Modeling character after Christ ignites inner spark

Article 134 - Catechism of the Catholic Church Series
Paragraphs 1762 -1770

Many of you may recall your excitement as a teenager that the day finally arrived when you received your “learners permit” to drive a car. For me, following a meticulous reading of the driving manual from the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), and then the written test, my next challenge was to convince my dad to teach me how to actually drive. An empty church parking lot on a Sunday afternoon became the initial place where I sat behind the wheel for the first time and began my driving lessons. Later, I graduated to a quiet neighborhood with few moving vehicles before moving onto a regular thoroughfare.
After several months of patient preparation, I scheduled an appointment for my road test at the DMV. Soon after getting my official driver’s license, I had the good fortune of having kind neighbors who would often lend me their car. On one such occasion, I borrowed my neighbor’s car for a lengthy trip to another friend’s cabin about 100 miles from my home. When the day arrived, some friends and I began our journey; and, then it happened...about 70 miles into our trip, the engine stalled. Although I had filled the gas tank and had a fully charged battery, we did not move an inch. Lifting up the bonnet (that’s what we used to call the hood of the car), we discovered that the spark plugs were the problem. There was no electrical spark to cause the gas to generate power in the engine. As a result, the car failed to run.
Most of us see lots of stalled human engines all around us. It is as if there are many human beings who have lots of potential with the God-given gifts with which they have been blessed, but they are doing nothing and getting nowhere. Every human being has a certain amount of potential power, just as every automobile with gas and a battery has a certain amount of possible speed and energy. But, if there is no will — no spark — the human machine stands idle.
What is human will? That spark I just spoke about is the human will. It is the moving agent of the soul that dwells within each human being. Human will is required, is needed, for everything that we do — for getting out of bed, for eating, for walking, for resting, for working and even for praying or directing our thoughts to God. Every healthy person has the power to do these things, but each one of us needs a little spark, a little power to get going.
Those of us who seek to model our character after that of Christ have that spark. We have the desire to become more and more like Jesus. We feel drawn to imitate Him and want to be fired up to follow Him, driven to strive toward everything Christ-like. As the Catechism puts it, “human persons are ordered to beatitude by their deliberate acts: the passions or feelings they experience can dispose them to it and contribute to it” (ccc 1762).
What is this beatitude to which we are ordered? It is supreme blessedness that comes from God. What are the passions? “Feelings or passions are emotions or movements of the sensitive appetite (“the heart”) that incline us to act or not to act in regard to something felt or imagined to be good or evil” (ccc 1763). Passions “form the passageway and ensure the connection between the life of the senses and the life of the mind” (ccc 1764). In the Gospel of St. Mark, Jesus calls our hearts the source from which the passions originate: “what comes out of a person; that is what defiles” (see Mark 7:20).
Of course there are many passions, the principal ones being “love and hatred, desire and fear, joy, sadness, and anger” (ccc 1772). However, the “most fundamental passion is love, aroused by the attraction of the good” (ccc 1765). As St. Thomas Aquinas put it in his famous “Summa:” “to love is to will the good of another” (Summa Theologica, I-II, 26 4). Almost 1,000 years earlier, St. Augustine, in his work on the Blessed Trinity, said it this way: “only the good can be loved” (De Trinitate 8, 3, 4). The Catechism concludes, “Passions are evil if love is evil and good if it is good” (ccc 1766).
In and of themselves, “passions are neither good nor evil” (ccc 1767). What makes them good or evil is the underlying disposition to which they are directed or inclined. To say it another way, insofar as they engage reason and will, there can be either moral good or evil in them. And, as such, “emotions and feelings can be taken up into the virtues or perverted by the vices” (ccc 1768).
“Passions are morally good when they contribute to a good action, evil in the opposite case” (ccc 1768). When we decide in faith to follow the way of Jesus Christ, our human feelings “are able to reach their consummation in charity and divine beatitude” (ccc 1769).
“Moral perfection consists in our being moved to the good not by our will alone, but also by our sensitive appetite (“the heart”), as in the words of the psalm: ‘My heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God’” (ccc 1770). The perfection of moral good, therefore, borrowing from Psalm 84 in Sacred Scripture, consists in our being moved to the good not only by our will, but also by our heart. Thus, my friends, we must have heart in addition to that needed “spark” if we are to live life after the example of Jesus Christ.
Father Hillier serves as Director of the Office of the Pontifical Mission Societies, Censor Librorum and oversees the Office for Persons with Disabilities