure that God intended it to be from the beginning. To live that truth is to become the kind of person who can be happy living with God forever.
Our ability to be a free gift of self depends on our concept of personalism: "Man is precisely a person because he is master of himself and has self-control. Indeed, insofar as he is master of himself he can "give himself to the other. In inter-human relationships, therefore, the disinterested gift of self (of the person) stands at the basis of the whole order of love and the whole authenticity of love. The human being as a person is capable of such a gift. Moreover, a personal gift of this nature does not impoverish but enriches the giver." says John Paul II. He continues: "In inter-human relationships the disinterested gift of self (of the person) stands at the basis of the whole order of love and the whole authenticity of love. The human being as a person is capable of such a gift. Moreover, a personal gift of this nature does not impoverish but enriches the giver. I may want another person to desire the same good which I myself desire. Obviously, the other must know this end of mine, recognize it as a good, and adopt it. If this happens, a special bond is established between me and this other person: the bond of a common good and of a common aim. This special bond does not mean merely that we both seek a common good, it also unites the persons involved internally, and so constitutes the essential core round which any love must grow.” ThePope, as a great analyst of the condition of human culture notices that “The man of today often lacks the sense of the transcendental, of supernatural realities, of something that is beyond him. Man cannot live without something that goes further, that is beyond him. Man lives his life if he is aware of this, if he must always go beyond himself, transcend himself. This transcendence is deeply inscribed in the human constitution of the person."

We should not forget also about the content of our character as a person. Only a people of character are able to understand that freedom “is not a matter of doing what we like, but of having the right to do what we ought” as John Paul II claims in his teaching on personalism. Only a people of character are able to build community out of the materials of diversity. Only a people of character know how to deploy the explosion of knowledge in the life sciences so that the biotechnologies of the future serve the ends of genuine healing, rather than leading us into a brave new world of stunted humanity. Only a people of character are able to defend freedom in the world by defending the human rights of all, especially the first human right of religious freedom.

3. Jesus Christ fully reveals man to himself

“Man cannot live without Love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.
This revelation of love is also described as mercy, and in man’s history this revelation of love and mercy has taken a form and a name: That of Jesus Christ.

...The man who wishes to understand himself thoroughly he must with his unrest, uncertainty and even his weakness and sinfulness, with his life and death, draw near to Christ. He must, so to speak, enter into Him with all his own self, he must appropriate and assimilate whole of reality of the incarnation and redemption in order to find himself.” (John Paul II “Redemptor hominis”)

How can we reach the real meaning of love? Our religion gives us the answer: in Christ’s cross and resurrection there is the essence of love: a self-giving. We give ourselves away for the other person, even if it means (and especially when it means) sacrifice and suffering for us. Jesus’ cross seems to say to us: Remember: real love arises on the grave of one’s EGO. It means that when our ego and self-importance has died then we are able to experience God’s life and love and participate intimately in it, and we are also able to share and give a real love.
Genuine love is always connected with patience, joy, responsibility, commitment, sacrifice, fidelity, acceptance, truth, forgiveness, freedom, patience, support...

Christ commanded his disciples to love one another. The Christian loves his brother because the brother “is Christ”. He seeks the mind of the Church because the Church ”is Christ”. The Christian unites himself in the worship of the Church because it is the worship which Christ offers to His Father.

Man always makes time for what he loves. If he does not make time for God, it is because he does not love God. If you have no time for an intimate dialogue with God in prayer it might mean you don’t love God and… yourself. If you have no time for your spouse, children or friends, it is because you do not love them enough. Erich Fromm, the German Psychoanalyst, once said “An egoistical person is the one who does not love himself enough (in mature and proper way)”

Thomas Merton, a 20th century Anglo-American Catholic writer and a Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky (USA), says: “If I allow the Holy Spirit to work in me, if I allow Christ to use my heart in order to love my brother and sister with it, I will soon find that Christ loving in me and through me has brought to light Christ in my brother. And I will find that the love of Christ in my brother, loving me in return, has drawn forth the image and the reality of Christ in my own soul. This, then, is the mystery of Christ manifesting Himself in the love which no longer regards my brother as an object or as a thing, which no longer treats him merely as a friend, but sees in him the same Lord who is the life and light of my own soul.”

Here we cite the words of Jesus about the grain of wheat, which he himself laid down as the fundamental axiom of the Christian life: "He who loves his life will lose it, while he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life", “Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it".Love claims the beloved totally. This is obvious in the marriage relationship. It is also mandatory in our relationship with Jesus. We enjoy a love relationship with the Lord. He has given himself totally to the Father and to us. Therefore He is the best teacher of learning to be a gift of self. For the relationship to flourish, we have to accept his gift of himself and give ourselves totally to him.
What does Christianity have to offer that’s worth giving up everything else for, including one’s own life?
That price is the blood of Jesus shed for us on the cross. Is your life given over to God?

What does Jesus say to us about God, about Himself and us?

You must look at Jesus in the light of human sin as a rejection of God’s love. A sin is a deformation of God’s image and likeness in human being in which he was created. A sin is a betrayal of God, oneself and others. Jesus enters the consequence of human sin which is the separation of man from God - in other words Jesus enters our hell, our disintegration to bring us back to unity with God, our Father and with one another. Our sins, the things we have done which pull us away from rather than toward our God, are special burdens which inhibit us from truly focusing on another, from truly seeing and feeling the need of another, and from truly opening our hearts in prayer toward them. The phrase “physician, heal thyself” applies here. Sin turns us inward, upon ourselves, trying to hide ourselves from God like Adam and Eve in the garden. Repentance, the honest awareness of our imperfection, turns us outward towards God again and we once again realize that our loving God is there and has never left our side. Jesus gives us one simple plan – travel light, go where you are welcomed and heal those in need.

4. Love is the key to become a gift of self

Israel had acknowledged that through her entire history there was one and only God who embraced her with an everlasting love. The Chosen Nation knew God’s love was faithful and that he called his children to love Him with the same pure, faithful and total love. People of the Old Covenant knew that there was no real freedom without holy presence of God in one’s being. They understood that man’s strongest desire is to know, love and adore God. The human heart cannot be satisfied until it rests in Him, until it is fulfilled with His love.

If we possess any strong attachment to the things of this earth, we cannot possess true charity. For anyone who really loves God prefers to know and experience God rather than creatures. The whole set and longing of such a person's mind is ever directed toward God. The Pope states: “For God is far superior to all his creation, since everything which exists has been made by God and for God. And so, in deserting God, who is beyond compare, for inferior works of creation, we show that we value God, the author of creation, less than creation itself.”

The first and most important commandment, according to Jesus, is to love God with your whole being. Loving God wholly is not giving a piece of attention here and there. Loving God wholly is not deciding to spend time with Him just when you have problems and are desperate for help. Loving God wholly is not begrudgingly sharing your gifts. Loving God wholly is so much more - it is focusing all of your passion, your intelligence and your attention on your relationship with Him. It is a total immersion into the love of God and beginning to see yourself as a child of God - an extension of who He is because of our relationship with Him.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, a great Swiss theologian, says: “Human beings were created not to be satisfied with themselves but that, dead to self, they might, in Christ’s possession, possess all things in him.” We have been created for greater things. We have not been created to just pass through this life without aim. We have not been created to just eat, drink, do shopping, do sports, collect things, enjoy physical pleasure without limits and so on…Our main and greater aim is to love and be loved. John Paul reminds us that love is one of the greatest dramas of human existence.

But sadly talking about love, hoping for love, longing for love isn’t loving, and doesn’t make love happen. Now, don’t misunderstand, this is not a homily against love, or speaking about it, I hope rather it gives a way for us to really embrace life and love. Love is not something we create; rather it is a gift from God to which we respond. St Paul says: “Love is this, not that we have loved God, but rather that God has loved us”, Jesus adds “you did not choose me, I chose you, to go forth and bear fruit”.

“…love is enthusiasm rather then pensiveness.”

“…is love to be a compromise? Should it not be born continuously out of a struggle for the love of another human being?”

“The surface of love has its current - swift, flickering, changeable. A kaleidoscope of waves and situations full of attraction. This current is sometimes so stunning that it carries people away - women and men. They got carried away by the thought that they have absorbed the whole secret of love, but in fact they have not yet even touched it. They are happy for a while, thinking they have reached the limits of existence and wrested all its secret from it, so that nothing remains. That’s how it is: on the other side of that rapture nothing remains, there is nothing left behind it. But there can’t be nothing, there can’t. Man is a continuum, a totality and a continuity - so it cannot be that nothing remains!”

“Love is not an adventure. It has the taste of the whole man. It has his weight. And the weight of his whole fate. It cannot be a single moment. Man’s eternity passes through it. That is why it is to be found in the dimensions of God, because only He is eternity.
Man looking out into time. To forget, to forget. To be for a moment only, only now - and cut oneself off from eternity. To take in everything at one moment and lose everything immediately after. Ah, the curse of that next moment and all the moments through which you will look for the way back to the moment that has passed, to have it once more, and through it - everything.”

Karol Wojtyla “The Jeweler’s shop”

Thomas Merton states that “Man’s greatest dignity, his most essential and peculiar power, the most intimate secret of his humanity is his capability to love. This power in the depths of man’s soul stamps him in the image and likeness of God. Unlike other creatures in the world around us, we have access to the inmost sanctuary of our own being. We can enter into ourselves as into temples of freedom and of light. We can open the eyes of our heart and stand face to face with God our loving Creator”. The Christian love is the only answer for our daily questions: who are we?, where are we from?, what is our destiny? Man cannot live without love, and if the love is not genuine, than he must have some substitute – a corruption of real love. The most beautiful thing about the human person is that we can experience loving and be loved. Is there anything more beautiful about the person? You tell me? If I hold love for myself selfishly, afraid to give or share it, then I thwart the call of God, the plan of God. It is a gift given, and cannot be created by me, but once given it is remains a gift only if shared.
This is an obligation, not a wish. Not to choose to live the love given us by God diminishes and undoes us. And so what we do absolutely matters, and love is never easy, and will always demand all of us, and all we can be and give all the time. So we will spend our whole lives learning to return to God, by contemplation, service and love of others, in fact all others, the love God has given us.

Is my love active practical love in my acting or is my love really just emotions and thoughts?

For instance when I see sad persons do I go and talk to them be with them smile, or do I just sit in my own head thinking thoughts of love for them, and praying for them instead of praying for them and going to them to give them active practical love, not because you want to feel good about yourself or that you think you are a wonderful person, no, do so because you can just spend time with another person who is just as equal as you are and just as needy as you are. Remember you have been given gifts by God not for yourself but to share, if you have the gift of being friendly, but are not that clever, and your friend at school or work is clever but is sad, your gift to him or her is to be friendly to them and their gift to you is to perhaps share a bit of their knowledge and so make you have a richer inner life. So another person may have the gift of being a good cook while the other the gift of strength, these gifts must be given to each other and shared while all working together for the common good, which is that we can all feel happy together participating together in life.

So, do you know, really know how much God loves you? Can you say this in concrete tangible terms? What is God’s greatest manifestation of love in your life? What is God calling you to be and do because you are loved? How are you responding? How could your response be more full? How have you failed in a loving response and what can lead you to move forward?

5. Our civilization - crisis of humanity, culture of death

We live in superficial times. Listening to the average television commercial provides a pretty clear picture of what makes Australia tick - comfort, status, material possessions, personal appearance, prosperity, a laid-back existence. This sort of self-indulgent, problem-free philosophy of life might seem harmless, perhaps even a little endearing, were it not for the deeply sinister effects it has in promoting the culture of death. All of the most toxic elements of our society feed on the mindless cult of utility that measures everything and everyone with calculator in hand.

“The man of today often lacks the sense of the transcendental, of supernatural realities, of something that is beyond him. Man cannot live without something that goes further, that is beyond him. Man lives his life if he is aware of this, if he must always go beyond himself, transcend himself. This transcendence is deeply inscribed in the human constitution of the person." (John Paul II)

Narcism - when you are self-focused, unaware of the inner life of others, because you are so self absorbed with your own inner life and self, then you cannot progress in the spiritual life, you cannot progress in personal relationships with others. The opposite of this would be to try forget about yourself, and really try to speak to that other person in a gentle humble manner taking care to cherish and understand everything they are saying as they are saying it by listening carefully. When you feel the need to say something because you want attention on yourself, don’t, be humble.

Utilitarianism, hedonism - if you begin to chase after only satisfying yourself you cannot develop your self. These days sex has become an absolute and ultimate value or aim of human existing/behaving.

Conformism - when you do things because others are doing it and without thinking if you are doing it to feel accepted or if it is for your own good and development.

Materialism / consumerism - to have (things) or to be (a real person that God intended to be). Do I live to be a real person or do I live to have more things? I would like to invite you to reflect on the above, on the relation “between being more and having more“. Remember: Having more must never be allowed to win. If it did, we would lose the most precious gift of all: our humanity, our conscience, our dignity. Materialism kills an interior desire to be a gift of self…then an attitude of serving one another - living for one another vanishes.

In a society totally clueless to seeing the "vision of God in all things," the Church offers a radical Christian humanism that could transform the human family into a civilization of love. This is a humanism that acknowledges the fact that other persons are just like me: each is another I. The fundamental moral principle says that whenever one uses another person as a means to an end, one should never use them without considering their own aims and aspirations, never as mere instruments or objects, and that the end is towards a common good.

Make sure you look at your personal culture and character. Do you take your role models from some movie or pop star? Is your personal culture, your character the one you chose for yourself, or did the world choose it for you. Look at Jesus, read his gospels, you were taught how to read so that you could primarily read the Gospels, the very words of God to you. Look at his personal culture, at his character, choose that for yourself instead. Then become the person that he and you would both like you to be with His help, because you will never be able to do it alone, it’s not possible in fact.

6. The crisis of inter-personal relationships in our era

A little bit about the condition of a human relationship in the Western world called by John Paul II ‘the culture of death’. There is something inherently strange about the way people are to each other in these countries. There is a tendency for people to be more distant to each other. We face a greater fear of each other, fear of trusting each other, a fear of another person getting too close (I don’t mean this in any sexual way but in friendly innocent contacts with each other), a fear of touching each other in a non-sexual way by walking arm in arm, or shoulder to shoulder, by hugs and kisses when greeting each other, it’s almost as if this is a paranoia.

People are cold to each other, very formal, so very respectful of keeping a distance from another and not talking about personal things that eventually it leads to most people finding themselves isolated, like dessert islands, because nobody speaks to each other. In effect because we don’t speak to each other nobody really learns how to help another, this eventually leads to selfishness, because it becomes too difficult.

Look at the trains, everybody on the train sits in their seat, not moving, nowadays listening to their ipops, nobody smiles, nobody dares to catch another’s eye, nobody wants to talk to anybody, everybody is self conscious, which in a way means selfishness. This is not natural. In other cultures people are talking to each other and laughing and cracking jokes with strangers.

American movies and lyrics of pop and rock music are full of killing, sex and violence, drug taking and drinking. Just look at films like American Pie, Terminator, or reality shows like ’Big Brother” or listen to songs by e.g. Pink, Lady Ga-Ga and so on. If you have this on TV or in the radio, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, how do you think you will begin to think or react? At the very least you will not be so shocked or sympathetic, when you hear of another person being beaten up, or addicted to drugs.

All that I want to say is be aware of this deficiency inherent in our modern culture, why? Because in this climate, it’s easy to treat people like “he or she is something else - an object” instead of “he or she is the same as me, an amazing person”. In this climate it’s easy to dump another person or get divorced. The person being dumped easily becomes an object, a thing which we can forget about, treat badly or ignore, because they hurt us. But that’s not the case, the relationship may not work out, but there is no way that one can treat that person without love and respect and still call oneself a catholic. Forgiveness must occur. Become friends first. Or take for instance Abortion, a baby is not another person, this culture will teach, it’s something else, we don’t know what but it’s not the same as me. In the Western society dolphins, dogs or cats get more sympathy than pre-born human babies.

Don’t be like the culture of today teaches you to be. Do not allow this dreadful culture to make you its own victims. You belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God. Awakening of your ability to know that you are the captain of your own ship will perhaps still happen to you as you grow older, depending how old you are. Don’t worry, do not be afraid. Remember that you are still young, God will work everything in his own time but you need to make one step towards Him first. You are developing still and you will continue even when you reach thirty it will not stop.

7. Being a gift of self in marriage

By willing the good of the other—that is, by self–giving love—male and female become one in spirit, will, and truth. That gift comes not solely from one partner, this would be unreciprocated love; the gift of one is matched by the gift of the other, freely given; their love is mutual. To speak of Adam and Eve as “in communion” is to capture their gift of each to each other. Their beings come to rest in one another.

Thus, however imperfectly, our sexuality reveals to us that, whatever else He might be like, our Creator lives in self–giving communion. This experience of communion between woman and man, self–giving, in mutuality, and without either’s dominance, is more like the inner life of God than anything else that we encounter in creation. To self–giving communion, willing wholly the good of the other as other, giving of self freely and in accord with the creative will of the Creator, nothing else in the experience of the race comes close. Propelled by its most divine–like energies, l’amor is sexual, erotic, physical, and in that form its unity is procreative. From two–in–one there comes a third. From the love of two there comes the miraculous and startling creativity of birthing, pushing forth a newborn child—not just “child,” but “girl” or “boy.”

The essence of betrothed love is self-giving. This is something different from and more than attraction, desire or even goodwill. These are all ways by which one person goes out towards another, but none of them can take him as far in his quest for the good of the other as does betrothed love. `To give oneself to another is something more than merely `desiring what is good for another even if as a result of this another `I’ becomes as it were my own, as it does in friendship.

9. Practical advice:

- be holy which means put your trust in God, receive and accept His life and his plan for life for you, make yourself a gift to Him your caring Father as a response to His love towards you. How do I make myself a gift to God? To achieve this you must obey Him and submit your entire life to His will. Ask God for a burning desire for Him and for His love every single day. Ask Him for His grace to make you like Jesus in everything you say and do and to experience the joy of His love.

- ask the Father for a deep faith in Christ Jesus as the Lord of your life! Find out what areas of your life in which Jesus is not present and not welcomed. Be resolute in following Christ - don’t hesitate to offer Him your entire life, don’t look back, trust in Him, trust His love, allow Him to shape your present and future and your relationships with whom you meet in your daily life.

- be faithful to your prayer life

- gain self-knowledge in the light of knowledge of God

- the gift of self begins with the idea that we are a community of persons, each of whom is made in the image and likeness of Almighty God.

And what about time and talent? Giving of yourself means more than just giving financially; it also means sharing your gifts and talents with your brothers and sisters. How eager are you to do this? There are certainly lots of opportunities for that right in your parish:
When you hear requests made for volunteers (either here or someplace else), what is your typical response? Do you think to yourself, “That’s not my concern; let someone else do it”; or do you think to yourself, “Would I be able to do that? Is that a place where I could utilize my gifts effectively?”

- form groups of friends who go visit nursing homes, children’s homes and so on…just do it! Don’t talk too much about how to serve others or how to become a gift of self; just put your good intentions, ideas and projects into action. Make an investment in acting and practical love for God and his children.

You will only really find the happiness you seek from socializing when you decide that you must become close friends with each other. There only maybe a few of you to start with, but if you become close friends others would see the benefits and would no doubt want to join you or follow your example.

Our secular culture teaches us to be selfish, self-centered, interested only in ourselves, and does not encourage us to work together as friends for the common good. Look at Jesus and his disciples and the people who followed, they all wanted to be together and be real to each other.

Many TV and movies actors and so called entertainers are not ideal role models; be wise enough to recognize this and do not try to imitate life styles that will lead you away from God. So what does it mean to become close friends; it means spending time together practicing the skills of looking for the common good in all of your dealings with each other. Conversation should be about how to become greater friends and at the same time increasing your personality and spirituality. We should spend more time together and speaking to each other like Jesus and his disciples did. Talk to each other; if you feel lonely seek out those people who share your common goal and interact with them; create together an atmosphere of purity in love.

Before you start to speak to one another learn how to listen - talking and listening (words, silence, feelings, body language) with respect and understanding as to an equal partner. Don’t let your conversations be about who can say the most about what they want to say, let your conversations rather be about how can I listen more to what the person actually wants to tell me or to learn from me.

Remember: the better you listen, the more you will learn about the person you are speaking with.

Be attentive to the real messages your partner/friend is sending you. Express gratitude to your listener. Above all remember their dignity and do not judge for in judging you will not see the beauty that even the most difficult person has within. Look for beauty whenever you observe yourself judging.

Conclusion

The person who is self-governed, self-determined then must decide what to do with himself, with what he is, with the full revelation of himself to himself as the only creature created by God for himself, as a unique being. The final purpose of the pastoral constitution the Vatican II document “Gaudium et Spes” is to show that only by self-giving can this person really be himself because that is the nature of the love he has received, a love received as a gift, designed to imitate God's own love manifest best in the Incarnation, a love even unto the Cross. It is this personal, self-giving love alone that will make the world what it ought to be and that will be the eternal life that is the final answer to all of our questionings.

In our learning to be a gift of self we need to contemplate God's presence so that our hearts could be able to love Him and every human being. We need to remain in Christ's love and continually cooperating with the Holy Spirit if we want our various activities in our parishes to bring glory to God.

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“Learning to be a gift of self”