Robert Comte: “God invites us to fulfill ourselves personally”

Robert Comte, theologian and brother of the Christian Schools, is the author of several books, including the Courage to build. “The identity between gift and promise” (Salvator).

Doesn’t a certain Christianity perceive the search for personal fulfillment as contrary to the Gospel?

A pessimistic vision of the human has long prevailed in the Church, and traces of it remain today. When I was in the novitiate, at the end of the 1950s, I was thus formed in a spirit of asceticism. You had to sacrifice yourself, constantly restrict yourself, avoid existing positively.

Many years later, I discovered that God’s call to Abraham could be translated into: “Go to you! » (Genesis 12, 1), that is to say walk towards yourself. And it was an illumination. Not only did I have the right to fulfill myself personally, but it was God himself who invited me to do so.

Would God’s will therefore be for us to become ourselves?

What God wants is what we deeply want. In other words, we are not programmed or predestined in the bad sense of the word. God has not decided from all eternity what we should become, and he does not wait for us to decipher what he asks of us to then execute it. In that case, where would our freedom be?

In his book Joy of believing, joy of living, the Jesuit François Varillon declared: The truth is not that God has a plan for man, it’s that man is God’s plan. It’s all different. God wants us to be men, that is to say responsible adults, building our own freedom, writing our own history. » This reflection helped me better understand the meaning of the word “vocation”. This does not refer to a state of life, but to our deep being.

That’s to say ?

To respond to one’s vocation is to bring out one’s own uniqueness, “make your own being bloom”as François explains in Christus lived. Look at the saints: although they were all formed in imitation of Christ, they all differ radically. The saint is the most original of men in the sense that the realization of his vocation sets him apart completely.

Each saint thus opens to us a facet of a possible fulfillment for us. It is important to take them as role models. It is in the relationship with the other that we build ourselves and not in isolation, narcissism. Current individualism makes us forget that we are not autonomous, but interdependent.

What is the basis of our accomplishment?

Availability, I think. Maurice Bellet, thought it necessary “to offer oneself to events”, let them work on us, question us, transform us when they occur. Are we open to what they will trigger in us, to the unforeseen paths on which they will lead us? This is where it all happens.

Because he allowed himself to be affected by an unexpected encounter, Jean-Baptiste de La Salle, our founder, moved away from his primary vocation as a canon. He turned his back on an ecclesiastical career that his family had traced out for him to the point of wanting to share the condition of the first brothers whom he considered before to be “below his valet”.

Is it a conversion path?

In effect. “There are always areas of my being that are not evangelized”, wrote Paul Claudel. We discover it as we go along. Let’s go back to two episodes in the story of Abraham, namely the double change of names and what is referred to as the sacrifice of Isaac.

Abram, “my father is great”, becomes Abraham, “father of a multitude”: the one who until now was only the son of Terah is invited to become a father in his turn, therefore to look to a future of fertility. God then enjoins him to no longer call his wife Sarai, “my princess”, but Sarah, “princess”: he must recognize her for herself and not as his possession.

Ultimate conversion: on Mount Moria, Abraham understands that it is not his son he must sacrifice, but his way of being a father, perhaps too fusional, for Isaac to also become himself. It was at the cost of successive conversions that the patriarch went towards his fulfilment, that he adjusted to the requirements of the Covenant that God had concluded with him.

Not without committing a few missteps…

Abraham is made of the same dough as us: he has his power and his weaknesses. It therefore responded unevenly to events. However, he allowed himself to be gradually transformed by the action of God in his story.

What matters is not who we are at the start (we are all imperfect), but this inner energy that pushes us to never be completely satisfied with what we have become. It is this tension between what we are and what we could be that is the source of our incessant becoming and that underlies our entire life trajectory, from birth to death.

How to understand this existential dissatisfaction?

Based on a fundamental theological theme in Christian anthropology, namely that we are created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26). The Church Fathers affirm that ” the image “ is a starting datum, but that the “resemblance” is a transformation that remains to be performed.

It’s about our choices, our freedom, so it’s about the kind of person we become. “The Creator gave you one; and he left the other unfinished so that, completing yourself, you might become worthy of God’s reward,” after Gregory of Nyssa.

But Christ is the perfect image of God…

Yes, and it is therefore in him that we find this resemblance that we are called to make grow in us, and it is he who allows us to make it grow. Nevertheless, our aspiration for this fullness of life in God will never be fulfilled on earth. Only in heaven “we will be like him, for we will see him as he is” (1 John 3, 2). This is our hope!

To read
Towards self-fulfillmentby Robert Comte, Salvator, €20.

Robert Comte: “God invites us to fulfill ourselves personally”