But just being set in order, just being a certain thing, isn’t your identity. Your identity includes and is dependent on that web of relationships we were talking about; the way we fit into the rest of creation, including our fellow humans, but going beyond our fellow humans to all of the rest of creation; having that set of relationships, those connections, being right, being set right, being put in order and in their proper order. Without that, we can’t be internally set right. This is why, all through the Scriptures—famously in 1 John, but all through the Scriptures—you can’t love God and hate your neighbor. You can’t have things right with God, you can’t be justified and have things be out of whack at the same time. I don’t want to pick on him too much, but I’m sorry, Martin Luther. You can’t be just and a sinner at the same time. You just can’t.

So we have to always remember, and especially now during Great Lent, when we’re really focused on this—we’re focused on repentance—that this is not just a move inward. Everything that we said about paradise being within you and the kingdom being within you is absolutely true, but that doesn’t mean that you fold in on yourself and become a solipsist and become entirely self-focused, because finding yourself and finding what is within you is only going to happen through correcting that web of relationships. You’re going to find yourself in other people; you’re going to find God in other people.

And when we’re loving our neighbor and we’re setting things right and we’re making amends as part of our repentance and we’re putting everything around us back into order, that’s what’s going to cause all those things within us that are out of joint and out of place to slide back into place. That’s where things are going to come together, and we’re going to find out who we really are and what it really means to be a human, and thereby, by discovering what it means to really be human, to discover what it is to be like Christ and to become like God, which is what we call theosis and what salvation is really all about. It’s about becoming a son of God, as we’ve said before, becoming like him, becoming like Christ. That doesn’t happen for us all alone on our own. That happens for us as part of the Church, as part of a community of the faithful, both those who are alive with us here in this world now and those who have gone before. We all find salvation and restoration and paradise together.

– Fr. Stephen De Young