MAN Struggles to keep alive, yet often forgets to live. He is obsessed with acquiring things, yet he seldom has the time or the understanding to enjoy them. The will to survive is a pre-requisite for life, but if the object of the living is simply to escape, or postpone, death, we are indeed truly dead already: The time in which we live is notable for the great scientific advances and social achievements that have swept humanity on and transformed its members into active units. And yet the individual is as far from true fulfillment as a person as he has ever been. What is the measure of a truly mature person? He is the one who is at home in the world because he is at home in himself.
In the mad rush for security and peace, there is too often an escape from the person to an outer world of authority, where responsibility may be laid at the door of someone else. Yet there can be no peace that does not come from the depths of our own being, no security that does not arise from the love within, and no knowledge that does not proclaim the unity of the person in the greater community of creation.
"The glory of God is a living man" wrote St. Irenaeus some 1,800 years ago. He saw this glory in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. If the Incarnation has anything to say to us today, it is to impel us onwards to something of the measure of humanity that was in Christ. A living man is not simply a man who is physically alive. He is a man in whom every part of the total personality is working in co-ordination, so that he is in dynamic relationship with the whole universe, and moving in harmony with it to its final end in God, Who is the ultimate reality to which all sentient beings aspire.
Of course, such a vision of a living man must remain, at least at one level, a pure hypothesis. There is no certain evidence that the universe is moving towards its completion in unity with its creator. Indeed, the cataclysmic events of our own time could presage disintegration as easily as synthesis. The lives of many men, even those whom we admire most for their saintliness, often end in tragedy, so that it would seem that they have betrayed their own vision. A philosophy that sees the world as the development of random forces, and with no moral future at all other than that which man may direct from his own nature, is plausible, and indeed in some sources, popular.
The argument against a random, purposeless creation lies not in intellectual sophistry but in a deep contemplation of the course of history and the inner nature of the human being. We cannot dogmatise about the origin and destiny of the universe, but we can speak with some authority about our responses to the world we live in and the behaviour that accrues from those responses. As a man thinks in his heart, so is he. As a man is, so he orders the world around him. As he changes the world around him, so the whole complexion of society alters. When man reflects the glory of the Word of God become flesh, he lifts up the world around him and brings it nearer to its divine source. Thus we know most of God when we know ourselves best. It is the movement towards self-knowledge that brings us towards a knowledge of life.
To what does the heart vibrate in greatest acclaim? Is it wealth - which is evanescent? Is it fame - which is short-lived? Is it the opinions of others-who are fickle and self-centred? Is it power - which separates us from other people and isolates us? Or is it a will to meaning? This meaning casts a shaft of light on the dark course of personal life moving inevitably towards its end in physical death. It leads us on from physical repletion to mental growth, and from mental growth to spiritual understanding.
It is with the spirit of man that this book deals; what that spirit is and how it may be experienced are the subjects of our consideration. For it is the giver of life, and where it is there is liberty. True life is liberation from the bondage of matter to the mutual communion of all creatures in God, Who is our home.
When we know ourselves we begin to live with meaning and purpose. The world expands, and our hearts respond in joyful radiance.
This is the life abundant which alone is worth having. He who has it can never die.