I am currently reading “Forming Intentional Disciples: the path to Knowing and Following Jesus”. This is a very challenging book for me. I am challenged on a personal level and professional level.
It comes down to, for me, the integrity of my faith. Am I a true disciple of Jesus Christ, have I acknowledged him as my true savior?
I could say “yes”, having been a lifelong Catholic and being a priest. But I also have already written about how I felt for most of my life that my level faith was rather superficial.
I attended Mass, “got” the sacraments, and did what was good. I was not unlike the young man in Matthew’s Gospel who asks Jesus what must he do to have eternal life.
I also think though that through those years, I somehow knew it was not enough. I had questions that were not being answered and questions for which I lacked the vocabulary to ask about.
Reading this book and some of its statistics, I think I am not alone. That many of my generation had/have questions that were not being answered by the institution of the Church. Many of us searching for a deeper meaning.
Maybe for that reason so many left the church, such as most of my siblings.
Now, I have been given more context and more vocabulary. I have been given some answers, and I am thinking even now, it is still not enough.
I have doubts in whether I am truly evangelizing the good news. I have doubts to whether I am communicating well the beauty and the power of faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, as Savior of the world.
Here again is the crux of my thoughts….have I had the personal encounter with the person of Jesus Christ?
Benedict XVI writes: “Being Christian is not the result of a an ethical choice or lofty idea, but an encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction…”
Maybe I have had the encounter but have failed to recognize because I did not, nor still do not, have the vocabulary. Maybe the fullness of that encounter has yet to happen?
SOOOOO…what I prayed over during my mini-retreat, and what I intend to discuss with my spiritual director is the meaning of this all. That searcher in me is wanting a better answer to it all. That priest in me wants to be able to share it with others.
Dear father, the pope and his predecessor bl John Paul are restoring our deep catholic language for discipleship. I am so happy you are allowing yourself to be led by the Holy Spirit through the challenge of this book. I shall pray that you do encounter him in his personal love for you….so that you can say from your heart, “your love lord is better than life. “. Yours in Jesus, carole
I can say without flinching that yeah, I’m a true (and sinful) disciple of Jesus Christ, & have acknowledged him as my true savior. As the book puts it, I’m an intentional disciple. But all that’s not enough- it just opens up a wider and more compelling vista for being a Catholic Christian. And I don’t know about others, but in my case, getting to this point was preceded by some bad sins, shocking tragedy, and shocking good fortune.
Father,
I’m so encouraged by your honesty and candor. I sometimes ask myself the same question and I believe that a true disciple is always looking for the pearl of great price even after he thinks he found Jesus, because there are so many dark and maybe even dissociated parts of the heart even after we make a decision to follow Jesus.
One thing that helped me was just to attend a local evangelical church for a while (I know this is heresy to some). I suggested to my local pastor that we need to open up new connections between our parish and the local evangelical parishes and he just replied defensively by saying “I have all I need in the Eucharist.” It’s a shame when we catholics use Jesus’s presence in Eucharist as a defensive measure to close off from the Evangelicals who can help us to re-encounter the Lord in our lives because of the intensity of their faith in Christ.
I’m reading Evangelical Catholics (1990) by Keith Fournier right now. Some of it aligns well with the subject of this post.