Jeremiah 13:23

We are what we are.

Let us be proud of what we are, and grateful, as it is a gift.

A leopard cannot change its spots – and so we should not try – for there is nothing wrong with us. We are OK.

And yet we find ourselves not perfect (in Love) as God is.

If we ‘attach’ ourselves to God, be with God, act with God, remember God, then by God’s grace we with our spots are sanctified.

Then if we separate ourselves from God, forget about God, act without God, we lose that sanctity and fall from grace –

… but our spots remain either way.

We and our spots can be made holy with God and can be unholy without God.

With God I act in grace, without God I act a fool. Those spots are always there.

It is not the spots we should try to change – we can’t, we are what we are and let us rejoice in this – but what we are can be sanctified.

So what can change? Being, remembering, acknowledging, accepting, thanking, attending, being open to God's Love for us, a gift, can change our hearts. This can turn hearts of stone to hearts of Love. We can and do so easily forget God, so we need to remind ourselves regularly, and reading scripture helps us to do this.

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Interview with Fr Aiden

Fr Aiden:

Your reflection carries a strong internal coherence: identity is given, sanctity is relational.

You’re making a distinction between Essence (“our spots”), what we are; Orientation (with or without God), that is how that essence is lived, and Sanctification, not changing what we are, but transforming how what we are participates in divine love.

That framework echoes themes found in Christian theology, especially in writers like Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, who both argued that creation is fundamentally good, yet incomplete apart from union with God.

This image of A leopard cannot change its spots (from Book of Jeremiah) originally emphasizes human inability to self-redeem. But you’re turning it slightly: you’re saying we are not doomed by our nature, and our nature is not the problem.

That’s a hopeful reinterpretation. You’re affirming goodness of being, close to Thomas Aquinas’s idea that being itself is good because it comes from God.

And you say that, “With God I act in grace; without God I act a fool.”

That resembles the teaching of Paul the Apostle in the Epistle to the Galatians, walking “by the Spirit” versus by the flesh. The person remains the same person; what changes is the animating principle.

“God became man so that man might become god” (by participation, not by nature).

The “spots” remain. But they are transfigured.

You move from ontology (being) to interior transformation:

hearts of stone to hearts of Love.

That language comes directly from Book of Ezekiel 36:26. In this view: Identity is stable. Orientation is fragile. Memory is essential.

You’re right to emphasize remembrance. In Scripture, forgetting God is often the root of collapse. That’s why practices like prayer, Eucharist, and Scripture reading function as acts of re-membering, literally putting ourselves back together in relation to God.

There’s one interesting theological tension in your reflection:

If our “spots” never change, does grace merely overlay us?
Or does grace penetrate and heal even our disordered tendencies?

Some traditions (especially influenced by Martin Luther) emphasize that we remain sinners yet are declared righteous.
Others (following John Wesley, for example) stress real interior transformation.

Your reflection seems to sit somewhere in between: Nature remains. Heart can soften. Love can grow.

That’s a rich middle ground.

What I find most beautiful in what you say is that it is not the spots we should try to change… but what we are can be sanctified.

That expresses gratitude for existence itself, a deeply Christian instinct.

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Br Nicholas:

No, I would say that grace does not merely overlay us. It is transfiguring, changing. But what does not change is what we are. What we are can be transfigured by grace, but we are what we are. And what is that? It is that we have choice. Love is free and so must choose. There is no compulsion.  We have the choice to walk away from grace. Commitment is commitment. And this commitment is what is trying to be taught through religious vows and Christian marriage. Commitment is unto death, nevertheless we can always choose to walk away.

 
 
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Fr Aiden:

That’s a powerful clarification. You’re sharpening the distinction in an important way.

You’re not saying grace is cosmetic. You’re saying grace is transfiguring, but not annihilating. It does not replace what we are; it fulfills and elevates it.

That places you very close to the classic Christian principle articulated by Thomas Aquinas: grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it.
Nature remains real. Freedom remains real. Identity remains real.
But nature is brought to its fullness by participation in God.

When you say, “What does not change is what we are,” and then answer, “We have choice,” you’re identifying the stable core of the human person not as flaw or fixed trait, but as freedom.

That is deeply resonant with the Christian understanding of love:

    Love cannot be coerced.
    Therefore freedom cannot be removed.
    Therefore the possibility of walking away remains.

Even in glory, love is chosen.

Your emphasis on commitment is important. Religious vows and Christian marriage are not about eliminating freedom; they are about freely binding freedom. The vow does not remove the ability to leave. It intensifies the meaning of staying.

That’s why Christian marriage is described as covenant rather than contract. A contract protects interests; a covenant gives oneself. In the New Testament, marriage becomes an image of Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5). And Christ’s love is steadfast, but it is never forced.

So back to your framework:

    Our “spots” are the givenness of our nature.
    Our freedom is the enduring image of God in us.
    Grace is the divine life offered to us.
    Sanctification is what happens when freedom continually says “yes.”

Grace transfigures because it is relational union. But union requires consent. And consent can be withdrawn.

That’s not a weakness of grace — it’s the dignity of love.

Your thought actually leans toward what the Eastern Christian tradition calls theosis (divinization): participation in God by grace while remaining truly human. It echoes the transfiguration of Christ — the humanity does not disappear; it shines.

So perhaps the refined formulation of your view is:

    What we are does not change, creatures endowed with freedom.
    What we become depends on how that freedom responds to grace.
    Grace truly transforms, but never coerces.
    Commitment is the sustained exercise of free love.

There’s something very mature in insisting that freedom remains even in holiness. It preserves responsibility, dignity, and the seriousness of love.

Let me ask you something that follows naturally from your view:

If freedom always remains, do you think there is ever a point where a person becomes so united with God that walking away becomes unthinkable, not impossible, but no longer desired? Or must the tension of possible departure always remain active?

That question touches the edge of how you understand heaven itself.

 

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Br Nicholas:

To this i say that Jesus on the cross asked forgiveness for those who did not know what they do. If we truly know God we would never walk away. God is love but God is truth. when everything tells you what is true, walking away just makes no sense. there is nothing to walk to. only to "no thing" and death. but maybe some walk away because there is a need to experience that vacuus death with nothingness to appreciate Love and Truth.

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Fr Aiden:

You’re moving into very deep waters here.

When you point to Jesus saying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” you’re identifying ignorance, not malice, as the root of separation. That insight goes all the way back to early Christian thinkers like Augustine of Hippo, who argued that evil is not a “thing” in itself but a privation, a lack of proper good, a distortion of vision.

If God is Love and Truth, as revealed in Gospel of John (“I am the way, the truth, and the life”), then to truly see God would be to see Reality as it is. And if Reality itself is Love, then turning away would not just be immoral, it would be irrational. There would indeed be “nowhere else” to go, because there is no alternative ground of being.

That aligns with your thought:

If we truly know God we would never walk away.

In that frame, walking away is not a fully informed rejection, it is a movement in partial blindness.

Now your final idea is especially interesting:

maybe some walk away because there is a need to experience that vacuus death with nothingness to appreciate Love and Truth.

That suggests that separation might function pedagogically, as contrast. Almost like the “far country” in the parable of the Prodigal Son. The son does not understand the father’s love until he tastes famine.

But here is the theological tension:

Is the experience of “nothingness” necessary for freedom?
Or is it simply what freedom risks?

In classical Christian thought, especially in Thomas Aquinas, evil is not needed for the good to be meaningful. Good is intelligible in itself. However, in lived human experience, contrast often awakens awareness. We learn gratitude by losing what we took for granted.

There’s also an echo here of existential thought, that confronting “nothingness” clarifies being. Yet Christianity would hesitate to say that death or separation is required for appreciation. It would instead say that fullness of vision eliminates the illusion that anything else could satisfy.

So perhaps what you are circling is this:

    In ignorance, we wander.
    In partial knowledge, we vacillate.
    In true knowledge, we rest.

And in that state of true knowledge, walking away is still metaphysically possible (because freedom remains), but existentially absurd, like stepping out of light into void while knowing it is void.

That preserves your earlier claim:
Freedom remains.
Grace transforms.
But clarity changes desire.

The deeper implication of what you’re saying may be this:

Hell is not chosen by someone who clearly sees God as God.
It is chosen by someone who does not yet see clearly.

Which raises a profound question:

Do you think perfect knowledge of God necessarily results in perfect love of God?
Or can a will fully see the Good and still refuse it?


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Br Nicholas:

This is a hard one. there can certainly be a knowledge of what is the right thing to do and yet we can choose the wrong thing. so knowledge of God's Will does not result in perfect love of God, but doing God's Will unto death does.

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Fr Aiden:

Yes, that’s a very careful distinction.

You’re separating knowing from doing, and even more, separating intellectual recognition from lived fidelity.

You’re right: we can know the right thing and still not do it. Paul the Apostle says exactly this in Romans 7, “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.” Knowledge alone does not heal the will.

So when you say:

knowledge of God's Will does not result in perfect love of God, but doing God's Will unto death does

you’re shifting the center from cognition to obedient participation.

That is profoundly Christological.

In Epistle to the Philippians 2:8, Christ “became obedient unto death.” It is not merely that he knew the Father’s will, he enacted it completely. Love is proven and perfected in fidelity, not awareness.

This also echoes Thomas Aquinas again: for him, love is not primarily a feeling but an act of the will, willing the good of the other. The will must be formed through habit, through repeated choosing of the good, until it becomes stable.

So perhaps the progression in your thought looks like this:

    Knowledge reveals what is true.
    Freedom allows assent or refusal.
    Repeated assent forms the will.
    Fidelity unto death perfects love.

In that sense, perfect love is not automatic upon seeing the Good. It is forged through commitment, through staying.

That also makes your earlier emphasis on vows and marriage even more coherent. A vow is not sustained by constant emotional intensity. It is sustained by choosing again and again, even when knowledge alone would not compel you.

There’s something very strong in your position:

    Freedom remains.
    Knowledge is not sufficient.
    Love is completed in faithful action.
    And perfect love is formed through endurance.

It almost suggests that heaven is not merely the result of seeing God, but the result of having become the kind of person who has chosen God fully.

Let me ask one final refinement, because it follows naturally:

If love is perfected by doing God’s will “unto death,” do you see death primarily as physical death, or as the continual dying to self that happens throughout life?

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Br Nicholas:

The latter. it might sound flippant, but the physical death is of no import when one is fixed on God's Love that does not know death.

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Fr Aiden: