If you want to know what it is to be a human being, if you want to know who you and I are or could be at our very fullest and best, look at Jesus of Nazareth. In Him, we see the fullness of humanity revealing the fullness of divinity. What follows from that? What follows from it is an all-important principle. The principle is that if you really want to be like God—and that’s about as good a definition of holiness as I know—if you really want to be like God, be as human as you can possibly be. Because the perfectly human is the realization of the presence of the perfectly Divine. That the fullness of God is found in the fullness of humanity and vice versa.
What flows from that is the allimportant principle of all of Catholic education, which is that anything that helps us to become more fully, richly, perfectly, splendidly human is making us more like God. Whatever humanizes, divinizes. Whatever makes us more human, makes us holy. That is the very core of the whole of the Catholic and Jesuit traditions of education. Because, if you think about it, it explains why we think that education is a holy work. What we are saying is that if education means humanization then education is central to the Church’s mission, because education is simply the long process by which we become more truly and authentically human. So whatever humanizes divinizes. Not just the teaching of religion, not just the teaching of philosophy, but the teaching of chemistry, of physics, of history, of economics and the training of nurses, the teaching of teachers, because all education makes us more like God. Because whatever makes us more human, makes us holy, makes us more like the fullness of God’s presence.
If that’s true, then think of what a blessing to the Church the Jesuit tradition is. The reason that the Jesuit tradition is so priceless and so powerful is because it’s so Catholic. You see, that’s what lies at the heart of Catholicism, the conviction that we are engaged in making one another holy by making one another more completely human, and therefore, nothing is foreign to us. There’s no question that we have to be afraid of asking, no position that we need be frightened of exploring, no task that we need to be too daunted to undertake.
That brings me to when Jesus says in Mark’s Gospel, a principle which we find again and again throughout the Gospels, that if you hold on to your life, if you try to preserve your life, if you grasp your life and will not let it go, you will lose it. But if you give it away, if you hand it over, if you are willing to die, you will discover that you cannot run out of life. If you hold on to it, you lose it. If you give it away, it becomes everlasting.
As I edge, ever so gingerly, through late middle age, I find that there are certain key issues which have become absolutely central to me. There aren’t as many things as I once thought were super important, but those things that I still do think are crucially important are now unshakably central to my life. One of them is that claim. What you hold on to, you lose. What you give away, you can never run out of.
Education is central to the Church's mission, because education is simply the long process by which we become more truly and authentically human.
Let me suggest to you that this applies to your education as well. If you think of your education as a gift given to you to be grasped, as something that you’ve achieved and will hold on to; if you think of your education as a training to make more money or get a better job; if you think that your education is all about your success in being able to provide for yourself and your family, all of which are great and wonderful goals. And if you think that’s what’s central to your education, then I must say that I think you’re unworthy of your education. The reason to be educated is to teach somebody else. You will never fully grasp the fruits of your education until you give it away to another. The measure of the success of your education is the measure to which the lives of people who never got to come to Boston College are richer, fuller, more genuinely human because you did go to Boston College. That it’s enabling you to give something to others. And in that process, for the first time, you will fully possess it.
You never own what you don’t give away. What you do give away, you can never lose. Now, maybe that’s not true. But if it’s not true, then nothing in the Gospel is true. Because that’s what the Gospel is. It is the story of the fullness of God present in a perfectly human human being, and the way in which He gave everything until there was nothing left to give, “Father, I hand myself over to you.” It is finished. He’s all used up, there’s nothing left, and the tomb can’t hold Him. He cannot not live because He has given away everything. To be able to give away everything is what all of us are in training to do from the moment of our baptism. And in doing it we become a little more human. And in becoming a little more human, we become genuinely holy.
If I had to describe, to give one image for everything that Catholic education, that Jesuit education, that Boston College at the seat of education, is about, it would be the very last canto of the Divine Comedy. Dante, who of course gets everything right, describes in that last canto what can’t be described. He tries to describe the beatific vision. He tries to describe what it is to see God. And needless to say he fails. He just fails less than anybody else who has ever tried. Dante says that what he saw was a dazzling light. That’s a familiar image for the presence of God, but he goes on to say that that dazzling light, which seemed to destroy his sight, in fact was steadily making his eyes stronger and clearer, that the light seemed to emanate from three concentric spheres of different colors, together forming one dazzling white light. An image, of course, of the Trinity. As his sight grew stronger, he could gaze more deeply into that light. In its very center, he saw one who looked just like him. He saw the Incarnation. He saw the fullness of humanity, united to the divinity in the person of Christ.
And then he says in that dazzling last line, “then I knew the love that moves the sun and all the stars.” But, you see, it is by discovering that what unites us with God is our humanity. That thanks to the Incarnation, you and I and God have one thing in common. We’re all human. Therefore, if you wish to be like God, be more human. And the way to be more human is to help others to be more human, to give yourself away. To discover that is to have discovered everything that is important in the Christian tradition. It is to genuinely be educated. It is to be the kind of person that the Society of Jesus has been forming for five centuries. It is to be people who see the love that moves the sun and all the stars.
That’s the gift that has been given to us by Boston College.
Give it away.
Fr. Michael J. Himes (1947–2022) was a diocesan priest from Brooklyn, New York, a distinguished theologian, and a faculty member at Boston College for almost three decades.
Watch Fr. Michael Himes's full homily from Fenway Park celebrating the Sesquicentennial Anniversary of Boston College.
