The last two
weeks I have been looking at Pope Francis’ challenge to us “to a renewed
personal encounter with Jesus Christ, or at least an openness to letting him
encounter them; I ask all of you to do this unfailingly each day.”
Last
week I wrote about setting aside a time each day for prayer as the basis for
the encounter with Jesus Christ. But Jesus is totally free to encounter us at
any time, and just about in any way, so while we need the stable foundation of
a daily practice of prayer, we also need to develop an on-going awareness and
alertness for the presence of Jesus. He can show up in many different disguises
and in many different situations and places, and we have to constantly be on
the look-out for Him.
Maybe
a sunrise while driving to work, or a sunset on the way home, touches you in a
way that leads you to say “Thank You” to the author of that beauty. Maybe
during a difficult day of work when you have way too much to do and many people
hounding you with too many demands, you suddenly push away from your desk, take
a breath, and realize that having talents and abilities, and having a job, are
good things. And you just quietly say “thank you.” Maybe in the smile of
stranger, in a phrase of a song from church last Sunday that pops into your
head, in a random act of kindness you receive, in a hug from one of your
children, a “hello” from a beggar on the street, a quote from Scripture that
comes to mind and helps you decide the right thing in a decision you are
facing, in these and a great many ways we encounter Jesus. It can even be a
mystical experience, such as Thomas Merton had on the corner of Fourth and
Walnut in Louisville, KY in 1958, when he experienced the glory of God revealed
in God’s love for all the people he saw hurrying by on that busy street corner.
So
we have to keep our antennae up and our sensors on to perceive the presence of
the Holy Spirit, which is the Spirit of Jesus.
It
is important to recognize that the encounters with Jesus are all not warm,
fuzzy and rosy. There certainly are personal encounters with Jesus that are
experiences of strength, comfort, and especially peace. We should savor those. But
these are not the only, nor even the most common, encounters. Jesus also
challenges, corrects, re-directs, and even convicts. These encounters are
uncomfortable and embarrassing. It is easy to try to hide from these encounters
and avoid them. However, they are never meant to harm or even to punish us, but
rather these encounters are always directed towards growth. Nowhere in the Gospel
does Jesus ever speak of feeling guilty, because guilt never helps us move
forward. Guilt always looks back to the past. Jesus does talk about repentance,
and repentance is always about moving forward in a new direction. Jesus is
always about growth and more life.
Jesus
can also be encountered in tragedies. Often when terrible things happen people
are caught up short, put aside the trivial matters that so occupied them
before, and begin to focus on things of greater substance and worth. That was
certainly true in New York City immediately following the tragedy of 9-11. People
saw, at least for a while, the great if fragile value of human life, and for
many of us, Jesus was in that awareness.
The
more we practice this kind of openness, the better we usually get at it. We can
find that Jesus has been hanging around a lot more than what we had suspected.
God
bless,
Fr.
Chuck
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