Divergent

Last weekend, Fr. Carl Joseph OP made a comment that Jesus came to restore our humanity.  I had just finished watching the Divergent trilogy, which also contained a concept of restoring humanity, and I immediately saw the stark contrast.   

For those of you who haven’t seen the movie or read the books, the concept in the final part of the series goes like this:

The story is set in a post nuclear war scenario. The people of Chicago believed themselves to be the only survivors.  However, as the story progressed, the audience learned that other people lived outside of Chicago and that many of the people who lived in the generations leading up to the nuclear war chose to be genetically enhanced. There was a belief that genetic enhancements caused the loss of humanity, which resulted in the nuclear war. The isolated citizens of Chicago were actually an experiment, an attempt to regain humanity by trying to purify broken DNA. The divergents were those who were moving towards pure DNA. However, by the end of the series, it became evident that even those who were considered pure were not humane, either. 

While we are not yet (to my knowledge) at a place of genetic enhancements, we still live in a broken world, and it was into this broken world that Jesus was born with the mission of restoring our humanity by metaphorically perfecting our DNA.  In addition to restoring us to right relationship with the Father, he did this by showing us how to live a humane life, and he gave us the ability to live that life in grace.  As we learn to follow his example of selfless living, we regain our humanity by living the way we were created to live.  As we become more and more fully incorporated into the body of Christ, the more we metaphorically share in his pure DNA. The result of this sharing is that our lives become less and less broken, and we become more and more divergent.

Spend some time with the Holy Spirit looking at the way you are living your life. Do your choices look more like that of the average person who contributes to the brokenness of this world, or are you moving in a direction, with the help of grace, of becoming divergent and living a life in Christ?  Ask him to show you how you can better cooperate with grace in order to live a less broken life.  As you close your time of prayer, thank him for showing you the way of becoming pure by living a divergent life.

In Him,

dw