How Do You Communicate An Experience?
In Fr. Mike's post on Recovering a Catholic Culture, I was struck by this passage:
"As is almost always the case, our wonderful Church documents presume or propose a culture of intentional discipleship, but if one does not exist in a parish, we have a bit of a catch-22. How do we foster intentional discipleship if the lived reality of the local parish is not actively promoting it?"(I suppose my being struck by that shouldn't surprise me. It is the question that moves this entire blog, after all ;-))
But what I kept thinking about when reading this question is that part of the challenge rests in how we can communicate an experience.
What experience, you say? The encounter with Christ.
I personally like that way of speaking of this experience. Admittedly, it may be due to the context in which the meaning of this phrase was driven home for me, but it has always felt less saddled with the baggage of what most Americans identify as "classically Protestant" expressions, like "a personal relationship with Jesus" or "accepting Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior". Even, today, when I hear those phrases, I must admit that I first and foremost think of the personal and (honestly) an almost ethereal Jesus. But "encounter?" For some reason, there's flesh there. And where I find Him in the flesh is in His people, in His Church. Cardinal Scola said much the same in his address* at the 2nd World Congress of Ecclesial Movements this past Pentecost, where he described the encounter with Jesus Christ as a "personal and communitarian event" (emphasis added). At least for me, the phrase "encounter" more easily brings this to mind.
But, I think, it is that experience, the encounter with Christ, that is part of what makes intentional discipleship possible. After all, how do you, exercising your freedom, choose to follow Christ if you have not first met Him? And is not to follow Him but to encounter Him anew each day? And here, I am talking about the existential of being a Christian. An active following that is the following of a Person, not, as then-Cardinal Ratzinger commented, an adherence to a Christianity that's been reduced to some "intellectual system, a packet of dogmas, a moralism ...".
Of course, once could say that this is precisely what the Church as been proposing through the ages: the apostles sharing their experience of His presence with others and inviting them to partake and then those others sharing their experience of Him with the next generation. But in some pockets (and, admittedly they are some really big pockets today) what is being offered to people is precisely what now Pope Benedict warned was not really Christianity. And when tested, it fails to satisfy, it falls short, and thus doesn't sustain and change a person.
(Okay, I know what you are thinking. Did he use all of these words to basically just restate Fr. Mike's question? Well, what did you expect, programmatic answers from me? Heh. Not likely. The best I have ever managed is to return to Christ's own reply to the question of St. Andrew and St. John: "come and see." )
* Sorry that the link is in Italian, but I couldn't find an English translation anywhere.
** The external link above is a hat tip to Fr. Julian Carron,and the title of his article on education, that inspired the lens of this post.
Labels: Catholic culture, Christ, Encounter, Experience
posted by JACK @ 10:36 AM
7 Comments
7 Comments:
Hi, Jack;
Great observation, "part of the challenge rests in how we can communicate an experience - the encounter with Christ."
I have a friend in Colorado Springs about whom I'll submit a post someday. He's had a powerful conversion experience through what I'd call a mystical encounter with Christ. It changed his life completely, enabling him to overcome addiction to meth, sexual promiscuity, and other vices. He has a hard time describing what actually happened, but in a nutshell it was a powerful experience of Jesus' love for him, which caused a profound sense of contrition for his sins, as well as a desire to love as he knows himself to be loved.
But while he can't really describe his experience, something of that experience is expressed in how he now lives. He is a saint-in-the-making. I see the fruits of the Spirit being manifested in his life: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control. He says he tries to see Jesus in everyone he meets, and he's much more successful at it than I am. But at the same time, I'd say that people encounter something of Jesus when they meet him.
And that's my point, finally. Pope Benedict XVI said, "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."
Homily April 24, 2005
Part of the solution to the catch-22 I mentioned in my post is to encourage the intentional disciples in our communities to speak of the surprising encounter with Christ, of their friendship with Him, and to be transformed by that intimate knowledge of him so that others encounter Jesus through them. That's the power of the charisms, for one thing, but it's also exactly what St. Paul means when he says in Galatians 2:20, "I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me; insofar as I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given himself up for me."
When people encountered Paul, through the grace of God in him, they had an experience of Christ, mediated through Paul's flesh and blood.
By the way, what Paul said in Gal. 2:20 is precisely how my friend desires to live. It's a beautiful thing to witness, and my encounter of Christ through him has changed my life.
Fr. Mike:
Yes, do share a post about this friend someday! Your point about people encountering Christ in your friend is key. Because I agree that that is a core way of how we truly encounter Him, how He is present, through His Body, the Church. Otherwise, we are just passing along ideas about Christ, if those meeting us can only hear of other people's encounters with Christ but have no ability to meet Him today.
JACK
I am a former non-Christian, and then a born again Christian, and then a Catholic Christian. The key to my own conversion was and is a powerful and life-changing direct encounter with Christ, which did not happen through the agency of any person. My life before and after that encounter has been completely different (I call it my own personal B.C. and A.D. – before Christ in my life and after my own “death” and rebirth into Christ).
Christ has been leading me ever since; he first let me into an evangelical church, where I began to learn about Christianity, and where I also very powerfully experienced Christ not only personally, interiorly and in my prayer life, but in the community of believers, including experiencing Him speaking to me through other believers. He was very much present there, in and among everyone, and no one was shy or ashamed about speaking of Him. Direct, personal encounter with Christ seemed to be the norm, not the exception, in that environment.
It is Christ who also led me, through very fortuitous circumstances, into the Catholic Church. Sherry Weddell was one of the people who witnessed to me during my conversion (I was confirmed in 1999). My immersion into Catholic doctrine, history, liturgy, sacraments, spiritual and mystical theology, the lives of the many holy men and women throughout history, and pilgrimages to many holy places around the world has greatly enriched my experience of the life of faith and of life in the Body.
However, I have to say that I have not experienced the presence of Christ in the community, in other believers, to the same extent that I did in the Evangelical world. I’ve been trying to understand why. It seems to me that people either do not have the relationship with Christ that I have found elsewhere, or that they do not express it openly, out of a kind of Catholic cultural reticence that has been discussed in other posts on this blog. In my experience, this lack or reticence makes the Catholic Body much less effective in witnessing and evangelizing for Christ – which is disappointing, given the great riches present in the Church.
Jack, you describe the wording “personal relationship with Christ,” and experiencing him as “personal Lord and Savior,” as baggage. But Jesus is our Lord and our Savior, is he not? The phrase “intentional discipleship” itself means you are a disciple of something, and that something is Jesus Christ.
It seems to me that the problem here is not really whether one should have a relationship with Christ or not, as it seems clear to me that the whole point of Catholicism is to have a relationship with Christ, and through the Christ the whole Body and the full Trinitarian life of God. Rather it seems to be a reaction against Protestant ways of speaking and thinking about Christian life, simply because they are Protestant.
I think this is something that needs to be examined. Because I have lived in both Protestant and Catholic worlds, I have experienced both Protestant prejudice against Catholicism, and Catholic prejudice against Protestantism, neither based on the actual merits of the beliefs in question. As a former Protestant and present Catholic, I’ve found myself correcting both Catholic and Protestant friends when they express such prejudices and misunderstandings.
These misunderstandings keep Protestants and Catholics apart from each other, and contribute to the ongoing divisions in the Body of Christ. But Protestants are Christians, too – are our brothers and sisters in Christ (“separated brethren,” according to the Catechism), and so are also gifted by the Holy Spirit with charisms for building up and strengthening the Body and evangelizing the world. The Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms this, and tells us that we should acknowledge what is good in other religions. The emphasis on personal relationship with Christ, in my opinion, is a very wonderful charism that Catholics can benefit from.
One more thing: in my Evangelical church, many of my friends were former Catholics. When I was on my way into the Catholic Church I asked each of them in turn why they had left the Catholic Church. They all gave me the same answer: although they loved the Church, had a sense of God there, and miss many things about it, they did not encounter Christ there. It wasn’t until they met an Evangelical, who witnessed to them about Christ, that they finally encountered Christ.
I have heard this story repeated many times; one of my teachers in the Augustine Institute has a son, now serving in Iraq, who left the Church for the same reason and has been a devout Evangelical every since. This may be an uncomfortable issue, but is an issue that many in the Church are aware of, including recent Popes, and are trying to deal with. Thankfully, so is the Catherine of Siena Institute.
Aimee, you make some great points. And I hope my post didn't seem like I was denying the truth of what you wrote. My point was simply to acknowledge the current situation on the ground, namely, that those phrases ring to the ears of many as being "Protestant" and can tend to close people off from their substance because of preconceptions of what they mean. I wish that weren't the case, and in some ways I think we should fight to restore the correct understanding of those phrases. On the other hand, it is just a phrase. Words to describe the event that matters. And there are other options of how we can speak about it. So, to the extent that a Catholic is more open to hearing about Christ, more open to a relationship with Him, if we speak of it as "encounter" (or some other phrase), why not? I'm not suggesting "encounter" is some magic phrase, either. (It is very powerful for me, but I don't pretend all would be moved by it in the same was as me.)
And I think there are difficulties (even recognizing the truth of what you say about Protestant experience, because I have witnessed it first hand as well) in how encounter is understood within Protestant circles. It often does come with a division between Christ and the Church (even, when they are speaking of some Protestant denomination or their local church when thinking of "Church").
So I share your belief that Catholics have much to learn from the Protestant emphasis on a personal relationship with Christ. But I am cautious (as I know you and the Siena Institute are, too) about adopting their language wholesale as some of what they mean by those phrases misses the mark, I think.
Jack: The problem with division in the Protestant world that you see is very real, and worth discussing. I was extremely aware of it as a Protestant, and uncomfortable with it. I even founded a prayer group at one point to pray for unity in the Body of Christ – an early precursor to my eventual conversion to Catholicism.
The problem with "relationship" that you see may partly be in how Protestants think of relationship with Christ as opposed to membership in a church. This has to do with the definition of church itself, which is different from the Catholic definition. It leaves Protestants free to move from church to church or found their own churches without qualms.
It also involves the Protestant concept of "authority," which is not located in a magisterium but in scripture alone, which really amounts to personal interpretation - the main source of division in the Protestant world.
Related to this is a confusion about how the Holy Spirit works, which is that each person has the Holy Spirit and so the Holy Spirit also speaks to each person individually on matters of interpretation, rather than through a magisterium. This can turn into division when people who are very dedicated to Christ perceive him speaking to them differently – and all they have to go on is their own perceptions.
But I can see how all of this taken together, wrapped up in the concept of “relationship with Christ,” could be very bothersome to a Catholic, and cause a Catholic to view such a relationship with suspicion.
For me, I am a Catholic because I was taught that I should obey Christ at all costs. In my study of history and Catholic doctrine I became convinced that Jesus really did found the Catholic Church and really does head it, and his Holy Spirit really does guide it through the magisterium. Therefore, to obey the Church is to obey Christ. There is no difference.
I don’t have any issues with “encounter” as opposed to “relationship,” except for the fact that “encounter” has a connotation of a single or occasional event, whereas “relationship” is ongoing. I encountered Christ on one unforgettable day; it resulted in my committing myself to him in faith, and I have had a relationship with Him ever since as a result. I suppose I could say that I encounter Christ in different kinds of ways, such as in the Eucharist or in prayer, but my relationship spans all times of day and night, in prayer, during work and rest, and during Holy Communion.
It is like a marriage. We encounter our spouses in different ways during the day and night, but we are always married to them. Does that make sense? Not trying to play rhetorical games here – you just brought up some points that got me thinking.
Maybe we should be asking Catholics: have you truly encountered Christ in your life?
Aimee,
You make a great point. In fact, it was part of what I initially struggled with until I recognized that the Church's teachings on encounter didn't envision it as a one time event that happened in the past and is over but as something we are called to anew. And that an event can continue to unfold in the present. For example, I was born to my parents at a specific point in time, but my sonship is something that is still unfolding. It isn't something that was present, just for the moment, when I was conceived or born.
So I agree, many people might wrongly think that encounter is a call for a moment versus a name for a method.
Yes! If you think about it, you realize that Jesus is not only far away in heaven, or present only in the Eucharist (though that is the most incredible way that He is present to us now), but present with us right here and now, all the time, at this very moment and always holding us in being in Him.
And I do believe that we can learn to experience His presence on a more constant basis, even given the ups and downs and periods of darkness or dryness in the spiritual life.
I wrote a series of posts on my evolving experience of Christ, both as an Evangelical and after my conversion to Catholicism. You can read it on my blog if you like:
http://aimeemilburn.typepad.com/my_weblog/jesus_christ/index.html
Or just click on my name here to get to my blog, then click the category "Jesus Christ" on the right side of the page.
It's called "I Believe in Jesus," and is in four parts. You have to scroll to the bottom of the page to get to the first part.
It doesn't include the story of my first encounter with Christ - come to think of it, I still need to write that - but it does tell of how that experience has changed and grown over the years, especially after my conversion to Catholicism.
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