CHRISTIANS, LET US NOT LIVE A “DOUBLE” LIFE. MAY WE HAVE “UNITY OF LIFE”.
WHAT IS “UNITY OF LIFE”?
“Unity of life” is a phrase coined by St. Josemaria to indicate our task as Christians to live accordingly to our faith, wherever we are, in all our daily activities, at all times. For “Only one thing is necessary“: that we love God, that we seek personal sanctity or holiness (cf. Lk 10:42).
How do we live unity of life?
By uniting ourselves with Jesus Christ, making him as our example, and point of reference in all the we do, such that we behave and live as He did…for love of God. In short, by imitating Him.
- When we are united with the “Vine”, and Christ is our primary concern all day long, we will find ourselves thinking on what Jesus would do if He were in our place, and end up behaving, praying, working, resting,… as He did.
- Our union with Christ is the source of our unity of life during the entire day.
- We will avoid leading a double life: one life for God and another life dedicated to worldly affairs, business, politics, rest and so on.
Saint Josemaria expressed the need for this unity of life in his preaching from 1928, to avoid the temptation to take as a double life:
I often said to the university
students and workers who were with me in the thirties that they had to know how
to ‘materialise’ their spiritual life. I wanted to keep them from the
temptation, so common then and now, of living a kind of double life. On one
side, an interior life, a life of relation with God; and on the other, a
separate and distinct professional, social and family life, full of small
earthly realities.
No! We cannot lead a double
life. We cannot be like schizophrenics, if we want to be Christians. There is
just one life, made of flesh and spirit. And it is this life which has to
become, in both soul and body, holy and filled with God. We discover the
invisible God in the most visible and material things.
There is no other way. Either
we learn to find our Lord in ordinary, everyday life, or else we shall never
find Him. That is why I can tell you that our age needs to give back to matter
and to the most trivial occurrences and situations their noble and original
meaning. It needs to restore them to the service of the Kingdom of God, to
spiritualize them, turning them into a means and an occasion for a continuous
meeting with Jesus Christ. Conversations 114.
Pope John Paul II has written about unity of life:
In discovering and living their proper vocation and mission, the lay faithful must be formed according to the union which exists from their being members of the Church and citizens of human society. There cannot be two parallel lives in their existence: on the one hand, the so-called ‘spiritual’ life, with its values and demands; and on the other, the so-called ‘secular’ life, that is, life in a family, at work, in social relationships, in the responsibilities of public life and in culture. The branch, engrafted to the vine which is Christ, bears its fruit in every sphere of existence and activity. In fact, every area of the lay faithful’s lives, as different as they are, enters into the plan of God who desires that these very areas be the ‘places in time’ where the love of Christ is revealed and realized for both the glory of the Father and service of others. Every activity, every situation, every precise responsibility – as, for example, skill and solidarity in work, love and dedication in the family and the education of children, service to society and public life and the promotion of truth in the area of culture – are the occasions ordained by Providence for a ‘continuous exercise of faith, hope and charity’ (Christifideles laici, 59).
Dear brethren in Christ, let us ask God’s grace so that we may seek union with Him so that our faith and our vocation to BE “OTHER CHRISTS” EXERT AN INFLUENCE IN all the circumstances and activities of our ordinary life which provide us occasions of meeting and loving God, and of exercising both human and supernatural virtues. Through our union with God, we could convert our whole existence into prayer, sacrifice, service, and apostolate, offering to God all the events of our day.
