(Monday, 09/29/2014, Gaudium Press) The legend is an aura that ennobles human beings and makes them more interesting to others. It could be said that without a legend human beings would be just what they are. To understand someone’s life is not enough the biographic data or his dull “Curriculum vitae”. His legend is required. To respect someone’s legend is an act of charity, by loving each other as Christ has commanded us (John 13:34).

St Teresa said that Jesus knew the qualities of his apostles, simply because He had gave them to them.

St. Teresa of the Child Jesus, expounding on this passage of the Gospel, says that Our Lord knew the qualities of his apostles, simply because Jesus Christ had given these graces to them. And that His kind invitation to love each other, which he revealed to us on the night of the Last Supper, is not simply to try to do the effort to appreciate someone’s qualities but to love him despite his possibly horrible and unbearable defects: “Love one another as I have loved you” and He loved us despite our sinfulness nature which makes us ” sin seven times a day “(Proverbs 24, 16).

To make a legend of a person is not to create a fable or a fiction. It is to see as a fact what it could have been, or to see a divine plan behind someone’s life, a providential call that someone received, something “beyond the ordinary” that is still to be accomplished either in this life or in eternity. In a truly Christian society people should be looking to best of each other to what it has been called by Prof Plinio Correa de Oliveira, in a lecture in 1982, as “our own archetype”

The legend survives us and surpasses us, it is not a myth based on unreality as it happened in pagan antiquity. Christian philosophy tried to sanctify that natural human tendency to look for what’s legendary. Everything created by God has its own beautiful legend, and to admire this beauty is actually a human right that unfortunately is not mentioned in the famous “Universal Declaration” of 1948. Human relations, in marriage for example, could have been tremendously different if each spouse would have taken this into consideration.

But to keep believing in the legend of those around us is not something we can do by our own stoic effort. That would be impossible due to our weak nature. Jesus warned us that without him nothing we can do (Jn 15,1-8). All our efforts would be useless without the mysterious force that He promises us if we humbly ask.

Neither we will need “The Third Eye” imagined by the enigmatic Englishman Lobsang Rampa, born in the Uk, his real name being Cyril Henry Hoskin, and died in Canada in 1981. Rampa claimed he had undergone an operation in which a small hole was drilled into his forehead to arouse the third eye and therefore enhance powers of clairvoyance.

As St. Paul says “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12.9). If a more perfect Christian society is to come people ought to see each other enrobe by the legend our Creator has clothe us since He saw us in our mother’s womb.

By Antonio Borda