Is A Personal Relationship With Christ A Catholic Concept?

To peruse the comments in response last week's blog at Aleteia, The Elephant in the Communion Line, one might conclude that I eagerly observe those coming forward for Holy Communion and readily judge their worthiness or unworthiness to receive. Truth be told, I rarely notice who is receiving communion, as I am generally focused on Christ’s presence in the Eucharist before and after communion, often with my eyes closed. Furthermore, far be it from me to judge whether any soul is in a state of grace, for God alone is capable of such knowledge. But that is completely beside the point.

The point of my article was to pose a different question entirely, which I ask again here: What is at the root of the problem when, statistically, a majority of Catholics don’t practice the moral teachings of the Church or live in a way that demonstrates any appreciable difference than those in the surrounding secular culture? Moreover, why has so much focus been placed on divorce and remarriage instead of on the overarching problem of the spiritual and moral confusion that reigns in the Church?

I suggested that the crisis in the Church is due, in large part, to a system that often “sacramentalizes” Catholics without leading them to a life-changing encounter with Jesus Christ. The solution? Bold, clear evangelization that leads people to a personal relationship with Christ. Or as St. John Paul II put it:

It is necessary to awaken again in believers a full relationship with Christ. Only from a personal relationship with Jesus can an effective evangelization develop. Pope John Paul II, speech to bishops of Southern Germany, Dec. 4, 1992. L’Osservatore Romano (English ed.). Dec. 23/30, 1992, pp. 5-6.

The crux of the Christian faith is a living, personal relationship with the Triune God, fully revealed in and through the person of Christ. This is the fundamental truth of the Catholic faith, and it is a truth we must proclaim with heartfelt zeal if we are to see the realization of the new evangelization of the Church and the world for which St. John Paul II ardently and repeatedly asked.

Christian faith is not meant to simply give us something pleasant to do on Sundays. It is meant to radically change us and our lives—to turn us around from death to life, to reorient our souls to life-giving truth, to enable us to participate in God’s very own love life—equipping us to know God intimately, to love as he loves, and to live and act as his very own children. Faith in Christ is more than merely an intellectual assent to propositions or the practice of a set of rituals, however good and necessary those are in themselves. Faith is “first of all a personal adherence of man to God,” the act through which one “freely commits himself to God,” and the mystery through which we live out “a vital and personal relationship with the living and true God” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, par. 150, 1814, 2558).

In other words, faith is the total self surrender of the human person to the living God, whom we come to believe in, love and trust as Lord, Father, savior, bridegroom, healer, lover of our souls, fulfiller of the deepest longings of our hearts and so much more.

Faith, trust and love are synonymous words in Christianity, and they indicate familial intimacy and deep friendship with a God who “has a name and calls us by name…he is a Person, and he seeks the person, he has a face and he seeks our face. He has a heart and he seeks our heart” (Joseph Ratzinger, The God of Jesus Christ: Meditations on the Triune God, 24). This is the God of the Christian faith; this is the God to whom we must introduce others at a moment in history when vast numbers of people, including many baptized Catholics, have lost their way in an aimless search for meaning and satisfaction.

Finally, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI) so eloquently articulated in Introduction to Christianity:

Christian faith is more than the option in favour of a spiritual ground to the world; its central formula is not “I believe in something”, but “I believe in Thee”…Thus faith is the finding of a “You” that bears me up and amid all the unfulfilled—and in the last resort unfulfillable—hope of human encounters gives me the promise of an indestructible love which not only longs for eternity but guarantees it. Christian faith lives on the discovery that not only is there such a thing as objective meaning, but this meaning knows me and loves me, and I can entrust myself to it like the child that knows all its questions answered in the “You” of its mother. Thus in the last analysis believing, trusting and loving are one, and all the theses round which belief revolves are only concrete expressions of the all-embracing about-turn, of the assertion “I believe in You”—of the discovery of God in the countenance of the man Jesus of Nazareth.  

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 47, 48

Thus, the essence of the Christian faith is a personal relationship with God. May we individually and corporately discover anew the “all-embracing about-turn of the assertion I believe in You.”

This article originally appeared at Aleteia.

How To Find God in A World Full of Chaos

 

To repeat continually “for his mercy endures forever,” as the psalm does, seems to break through the dimensions of space and time, inserting everything into the eternal mystery of love. It is as if to say that not only in history, but for all eternity man will always be under the merciful gaze of the Father. Pope Francis, Misericordiae Vultus, para. 7

“Let us remember that we are in the holy presence of God.” That reminder begins every class and every assembly at St. Paul’s School, the Catholic high school that my 16-year-old son, Benjamin, attends.

We are in the holy presence of God. Do we believe it? Do we live as though it’s true?

As the world seemingly spins out of control, we can wonder: Where is God in all of this? Caught in the vortex of the world’s chaos, we can feel our center slipping. How do we find rest?

To begin with, we must be intentional about how we spend our time, living with a lively awareness of whether what we do with our time facilitates internal peace or chaos in our lives. We can develop chaos-free habits of living, the most important of which is spending time with God daily in prayer (which, ironically, is the thing we often avoid most). Indeed, “wasting” precious time with God in prayer is the most vital thing we can “do” on any given day, even if it’s just for a few minutes. Jesus spent lavish time in prayer regularly—he “often withdrew to lonely places and prayed” (Luke 5:16). If the God-man needed to pray, how much more do we pitiful sinners need to?

Prayer awakens us to the presence of God, who is always with us. Prayer calls us to center ourselves on God, who as St. Augustine said, “is closer to us that we are to ourselves.” Prayer intentionally pushes back the unholy pandemonium in our lives by reordering our hearts and minds to God. Because the chaos in our lives is often a reflection of the chaos in our hearts and heads. In fact, when our insides become a place of mayhem, our outsides generally follow suit.

It seems that the more chaotic we feel inside, the more we experience ourselves as being “scattered.” Jesus said: “Whoever does not gather with me scatters” (Luke 11:23). It is interesting to note that the New Testament term for the dark power, ho diabolos, from which we derive the word “devil,” literally means “the scatterer.”* The “scatterer” specializes in chaos, disorder, division and disintegration—in keeping us dispersed in umpteen ways until we are beside ourselves.

The good news is that God’s promise is to gather us in from “every place where we (are) scattered” (Ezekiel 34:12). He continually invites us to intimacy with Him, to peace, order and integrity. He invites us to slow down, settle down and look up, praying with the psalmist: "I set the Lord ever before me; with him at my right hand I shall not be disturbed. Therefore my heart is glad and my soul rejoices, my body, too, abides in confidence." Psalm 15:8-9

A powerful remedy for chaos is to gather with God, and in so doing, allow him to gather us back from all of the places to which we have been scattered. As problems press in from every side, let us remember Christ’s words to anxious Martha that sitting at his feet is the one thing necessary (Luke 10:42)—one concrete act that can lead to peace, both in ourselves and in the world around us.

"The Lord is near. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving make your requests known to God. Then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." Philippians 4:5-7

*Thanks to Bishop Robert Barron for this insight.

This article was originally published on Aleteia.

Is Christ My King?

“Jesus is the Lord of my life.” That was a common statement in the evangelical Christian church I attended 25 years ago, before I returned to the Catholic Church in 1988. Meditating on the Feast of Christ the King this past week, I wondered why Catholics don’t use that kind of language more often when we describe our relationship with Christ. After all, is making Jesus the Lord of one’s life only a Protestant concept?

Not according to Joseph Ratzinger, who says something very similar in his book of Advent sermons entitled, What It Means To Be A Christian:

Becoming a Christian…is just this: achieving a Copernican revolution and no longer seeing ourselves as the center of the universe, around which everything else must turn…instead of that we have begun to accept quite seriously that we are one of many among God’s creatures, all of which turn around God as their center.

My relationship with God is thus meant to cause a Copernican revolution in my life, where I awaken to the reality of a personal God and make Him the center of my universe, letting everything in my life orbit around Him. Such a revolution is called “faith,” which is not just an intellectual assent to articles of the Creed, but the full surrender of my entire self to the living God, including my mind, my will, and everything else in my life.

I underwent such a Copernican revolution in my early twenties, when I gave my life to Christ. But a recurring revolution occurs daily in my walk with God, as I offer my life and myself to Him and honestly examine what gods I am placing at the center of my world on any given day. So often, I fall prey to three “lords” that I must continually renounce: what I possess, what I can do and what people think of me.  Those are the gods this world prizes most, and, sadly, they are often the standard by which I measure both my own self worth and the value of others.

Thankfully, God’s ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts (Is. 55:8). While the world around us screams: “You’re not enough, you don’t have enough, you don’t do enough,” God whispers, “You are My beloved child, on you My favor rests.” While the world encourages us to compete frantically to fit in, buy in and measure up, God says: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest,” (Mt. 11:28).

I am increasingly aware of how tired I am of the world’s false measures, and how much I desire to be set free from the burden of carrying them. So I invite Jesus to come more deeply into my being, asking that more of His love inhabit my small temple. This process of ongoing conversion—a conscious, constant Christ uprising—turns me away from false gods toward the living God, who is Love. It places the one, true Lord on the throne of my heart, where He is anxious to lay His crown.

Interestingly, the word conversion, which means the change of a measuring system, also means changing one’s beliefs. Maybe that’s because our beliefs change when we change our measuring system. Conversion is a “radical reorientation of our lives toward God.”*  It recalibrates our entire understanding of reality, changing our measuring system from the world’s stifling scales to the infinite expanse of God's love, which knows no bounds. When that happens, I trust that my significance and meaning lies in God’s love for me and not in any manmade gauge of performance.

So let us ask today: Is Jesus the Lord of my life? Is He is the center of my life, around which everything turns and by which everything else is measured?   To live in such a stance is what it means to be a Christian.  To live in an opposing posture makes us a slave to the world's tyranny.  It's one or the other.

Let us pray:

Lord Jesus Christ, I surrender my life to you and I place my mind, my will, my heart and everything in my life under your Kingship and your authority. I give myself to you and ask you to take possession of me. Change me, that I may live in the truth of your love and reflect that love in our broken world. Thank you Lord for your love, mercy and kindness. Amen.

*Catechism of the Catholic Church, Glossary