66. How we can get there from here
66. HOW WE CAN GET THERE FROM HERE
The old Vermont farmer joke about the lost driver concludes with the punch line: “You can’t get there from here.” Why isn’t that true of Heavenly perfection? The ideal seems as far beyond our reach and capacity as flying would be to a tree sloth or climbing Mount Everest to a worm.
Since happiness consists in gaining the last end, those things that are required for happiness must be gathered from the way in which man is ordered to an end.
Now man is ordered to an intelligible end partly through his intellect and partly through his will: through his intellect in so far as a certain imperfect knowledge of the end pre-exists in the intellect; through the will, first by love, which is the will’s first movement toward anything; secondly, by a real relation of the lover to the thing beloved. . . (I-II,4,3).
The better analogy would be not the tree sloth or the worm but the caterpillar. We are programmed to fly, to be transformed.
St. Thomas mentions the three things necessary to attain any end, earthly or Heavenly: knowledge, love, and presence; our conceiving what to desire, our subjective desire moving to it, and it being or becoming really present. Applied to God as our last end, this means (1) moving toward Him with our minds, knowing God, which in this life is by faith; (2) moving toward Him with our will, our desire, which is hope, and (3) God’s objective reality that is known and loved coming to us, moving toward us, letting Himself be united to us, which is love (divine charity).
Our divine life, our theosis, is like a plant. Faith roots the plant in the truth, hope makes it grow up into the heavens, and love is the flower or fruit it produces.
God has given us all we need to get us to Himself. He put the wings in the caterpillar.