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The Need to Find the Authentic Christ
Fr. Donald Macdonald, SMM
M any people today are conscious of the air they breathe. Pollution in the atmosphere affects us all, just as the polluted air of a city affects everyone who breathes it. There is therefore a growing concern for our environment. The hope is to provide a better world for all of us. The concern then must be global if the environment is to be improved, as inevitably nations and countries interact in what is coming to be seen as our global village. Individual concern or lack of it may have a world—wide impact.
The Christian would share that concern, but might also care about pollution of the environment through anti—Gospel values and contempt for Judaeo-Christian traditions and broadly positive values generally. We are being conditioned today through the lens of a camera in its many forms. Also, we are conditioned also by formal teaching in various ways, which if it came through a tap, would cause a disease epidemic on a frightening scale. We live in a pluralist society for the most part where varied perspectives flourish, but which in practice can mean that the Judaeo-Christian perspective is savaged.
STRUGGLE ON MY ACCOUNT
Against such a background it was forecast that the Christian of the future will be a mystic or he or she will not exist. By ‘mystic’ here is meant someone who has had a personally convincing experience of God. Such a person will have come to faith by successfully struggling against their environment. Personal experience of God and personal struggle will mark the future Christian. The environment can carry us no longer.
The Gospel warns us of this. The Sermon on the Mount is categoric: “Enter by the narrow gate for the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Mt. 7:13-14). This tells us clearly that the environment will not carry anyone who would find ultimate reality through life in God.
REJOICE AND BE GLAD
Opposition from our contemporaries was also forecast: “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven. In the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (Mt. 5:11—12). There is then an inbuilt pattern of antagonism to the will of God, part of a pattern which is centuries old. Within that same perspective Jesus was crucified. Because He was always at one with his Father’s will He was often at odds with people around Him who did not share His vision. Some were sufficiently influential to arrange for His death.
It is one thing to indicate this as the path of following Jesus, but the Sermon goes further stating that we are to “rejoice and be glad . . .” when we are treated like Jesus—ridiculed, persecuted and falsely accused. . . . To find myself in that situation is to see myself as “blessed”! Then I know that I am on the hard road to the narrow gate. All of this happens says Jesus in the Sermon, “on my account”. There is the key to understanding. In so far as I am at one with Jesus My Lord, I may be in conflict with militant others who are not willingly open to his influence.
THE REAL JESUS
It follows, therefore, that I can only stay on this road and continue to look for the true path, in so far as I have in faith a convincing experience of Jesus, and am prepared to struggle against my environment. Whoever or whatever helps me to make the authentic
Jesus mine is to be prized. Only in so far as Jesus is real will I be willing to struggle and fight to stay on the road with him and to follow wherever he leads.
St. Louis Marie de Montfort, who knew so much of this from personal experience, put it well: “Jesus our Savior, true God and true man, must be the ultimate end of all our . . .devotions . . . : he is the only Teacher from whom we must learn: the only Lord on whom we should depend; the only Head to whom we should be united; the only Model that we should imitate . . . Every edifice which is not built on (Jesus) that firm rock, is founded upon shifting sands and will certainly fall sooner or later” (TD 61).
HOW THEN DO I MAKE JESUS MINE?
How then do I make Jesus mine? I can pray, steep myself in Scripture, fast, do penance to help free my will for God, try to love selflessly. . . This can help me come alive to what it means to be baptized. In so far as I am aware that the defining moment of my life was in my baptism into Christ, I shall try to be alert to its implications. Only then with growing realization in wonder shall “I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me His own” (Phils. 3:12). To glimpse the wonder of this, my present status as a baptized Christian – ‘Christ Jesus has made me His own!’—is the dynamic which makes Christian identity in baptism come alive.
Our Lady of Perpetual Help (at least 1499, and likely significantly older)
Our Lady of Perpetual Help is a Catholic title of the Blessed Virgin Mary as represented in a celebrated 15th-century Byzantine icon. The icon may be first traced back to Rome where it has been since 1499.
Only then with growing realization in wonder shall “I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me His own” (Phils. 3:12). To glimpse the wonder of this, my present status as a baptized Christian – ‘Christ Jesus has made me His own!’—is the dynamic which makes Christian identity in baptism come alive.
THE WAY TO CHRIST
In so far as this takes hold of me, life will be a response to God giving himself to me in Christ—“ . . . I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me” (Gals. 2:20). The words are so simply put, but the weight they carry should they ever leave the page and lodge in the heart, can offer me a perspective on reality which might transfigure me. I am now held by the wonder of realizing that Christ Jesus has made me His own, having risen from a grave to be with me now and always, so much do I mean to Him. In so far as I see this in faith, shall I be given the strength to break free from my innate selfishness to live for God alone.
It is this perspective which marks the saint and the saintly. In such people the realization of what it means to be baptized is root and branch. And so they march to a different drum from the rest of us. They have a personally convincing experience of God and struggle against their environment to preserve it. Because of what they see of God giving himself in Christ they can do no other. Their outlook on life has transformed them: “therefore, if any one is in Christ there is a new creation . . . All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself . .. ” (2 Cor. 5 :17). Such people respond to God from the core of their being.
SLAVE OF JESUS IN MARY
To come alive to what it means to be baptized. Therefore, I am blessed if I can spend time in the company of people like that. St. Paul, for example, introduces himself as, “Paul, slave of Christ Jesus . . . ” (Rom. 1:1), just as later, St. Louis Marie de Montfort sees himself as “unworthy slave of Jesus in Mary” (Letter 11). This is who they are, their identity. They know Jesus has made them His own in baptism. They are wholly His. The gains would be many if I could only glimpse what they see.
Following this logic, St. Louis Marie counsels that above all I open myself to the influence of Our Lady. Baptism has given us the treasure of God in Christ through the Spirit. We know from experience that we carry it in a very fragile vessel. All of us need help to keep it alive: “To be . . . wiser than Solomon we should place in Mary’s care all that we possess and the treasure of treasures, Jesus Christ, that she may keep Him for us. We are surrounded by too many experienced enemies . . . and we have had too many sad experiences. Let us be distrustful of our own wisdom and fervor” (LEW 221).
OUR LADY GIVES US THE TREASURE
Our Lady gives us now, as she has always given, ‘the treasure of treasures, Jesus Christ’. When first invited to do this, Mary is recorded in the Gospel as identifying herself as simply, “O The Lord’s slave . . . ” (Lk. 1:38). God has made her His own in Christ and she too responds with her whole being. She is entirely His, then in faith and now in glory. Precisely because she is so at one with God’s will that God’s Word took flesh in her very person, Mary is ideally placed to help us keep alive in our hearts the Lord she gave human life to through the Spirit. One with her through our baptism in her Son, we can savor this treasure too. Just how and to what extent we might open ourselves to her influence. Following Montfort’s advice, we consider this in a subsequent article.
