Man Fully Alive!

Man Fully Alive

            Hello, today I will be blogging for the last time. The topic of today is a quote from St. Irenaeus. “The glory of God is man fully alive.” What can this mean? How is this important? I will tell you what I think.

            This year I have learned a lot about my faith and myself. This quote from Irenaeus has helped me strive to be closer with God. Being alive encompasses discovering ours own identities in Jesus.  My interpretation of this quote is to truly be you in life. We need to step out of our comfort zones and be an individual.  We are supposed to show God’s glory and communicate it. As children of God, we should always want to show glory for our Father. We can do this by being ourselves and not following the norm of modern day society. We don’t need to follow a set of socially acceptable rules on how to act or express ourselves. We should act as one with Christ, glorifying him in every moment possible.

This has been another great year. I have learned a lot about what it means to be a Christian and how to act fully live in Christ. We are all called to learn more about our religion and ourselves. This will bring us closer to God and help us find TRUE happiness in our lives.

Man Fully Alive-Last Blog

This is my last blog of the school year and it will be about being "Man Fully Alive." This phrase was stressed greatly throughout the year in theology class. Everything we learned and the whole basis of our class was centered around being man fully alive. Now the full statement is "The glory of God is man fully alive." This was said by St. Irenaeus. Now my first interpretation of this statement is that if you wish to glorify God, which all Catholics should strive for, you must act yourself. You should live your life to its fullest and be nobody but you. In my opinion this is one of the best guidelines to live by. Your parents, teachers, and other adults always tell you to be yourself and sometimes you may not listen to them. But after this year of theology and fully understanding what this statement means I came to realize that these people are smart and you should listen to them.

God created humans different. Each one of us is our own special person. You will eventually learn this if you do not know. You were created in the image and likeness of God, so he likes how he created you. There is no need to act like someone else. Now, this does not mean you can't have role models and follow their examples, but just be yourself and don't idolize them. The interesting thing I learned about this statement is that you can look at it in two ways--frontwards or backwards. Not only is "The glory of God man fully alive," but "Man fully alive is man glorifying God." I find this extraordinary that there is two ways to look at this statement, although they mean the same thing.

 St Irenaeus states: “the glory of God is man fully alive; moreover man’s life is the vision of God. God created us so that we could be stewards of his Earth and receive his glory. God is not selfish at all, he created us out of the goodness of his heart and wants us very badly to be man fully alive by glorifying him.
1 Corinthians 15:28 sums this up pretty well: "The ultimate purpose of creation is that God who is the creator of all things may at last be all in all, thus simultaneously assuring His own glory and our beatitude.”(1 Cor.15: 28)

Throughout the year we have been establishing a foundation for glorifying God. For example, participatingpartially alive, but fully alive. We can do this by being holy which allows us to glorify God. This year was a very successful one and I feel like I now fully understand what it means to be "Man Fully Alive."
in the sacraments is an easy way to do such action. The sacraments are a direct line into the grace of God. We also learned this year that we all have a call to holiness (I blogged about this earlier in the week). This call to holiness reflects us being man fully alive. We should not be