Category: SalvationWhat does it mean to have a “personal relationship” with Jesus?
A: Maybe, but maybe not. Let’s start answering your question with a question: When you “pray and go to Mass regularly,” why do you do it? Take a moment to answer that question for yourself before you continue reading… Why do you carve time out of your busy schedule to pray and worship God the Father through Jesus Christ in union with the Holy Spirit? Most likely, your personal answer fits into one of the following three generic answers. Falling into Routine First, we can pray and worship out of routine. It’s like punching our spiritual time-clock. We have always gone to Mass and always prayed, ever since we were kids, and we feel a kind of comfortable inertia in continuing to do so. We have a vague sense that one ought to do such things, and we have a vague sense that if I fail to do them we will feel guilty for some reason, and we don’t want to add an uncomfortable guilty feeling to our already over-stressed emotional world. So we keep going through the motions of being a Catholic. Just as it would strike an American citizen as somehow incongruent not to celebrate the Fourth of July, it strikes a cultural Catholic as somehow incongruent not to engage in some basic spiritual practices. If you “say your prayers” just because doing so has become part of your internal comfort zone, you may have fallen into what theologians call spiritual routine. When I was in eighth grade I remember sleeping over at a friend’s house. As we went down to the basement to go to bed, his parents were sitting on the couch watching television, the wife cuddling against the husband, who had his arm around her. They looked like a happy couple. Two months later they were divorced. I asked me friend how they could be so happy together, and then get divorced. My friend told me that they just kept up appearances for the kids’ sake, but there was no love in it. That’s falling into routine. Fright School Second, we can pray and worship out of fear. This can be akin to superstition. We have the idea in our heads that if we stop going to Mass, praying the Rosary, or making our morning offering, God will become angry, punish us, make our lives miserable, and maybe even send us to Hell. In this case, our spiritual commitments (prayer and worship) are like paying taxes to a tyrant, or being extorted by a strong-man: if we pay our dues, the Boss won’t bother us. In ancient pagan religions, proper worship depended on following formula perfectly. A priest had to offer an elaborate ceremony with perfect execution, or the god would not be pleased and it would go to waste. If during the ceremony the priest sneezed, for example, he would have to start all over again. In this religious vision, people are not children of a loving Father, but slaves of angry, fickle, and aloof deities. Connected by Conviction Third, we can pray and worship out of conviction. The word “conviction” comes from the same word that gives us “convinced.” Religious conviction is an internal state of assurance with regard to religious truth. The primary reason a convinced Christian prays and worships is because they sincerely believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, our Lord and Savior, Creator and Redeemer, and that he deserves our praise and we need his grace. If our spiritual life flows from conviction, then the actual activity we engage in during our times of prayer is conscious: we pay attention to the meaning of the words, we search the Scriptures for wisdom and guidance, we lift our hearts to God in thanksgiving and adoration, and we strive to conform how we live to what we discover in prayer – to what God wants for us (God’s will). In this case, our faith actually connects our mind and heart to God during our prayer. We are not just going through motions, and we are just paying our dues; we are actually encountering the God who speaks to his beloved children through the revelation of Jesus Christ. The Bible Reminds Us Praying and worshipping mainly out of conviction (as opposed to routine or fear), is what it means to have a “personal relationship with Christ.” On the one hand, we know that he knows us and is interested in our life (“I no longer call you slaves… I have called you friends… It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go out and bear fruit…” (John 15: 15-16). Or, as St Paul put it, “I live by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given himself up for me” (Galatians 2:20). And on the other hand, we put forth our own effort to follow his example and teaching, as a way to stay close to him, accept his invitation to become a disciple, and participate in his great project of building up the Church for the glory of God and the salvation of souls: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments…” (Jon 14:15). Christianity is about knowing, loving, and following a person, Jesus Christ. The essence of our religion is a personal relationship of faith, hope, and love. The Pope Hits the Nail on the Head As Pope Benedict XVI put it in his inaugural homily: “The Church as a whole and all her Pastors, like Christ, must set out to lead people out of the desert, towards the place of life, towards friendship with the Son of God, towards the One who gives us life, and life in abundance… There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ. There is nothing more beautiful than to know Him and to speak to others of our friendship with Him… If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation” (Pope Benedict XVI, 24 April 2005). Of course, we are all on our way to spiritual perfection, and so sometimes we fall into routine – at least, on the surface of our minds we can fall into routine; our conviction still exists, but it’s submerged under distraction or anxiety. That prayer is still valuable, and still pleasing to God – the remote motivation is right on target. But the more we can keep our convictions fresh, strong, and vibrant, the better. Likewise, I may find myself crawling out of bed on Sunday to get ready for Mass just because I know that missing Mass is a mortal sin, and I really don’t want to go to Hell. Some Christian faith and conviction is still present even in that slavish motivation. God can work with that. Yet, the more we understand what Mass really is, the more we will see obeying the precept to attend Mass as a joy, a relief, a mysterious encounter with eternity, and an opportunity to please God and build up his Kingdom. When we pray and worship out of conviction, we connect better with Christ, and his grace has more room to work in our souls. Having a “personal relationship with Christ” doesn’t mean regularly having visions of him sitting on the easy chair in the living room or hearing him give us directions while we’re looking for the right exit off the Interstate. Rather, it simply means gradually learning to live our Christianity more and more from heart to Heart. Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC What does the “born again” experience have to do with our salvation, and with our friendship with Christ?
A: I think I detect two different questions in your note. God and Emotions The first is: does someone have to have a deeply felt born-again experience in order to get into heaven? The answer is no. It doesn’t have to be deeply felt. It doesn’t have to be emotional. It just has to be real. There is a difference between “emotional” and “real.” On the one hand, I can have a profoundly moving emotional experience in the movie theater, but the drama that caused it wasn’t real. On the other hand, I can have a profound but un-dramatic relationship with a relative who is confined to a hospital bed, someone I visit regularly over an extended period of time without experiencing any strong emotions during those visits. Normally, some kind of interaction happens between the realm of real interpersonal experience and the realm of intense emotion, but we must keep in mind that the two realms only overlap; they are not equivalent. The same thing goes for our friendship with Christ. Remember, God deals with each of us in a personal, individual way. He has given you (and many of us) a very dramatic, emotionally undeniable experience of his love, his truth, and his presence. But to others he gives different graces. I have known people who have lived in deep intimacy with God for more than 80 years without ever having a “born-again” experience. It’s as if they are continually, quietly born again every day, every time they go to confession, every time they go to Mass. This is real. It proves its reality in the way they live, the way they pray. Remember Matthew 25? The “final exam” on Judgment Day isn’t whether or not we had an emotional, dramatic born-again experience. The wisdom of the Church also provides for a gradual growth in intimacy with Christ, and a quiet, discrete way of giving one’s life to Christ over and over again through the years, through the liturgy and the sacraments. I think you and I should be grateful for the dramatic, emotional born again experiences that God has given us. God knows we need them, and that’s why he gives them to us. But it is not our place to define how God should work in everyone else’s life. We need to trust his wisdom, and the wisdom of his Church. And we also need to make sure that our love for Christ isn’t built solely on those positive emotional experiences; it would constitute the classic mistake of loving the gifts more than the Giver of the gifts, and it can get us into trouble. Our Place in Heaven Second question: Is your place in heaven secure? Yes. Is mine? Yes. Is everyone’s? Yes. The place is secure. God “will’s all men’s salvation” as St Paul puts it. The INSECURE part is whether we will end up occupying it. That doesn’t depend just on God. It also depends on us. Remember, the essence of Christianity is a living relationship with Jesus Christ, a friendship with him. Now, common sense tells us that no real friendship automatically lasts forever. I can break a friendship. I can leave my friends and not come back to them. This is because I am a human being; I am free. This freedom is not eliminated by Christ. He doesn’t make us less human when he offers us his friendship. It is possible to backslide. It is possible to be seduced by the devil and to abandon Christ. Just look at the New Testament – Judas, Peter… This is why the New Testament at times seems to contradict itself. Our salvation is assured, because it depends on God; AND our salvation is a process, to be “worked out in fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12). It’s kind of a paradox, but it’s clear. We can fall away: “We ought, then, to turn our minds more attentively than before to what we have been taught, so that we do not drift away” (Heb 2:1). The most eloquent scriptural explanation of this comes from Revelation 2, 3, and 4. It’s all about Christ warning the Churches that they need to keep watch, they need to do their part to keep the faith, to keep their friendship with Christ vibrant and growing. This isn’t meant to be scary. If we make a decent effort to keep our prayer life in shape, if we stay close to the sacraments and continually follow God’s will as shown in Church teaching and in our well-formed conscience, the friendship will keep growing. That’s why we can have that quiet assurance in our hearts and look forward to heaven (this is the virtue of hope). But we can’t put it on automatic pilot. Real friendships don’t work like that (this is the sin of presumption). Both of these issues can have a strong effort on our efforts towards spiritual growth. If we are too concerned about concocting emotional experiences, our prayer life and sacramental life may start leaning towards self-centeredness instead of Christ-centeredness. If we become obsessed about whether or not our salvation is assured, the devil can use that worry to cause interior turbulence, leading to distractions and, once again, self-absorption. I hope these reflections have settled your mind, and I also hope they help you discover the magnificent variety of ways in which God touches the hearts of his beloved children. Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC |
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Q: Father John, I am a fairly recent convert to the faith. My conversion took place over a period of 3 years in which I had a series of powerful experiences of God’s presence and action in my life. It wasn’t just coming into the Church for me – it was discovering that Jesus is a real person, someone interested in my life. During my conversion, I understood this turn-around (this discovery of Jesus) as being “born again.” I also have understood this kind of experience as being necessary to have my place secure in heaven. And yet, I now know so many Catholics who have never had this kind of experience. They don’t talk about Jesus as if he is a real person. But they seem to think their place in heaven is secure anyway. This is all kind of vague, but I guess my basic question is: What does the “born again” experience have to do with our salvation, and with our friendship with Christ? Am I overemphasizing it, or are other people under-emphasizing it?
