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THE CALL TO BE HOLY In the sign of the times and through His prophetic word, the Lord is calling His people to bloom, bear fruit, and lead others to do the same, in short, to become holy as He is Holy. He is continually calling us, yet the volunteers are still small in number. For those who hear Him and answer, the witness to the response to follow will appear in four areas. They are sequential and upbuildingly interdependent. Coming forward involves commitment, relationship, community, and evangelism; a yes to each area and a willingness to cooperate so that growth leads to a unified wholeness through Jesus. What follows are thoughts which are a response to a sense within me to define these areas as to what the call to His Holiness is to mean for me right now. Even though they are not all inclusive, I share them in hopes that they may be an instrument in helping someone else also.
Commitment Commitment is basically a freely chosen decision to stick to or stand by someone or something. It is a self-imposed obedience to fulfill a set standard of expectations to achieve a particular result or end which one personally consents to as having meaning and merit. How consistently one sticks to this decision in thoughts, words, and actions reveals the depth and strength of the commitment made. How persistently one strives to change old values, ways of thinking, talking, and habits or acting reveals the degree to which one is involved and the extent of being personally experienced. How earnestly one seeks to know more fully and understand its application to the nitty gritty of daily life reveals the sincerity and wholeheartedness of the decision. The kind and amount of fruits produced compared to the expected outcomes of such a decision reflects the underlying faith in the object of the decision as well as the extent of progress toward the transformation to oneness with the object of decision within one's person. It is not born in full bloom, but is conceived and requires to be exercised and survive conflict to achieve steadfastness; otherwise, it remains either wishy-washy or dies. For the child of God, commitment is a voluntary response to God's calling and a decision to stick to and stand by Him and His Word. It is the decision to continually, faithfully, loyally, and obediently follow and act on His Word as the best we can at that moment relying on His power, even when the promptings, feelings, and desires that arise within us seek to pull us contrary to His Will and even when it goes against our personal conveniences or what others think of us. It is a lifelong process in which we continually decide to follow Him at all times and at all costs, realizing that as we cooperate and grow we will not always achieve this goal, needing daily to renew it and at times needing to be raised up by Him lovingly once again. We must hear. We must believe. We must choose to respond. We must cooperate. Our commitment is to decide to become like unto Him, holy for He is Holy. Relationship Relationship is a contact or interconnection of a person's existence with that of another person. It will range from shallow to intense, remote to intimate, disintegrative to unifying, imposed to freely chosen. It will vary in degree of its significant impact on self and the other person and will operate somewhere between a positive and negative extreme in its results or experience. In whichever direction a relationship may go, each

person decides and makes a decision or commitment to some extent, favorably or unfavorably, which guides his thinking, speaking, and acting, which in turn controls the effects of the interconnection, defining the limits of the other's affect in it. Needless to say, the outcome will be experienced anywhere from upliftingly creative and regenerative to hostilely destructive. In the realist sense, the freedom or bondage existing in such a contact determines the life or death of both persons physically, emotionally, psychologically, and/or spiritually in that particular instance of lived experience. The results of any relationship, isolated or on a continual basis, will open or close the possibility of growth in other areas of contact with another self by virtue of the experienced overflowing fullness or its osmotic void. In short, one will either be encouraged by a growth producing balm or be repelled by the sting of the injected vile poison sapping its confidence to further risk contact. The way the relationship permeates and affects the whole person will either tend to generate a path to order and harmony or one to disorder and chaos.

By God's design, man is created to be in such a contact with Him and the live and inanimate things of the world about him that all encounters are to lead to lifegiving, maturing experiences and away from all that would impede or destroy such growth. Man was created to live fully, not die. Our hearts confirm this even when we have erroneously sought a contact with another person that had led to bitter roots. Because our hearts are disordered, it takes our decision and commitment to seek to be transformed into God's design by the power of His Living Spirit. Even the commitment itself depends on Him to grow and to be put into practice steadfastly.

Relationship, like commitment, is not exercised or put into practice abstractly or in a vacuum. By the gifts of faith and God's Spirit, we can be in contact with the Living God - our first and most essential priority. Our Creator God knows whom He created. Left alone unto ourselves and Him without further contact with His other sons and daughters of creation, we generally tend toward a distorted and anemic relationship with Him. Through our flesh and blood existence with other persons, we concretely begin to experience the contact we are called to with Our Father and Brother. For that matter, Jesus tells us that we can be sure that our relationship with God is true only when its power is witnessed in contact with our brothers and sisters. In proportion as that experience grows, so does our capacity to relate and be in contact with our God, and visa versa. The decision to accept the call to be in an experienced relationship with our God as a whole person in body and in spirit is only valid to the extent that we strive to do the same with His children and learn the lessons He wishes to teach us. His same Life and Spirit bonds, connects, and empowers us to experience a fruitful contact and interconnectedness leading to the fullness of eternal life in union with Him and our brothers and sisters as He has chosen it to be.

God has made His unalterable commitment to us and has given us the set standard by which we can verify that we are committing ourselves, i.e., to stand by Him and His Word in seeking to live in a relationship with Him. We are called to freely choose to grow in connecting ourselves in the most intense, intimate, and unifyingly positive way possible with our God and each other. We are called to become transformed like unto Him - Holy!

Community is the lived experience of mutually shared beliefs, ways of thinking, and oriented activities. It forms an underlying bond. It gives credibility to pursuing a common end. It provides a basis of support and structure for the inter-contacts of unique individual existences as they seek to grasp ordered meaning in the pilgrimage of growing and maturing during their short physical tenure of earthly life. It is the seedbed which fosters and nurtures the development of the human person to achieve the end for which he is destined as it is in harmony with an ordained blueprint inscribed in the heart. It must be discerned and encouraged to bloom according to the set standard of expectations which verifies its fruitfulness. It is the basis and fiber of all which will guide the approach one will take in future contacts with the world about him. It is not always the result of ones total understanding, though even then it is not without a designed purpose, as is especially witnessed when it tends to create conflict with what the person pursues as desirable in opposition to thoughts, feelings, and desires which pull in a warring stance. In its maturity, community becomes the outcome of personally involved and experienced decisions to mutually submit ones existence to other selves under the banner of that which will lead all as a body to unified completion and wholeness.

In the infancy of each person's existence and experienced community, the structure is readily assimilated, accepted, and unquestionably adhered to due to the need for security and the inadequacy to encounter the complexity immersed in, despite the objective quality of what is practiced. Ensuing encounters, however, generate the conflicts and tests requiring a conscious affirmation of its meaning, merit, and worth. That which has provided the basis of ones existing to that point has to be consciously chosen if the continuance of allegiance is to avoid the characteristics of bondage, idolatry, and mechanical roteness and free one to growth. Community becomes then less of a blind acceptance and more of a conscious decision to be validated in its experienced fruits. The care and belonging sensed and desired becomes progressively an involved and personal experience through the mutual selfgiving. That which would impede its growth for self and others is more readily sorted out and separated from oneself, though not necessarily without difficulty.

Community in its broadest sense has many levels of involvement and a whole spectrum of pursued ends. It ranges from creative to destructive in scope. A person usually is involved in many avenues of community, in each to a more or less intense degree. The more a person is involved with those which tend toward his growth as destined, the more harmony and order appear as fruits in his behavior affecting favorably himself and those with whom he is in contact. The stronger the bond for wholeness, the stronger the decision to stick to that contact with the other person's world - in short a committed relationship. Community involves the decided contact of self with another with a sense of permanence. It can be witnessed in the binding together of only two persons, for better or for worse.

God calls us into His Kingdom, His divine community. His decision to stay in contact with us has already been made by virtue of His promise and unalterable Word. We are called to freely choose to do the same, to make and live out by His power a committed relationship with Him and those also whom He has called into His household. His act is immutable, ours is to verify itself in witness to and with our brothers and sisters through Jesus Christ. Only in the concrete expression with those like unto ourselves can we testify to or gain strength from the fact that we are living in community with God. In the growth of the experience with other selves, we come to understand what our God means and asks of us. In that growth we can more sincerely and knowledgeably come to our God and by Him be empowered to be even more committed with our fellows. To God first who sends us to our brothers and sisters, only to be able to return more deeply to Him is the continuous cycle asked of us in our pilgrimage to be transformed into His Holiness. He has ordained it and we must not disdain it lest we suffer eternal chaos and loss.

He calls each of us to the extent destined and empowers us to achieve it ongoingly. We are to obediently follow His leadings. Our lived experience of community is only valid and truly fruitful when we are in order with His expectations for us uniquely and are progressing to it because of Him. For all, the bold witness of community within our physical family is primary. For some, an added intense covenant agreement between families is in response to obedience; for others it is to the household within the parish body; for others it is in a religious body of priests/brothers or sisterhood. The greatness or lessness of our community witness comes only in contrast to our obedience in responding to our vocation and His strength which empowers us and which He in His wisdom has ordained. There are many rooms in His mansion, none less complete than another. They are all within His house. Our call is to an obedient, committed relationship expressed within the Divine Community of Himself and all His children. Then and only then can we become truly like unto Him who is Holy!

Evangelism in its broadest definition is sharing with another good news, being a messenger of something of merit to be noticed. More specifically, it is the communicating of a perceived and experienced good in ones existence which is deemed of value to desire another to be able to participate in its realizable fruits and to help lead him to it in word and deed. To the extent that the encounter is perceived as a good, is personally experienced at ones core, and is given acceptance and affirmation determines the degree of sincerity, enthusiasm, and intensity observed in bringing the message to others. Related knowledge ongoingly pursued under girds its zeal and bolsters its intelligibility and permanence of the message. Discernment provides the safety valve which allows the listener the freedom to choose, experience for himself, accept, and assimilate the good presented.

Although evangelism usually denotes the sharing of perceived good news more in the area of a truth or a goal, in its very broad sense we can see ourselves as a messenger of a "good" which we have experienced as we rush home to share about the detergent or set of tires that fires us up. The message does not usually stop there but generally persists, bubbling inside us to let everyone know. The point of expanding the meaning of the term to include the areas of non-earth shaking importance is to show the capability we all possess to "evangelize", spread the good news, and how powerfully transient matters can move us into action. By transient, I mean areas not worth dying for, though even here disordered priorities exist. The power in evangelizing can be expressed for that which is of intrinsic worth as well as for that which is essentially evil at its core though erroneously perceived as a desirable end.

In the most restricted and widely used sense of the term, evangelism means spreading the word or good news about a religion or of a sect or denomination within one. As a follower of Jesus by virtue of our baptism into His Life, we have been commanded to witness to the Good News of His Word, in short, to evangelize. Evangelism is not an option. It is part and parcel of who we are chosen to be and how we are expected to live. If there is not a desire to share our Christian life stemming from a pervading heartfelt experience within, the excited "look what I've found!", we need to take a look at where we are. Have we truly heard? Have we truly experienced the Lord and His word to us? Have we made a conscious decision to stick by Him stemming from the experience? Have we encountered the reality of His word in contact with others as He told us we would and desire to engender new relationships with others so they too can share the new life? Can we honestly testify that we are bound together under Jesus and are excitedly seeking the transforming growth we are being led to by the Spirit?

Even if we have only begun to experience the Living God in our life but are open to the growth ahead, the putting aside of those things that would cause our spirit's binding or death, the desire to share the Good News will start to bubble forth. By the empowering of God's Spirit, our openness and growth in the experience of His promises and life, the chaining fears we have will begin to give way. The fear of what others will think, or of their rebuff, ridicule or criticism will begin to crumble before the growing, excited joy of God's Spirit within reminding us of who we are and of the gifts we have been given. The command to evangelize, then is to get us started to bring the experience of God's Kingdom to all men so that they too can make their decision to accept or reject. By our obedience, the presence of the Kingdom will become increasingly realized within the depths of ourselves - a cause of great rejoicing. The closer we are drawn to our Holy God, the less the need to be commanded to tell the Good News. Like the lover whose heart is not very far from the beloved because the presence is ever before him, who experiences a heartfelt joy giving new eyes to the world about him, and who almost compulsively must speak the good news about the one he shares his existence with, so also can we experience as we become like unto Him who is Holy for that is His very nature.

To hear, to commit, to relate oneself, to commune to speak out, to truly live now and forever in and by God's Word Breathed upon us is our call. Mary, Peter, Paul, John, Francis, Therese of Liseux, Mother Seaton, and Cardinal Newmann confirm the witness of what God can and wants to do. The call is to become like unto Him - Holy. Can we hear it? It is to me. It is to you.