A Personal Relationship with God - Yes, it's Possible, and Essential for Catholics

In preparation for my upcoming World Youth Day pilgrimage, I took my iPad on vacation and tried pounding out a post of two. My hope is to stay blogging while on the road, chronicling our journey, if the places we're going to have wifi connection. This dry run had mixed results. The actual typing on the screen went well, but editing and re-writes proved to be more difficult tasks. I'm the king of typos, and this is riddled with them. Now that I'm home I went back over it on my laptop, so hopefully it's a bit more polished.

PLYMOUTH, MA - I brought some homework with me, as I lounge around my brother's house, taking in the unobstructed view of Plymouth Harbor. There don't seem to be as many pleasure or sporting boats out there this year. I'm guessing it has to do with some work that's being done on the docks. There are big cranes on the pier and just off in the shallows. There's also a big construction project, on dry land, just down the street. The 1820 Court House is being renovated and a large extension is being built that will facilitate its transition into the new Town Hall. 

2020 marks the 400th anniversary of the pilgrims' landing, and preparations are heating up, with the recent work serving as a sign. My brother, one of the selectmen in town, is on the anniversary planning committee, and there are a lot of moving parts. Elizabeth R, aka Her Majesty the Queen, has been invited for the official celebration in four years. She'll be 94 (there's longevity in her line so I wouldn't bet against her still being among the living in four years), so we'll have to see if she's even accepts, let alone is up for the travel. Bet your boots I'll be angling for the opening benediction if she shows up. I hear that, while Supreme head of the Church of England, she has a soft spot for us papists.

As for my homework, I've been reading through Sherry Weddell's Forming Intentional Disciples. I watched a couple of talks she gave at Mundelien on You Tube in preparation for reading the book, and am now going through a quick reading in these days. There's a lot of hype in Church circles right now about Weddell's evangelization approach. Many dioceses are adapting her principles as a template for their pastoral planning and evangelization programs, and she is an in demand speaker.

I have a grave, philistine doubt when it comes to people who seem to burst on the scene and become the theological or pastoral flavor of the month (Weddell has actually been around for a while, but has become better known in the last four or five years). For the last several decades Catholics have been trying to find the magic formula for keeping cradle Catholics from leaving and new converts coming in. It would be easy to assume that Weddell's methods are just the latest thing that will be hot today, and forgotten tomorrow.

The difference for me personally is that listening to her speak, and now reading her book, is like a kick to the gut. 

Weddell challenges many assumptions that we have about why so many Catholics stay lukewarm, leave the Church or, if they aren't Catholic, don't feel moved to enter. We tend to assume that defectors weren't well catechized, or had some deep disagreement with Church teaching, or were divorced and remarried, and so went to an ecclesial community they felt was more accepting of their situation. Anecdotally, I certainly know people who fit into one of these dynamics. What Weddell found in her research was that, while some may leave for these reasons, for the most part people leave the Church and go to a Protestant community because they don't feel that the Catholic Church offered them a personal relationship with God. Those who leave for no religion don't believe in a personal God or, if they do, that a relationship with God isn't possible. She's found that there are many people still in the Church, including clergy and lay leaders who don't know that such a relationship is possible. In her travels, visiting dioceses across the fruited plain, Weddell has encountered more than a few Catholics, by her reckoning, who don't even believe in a personal God (YIKES!).

In one of her talks Weddell describes an interview with a lay director of a major Catholic non-profit, who had no idea what she was talking about when asking the person about their personal relationship with God. After trying to approach the question from several different angles she concluded that this person, a leader in the Catholic Church, really didn't believe in a personal God, or else really didn't see the question of a relationship with Him as being terribly important. The sad truth was that the person in question could have been heading up any secular non-profit organization. He or she may have been bright, professional and otherwise qualified - but wasn't a Disciple. Unfortunately, while I've met a great many very dedicated lay leaders, people of true faith, I've also met a few Church workers, hard working and competent as they may have been, who fit that description. 

I can attest as well, that I have met or heard of people who left either the Catholic Church, one of the Orthodox churches, or mainline Protestantism, who spoke of never having had a personal relationship with God before now, and now feel at home in their new faith community. They'll say that they weren't Christian before, though having been brought up in what I know are Christian faiths. Again, a philistine doubt and cradle Catholic skepticism led me to think that there had to be some other, above mentioned, reason for their separating from the Church, especially focusing on the idea that they weren't well catechized (let's face it, if you grew up from the '70's on you probably didn't receive a very sold catechetical formation, K through12th grade).

But what Weddell writing is a wake up call. The reasons why people leave are deeper than simply not having received good catechesis. It's about not having received an integrated formation that accompanied them through the stages of growth from seeking God to living as a disciple. These stages are not separate, in many ways, but are interconnected and ongoing through life. It is a constant process of conversion that deepens our commitment to a dynamic discipleship in Christ.

Because I'm still reading the book I'm not going into details, but want to really focus in on one big point that she makes - that a personal relationship with the living God is not only possible, but essential to true discipleship. Weddell writes that Catholics are just not accustomed to speaking of their religious experience. But this has to change if we are going to really begin to retain, gain and form intentional Catholic disciples.

Catholics tend to focus on the objective truth of the Faith. Non Catholics, Protestants in particular, who enter the Church often come to "Rome" after they discover the Church Fathers, and investigate Church history. As famed Anglican convert, Blessed John Henry Newman, once said, "to be deep in history is to cease being Protestant." There are emotional conversions to Rome, but the pull of conversion often comes after someone falls in love with Christ, comes to sense that there is something more than what evangelicalism or the broader Protestant faith offers, they discover the historical roots of Christianity, a path that leads to the Catholic Church. 

Evangelicals tend to focus on the subjective experience of accepting Christ as personal Lord and Savior. We can give all the historical and theological reasons why Catholicism is the true Church Christ founded, but many of us don't have the ability to touch hearts by articulating why we believe on a personal, gut level. We are living in an age where heart supersedes the brain, feeling trumps reason. Somehow we need to better express the subjective experience we have living out the Catholic Faith, not just the objective reality underneath it.

For instance, we have the Sacraments, specifically the Eucharist, which I celebrate everyday. For me it is a very personal encounter with the risen Lord, a union with Him and sharing in His once for all sacrifice made mysteriously present through the power of the Holy Spirit. Evangelicals and other Protestants don't see it that way. They see it, at best as a simple memorial of the Last Supper, at worst as an empty ritual bordering on magic. 

I pray the rosary everyday, meditating on the various mysteries, the vast majority of which are drawn directly from Scripture. Through this ancient prayer I ponder the key events of Jesus' life as if I were there, looking through the eyes of the Blessed Mother, asking the Lord to help me grow in the virtues the mysteries represent, as well as praying for the my needs and those of my loved ones. They see vain repetition. 

In my devotional life I maintain an active friendship with the Saints. In them I am surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses who went before me, encouraging me to perceiver in faith to the end as they did (Hebrews 12:1). They are the sign that Jesus is the resurrection and the life, God of the living, not the dead (Matt. 22:23-33). They are the ones described in the Book of Revelation offering the prayers of the "holy ones" that rise up to the Heavenly Thrown like incense (5:8). Evangelicals and nondenominational Christians see all sorts of things, from idolatry to necromancy.

For me, the key is to not to get so caught up on objections that are thrown at us, but to instead focus on why we believe.

I have always been baffled by people who tell me that being a Catholic somehow means that I haven't accepted Christ as my personal Lord and Savior. I generally don't know how to answer the objection because the assertion seems so stupid it's beyond taking seriously. Sorry to be so blunt about it. But the people making the accusation aren't stupid, and many are former Catholics who made it through religious education or even Catholic school never having had that personal encounter with the living Lord. The problem isn't them, and it isn't the Catholic faith. The problem is us (by us I mean pastors, bishops, religious educators, et al). We have not done a good enough job sharing the treasure we hold in our hearts. We've taken for granted that the objective truth and power of the Sacraments will do all the work for us. We haven't appreciated that subjective dispositions are needed for the grace we receive in them to fully flower and bear fruit. We need to be more open about sharing who Jesus Christ is to us, and how he has changed our lives.

I leave you with disturbing questions that we all need to ask ourselves (or they should be disturbing if we call ourselves disciples) Who is Jesus? Do I have a personal relationship with him? And related to that, has He changed my life?