Scholars have explained the human person as a phenomenon because he bore within himself the spiritual and the physical. Through our body, we reach down to the lower elements and are one with the animals and minerals; through our mind, we reach upwards to God and the angels.

We know this is true instinctively; on one hand, we can enter into the depth of ourselves through silence and prayer, becoming as much like the angels as possible. On the other, we experience instincts and emotions that often get the better of us. as long as we are journey in this life, we struggle to strike a perfect balance between these two realities.

So, man is a mystery, a puzzle that generations have been trying to understand, but he still remains a depthless enigma incapable of being deciphered through and through; he is a paradox. He is simple yet complicated, straight yet crooked, lighted yet darkened, easy yet difficult. He often operates on the extreme; hence the need for direction. He can exalt himself as the absolute measure of all things or debases himself to the point of despair. Man needs help because he is split within himself. We tarnish the work of art that we are and destroy our inner beauty when we don’t control our divided self. We need God and that’s the truth. As Ecclesiastes shows and Blaise Pascal observes, “man without God is in total ignorance and inevitable misery.” The contrary is not true; God does not need us. we are completely contingent on him. What is man compared to God?

God could have left us in the lowliness of our choice, but like a mother who could not stop mothering, he intervenes. Why does he? After all, says Pascal, “what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either….” our lives are less than a speck of dust lost among the solar system of the galaxies. Why does he have to intervene when live or die, it makes no difference? While we think we are the indispensable actor in the unfolding documentary of our lives, in God’s eyes, we don’t have to matter; we come, we live, we play, then we die. After a few years, no one remembers that we were here. While we think we are the most important, and our lives enfold before the camera of God, only one kind of things is recorded, those done for love. we are an empty show unless we marked our space through charity. Veni, Vidi, Vici we like to say! This is false unless God takes notice of us. We are great insofar as we get his attention.

There’ s only one way to do that. Embrace love! That’s the only part that his camera records. We had better keep this in mind as we are developing new episodes for the documentary. That’s the very reason why he broke into the scene. He wanted to teach us how to love. When we finally grasp the profundity of this, we will go speechless. We may even have to say like job: “I have heard of you by words of mouth, but now my eye has seen you; therefore, I disown what I have said, and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:6).