Seeing Christ, seeing God

We have to learn how to see Christ in everyone, how to see God behind every event and situation. This is crucial, because unless we see Christ and see God, we cannot find the true good in every person and in any event and situation that we can have in life, and thus can find neither reason nor power to properly love them, which is what we are supposed to do all the time.

We have to wary of loving others based not on God's love but on some merely human and worldly values. That's because no matter how legitimate these latter values are, they cannot go very far. The love they generate would be very limited, incapable of tackling all possible scenarios, and can even be dangerous as it can lead us to a perverted kind of love.

This art of seeing Christ and seeing God in everyone and in everything, for sure, is not some ravings of a madman, a gratuitous claim with no leg to stand on. This has firm basis.

In the first place, it's because we are all creatures of God, and as such, we actually cannot help but reflect some semblance of God, our Creator, much like any work of art would somehow leave some imprint of its maker. When we look at a particular painting, we could somehow tell who painted it by its style or some other criteria.

Besides, we all know when God creating us and the whole of the universe, it was purely out of love. And in loving, the lover is in the beloved. That's the dynamics of love. And so we can say that God as the lover is always in his creatures, his beloved. We should learn to discern that reality in everything that we see or experience.

This is especially so in our case, since as human persons, we have been created in the image and likeness of God. Obviously, it is not so much in our physical or biological attributes  that divine image and likeness is imprinted on us. It's more in our capacity to know and to love that, if properly used, would enable us to participate in God's nature and very life, and thus resemble us with him.

And even if that image and likeness has been deformed by our sin, we have to realize that such divine image and likeness has not been completely damaged, and that the deformity has, in fact, increased God's love for us.

"Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick," Christ said. "For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners." (Mt 9,12-13) These words should make it clear that our weaknesses, defects, failures and sins, while somehow deforming us, actually draws God to us in some special way. This truth we should manage to discern.

We need to make adjustments in the way we look at others and view and understand the many events of our life. We have to conform, little by little, to the ways indicated by our Christian faith that eventually leads us to the highest virtue which is charity.