In the Gospel According to St. Matthew (vs. 19:16), a man approaches Jesus with a question that many Christians in the modern age have asked in one form or another:
At that time someone came to Jesus and said, “Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?”
The modern equivalent is something like, “What do I need to do to be saved?”
The modern answer vary but include ideas like believe, or have a conversion experience, or be baptized, or obey God’s laws, or be good, or evangelize, or repent, or take up your cross, or … well the list goes on. Poet and author Scott Cairns offers us this further thought:
“Salvation is a continuing process of being redeemed; it is our recovery from our chronic separation from God, both now and ever, and it includes our becoming increasingly aware of Who our God is. Our miraculous salvation has very little to do with the popular notion of ‘dying and going to heaven,’ and has far more to do with finally living, and with entering the kingdom of God, here and now.” (The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain, pg. 73)
It might be convenient for each of us if we only had to do one thing and then salvation was guaranteed. And certainly if we had to do only one thing that would make attaining eternal life as simple as buying a ticket. The Christian life however is discipleship – it is not buying a ticket but venturing forth on a lifetime sojourn.
In the charming yet profound Japanese movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Jiro makes it clear there is no plateau called perfection. One strives to do better today what one did yesterday. If we follow that philosophy – today I will follow Christ and love others better than I did yesterday – then we come to understand what true discipleship is. Discipleship is discipline, and we are following a discipline to move from one degree of glory to another, not to stay the same as we were yesterday. We are to grow in Christ, grow in love, to be perfect as the Father in Heaven is perfect.
Christ did speak to us as His disciples about our taking up our cross daily in order to follow Him. To be His disciple means not to experience a one time conversion event, but to be willing to live for, to suffer for, and even to die for Him each day of our lives.
We have to live for Him and for our brothers and sisters in Christ and for the salvation of the world. We don’t become Christian to abandon the world or to proclaim it evil. God so loved the world that He send His Son into the world. We are here to bring salvation to the world and to transfigure it.
And daily we have to repent of our sins, love one another as Christ loved us, be born again of the Spirit, be renewed in our minds, and strive to move ever toward the Kingdom of God. We renew our discipleship when we prepare ourselves for the sacraments of Confession and Communion. This is part of our daily striving for Christ.
Salvation is not a one time event but uniting our lives to Christ both now and unto the ages of ages.
“Besides the bulging forehead, oversize brain, and long, tapering fingers, our species bears other striking biological features of the kind biological taxonomists call ‘diagnostic.’ This means that in combination, some of our traits are unique among all animals: 
• Music, comprising a wide array of sounds, also in infinite permutations and played in individually chosen mood-creating patterns; but, most definitively, with a beat. 
• Uniquely fast and substantial growth in the brain size during early development, increasing 3.3 times from birth to maturity. 
It is interesting that some of the very things Wilson sees as unique to humanity would also be noted by Theists who accept the claim of Genesis 1 that we humans are created in the image and likeness of God. And it was vigorously discussed throughout Christian history what exactly about us is in God’s image? Many Church Fathers agreed that it is not a physical trait and they like Wilson looked to such things as language, symbolic and abstract thinking, creativity – using things which exist in nature to further create such things as art and music AND inventing and manufacturing things which don’t exist in nature for art and science, modesty and virtue, controlling sexual activity and the formation of moral thinking, creativeness in using foods even in symb0lic and sacramental ways.
“Michael Tomasello and his co-workers in biological anthropology, developed during the past three decades. These researchers point out that the primary and crucial difference between human cognition and that of other animal species, including our closest genetic relatives, the chimpanzees, is the ability to collaborate for the purpose of achieving shared goals and intentions. The human specialty is intentionality, fashioned from an extremely large working memory. We have become the experts at mind reading, and the world champions at inventing culture. We not only interact intensely with one another, as do other animals with advanced social organizations, but to a unique degree we have added the urge to collaborate.” (Kindle Loc. 3621-27)
“The creative arts became possible as an evolutionary advance when humans developed the capacity for abstract thought. The human mind could then form a template of a shape, or a kind of object, or an action, and pass a concrete representation of the conception to another mind. Thus was first born true, productive language, constructed from arbitrary words and symbols.” (Kindle Loc. 4486-88)
For theists at least, that humanity has a purpose comes as no surprise. That evolutionary biologists don’t recognize conscious observation as a product of the evolutionary process speaks more about their ideological commitment to determinism then it does of their commitment to revealing truth.
Fraternized 