On Seeking a Personal Relationship with Jesus





St Augustiner was a young man who followed the pagan ways of Rome.   He enjoyed sex outside of marriage and even fathered a child.  But he did have a devout Christian mother who constantly prayed for him.   One day Augustine took a look around him and found that the Christian young people were not behaving as he and his friends were behaving.  They valued chastity and marriage.   They believed in the teachings of Jesus and followed him and his teachings.   He saw immediately that there was something really beautiful here and he decided to investigate and as a result changed  his life.   He too found what these Christians had found - a personal relationship with Jesus.

Today as he looks down from Heaven does Augustine still see that same commitment in the Church?  Does he see people striving to love Jesus by following his commandments.   Why not?   Perhaps it is because in the Church today we have somehow separated our lives from Jesus and are somehow trying to follow a Jesus we do not have a relationship with.   You see to follow the teachings of Jesus and the Commandments is not very easy in this world we now live in.   We have to be constantly aware of the Jesus who lives within us and form a relationship with the Jesus within us.

Let me explain this from my own experience.   I ma 80 years old and sinned grievously in my youth.   But by some miracle I kept hanging on to the Church and lived the trappings of Faith rather than the spirit for many years.    I had my sins forgiven and felt better about it.   I had been well formed in the Catholic Faith and from the time of the Spirit of Vatican II I knew many were being misled.   Anything I tried to do was ineffective because although I could talk God and do God, I had no relationship with him.   I still lived with sinful thoughts and desires and preferred to turn my mind to worldly things.    God was for Sunday.    Then Mary the Mother of Jesus and my Mother started knocking sense into me.   I had gone to Downside Abbey  when the Pilgrim Statue of Our Lady of Fatima was moving round the country and had an experience there.   It was not a vision, it was not voices, it was just that I started crying and I felt somehow that I would have to do something about this.   I went home and shocked my wife by telling her  that I wanted to say three Rosaries every day instead of just struggling with one.   I have persevered in this but even more I knew I had been blest and that everything in my being must now belong  to Jesus and Mary.   So everything I do whether sinful or not i judge by this new relationship - will they be pleased or displeased?    Did I move forward today in our relationships.   I am far from holy so often I do disappoint them but to Mary I am her child and strange things happen that show her love.  

The task now is to bring our children away from the pagan society of today and give them back a relationship with Jesus and Mary.   I was born during the last war in a Glasgow tenement.   My family was poor and every family around was poor.    We were strong in our Faith and our children grew up to marry and have families and our Churches were full with four Masses on a Sunday morning.   But then the country began to prosper and we found so many material things to enjoy,    The cohesion  of being part of a Catholic Community disappeared and our young people were attracted by the vanity of the world, the sexual revolution, and the new immoralities.   Church became dull and uninteresting.   The church was in real trouble.   The solutions put forward by the Spirit of Vatican II, and I emphasise the Spirit not the Council itself, have failed miserably because although it made some feel good it did not bring them to God.    Church members had lost a personal relationship with God which was vital for renewal and even the programmes introduced far from leading children and young people to Jesus actually took them further away.   That 95% of young people have turned from the Church and are hostile in many cases to the Church shortly before they leave School is something of which we should be ashamed.     Yes, we are a great institution for giving to the poor, for seeking justice and peace, for our notional idea that this is all there is too Christianity but on the other hand we have failed to give our young children that love that personal relationship with Jesus that Augustine saw in the young people of his day.

How can we win back our youth?   I have posted two photos above and one is of a child receiving Holy communion on his tongue and kneeling and another of a young lady receiving Communion on her hand and standing   Which one shows the most devotion?   You may say it does not matter but when I tell you a certain teaching that nothing happens when we receive, it is only when we rejoin the community that something happens then answer the question again.    If this teaching is true then  does it matter how we receive?   And it it does not matter how we receive the living Body of Jesus where is that personal relationship with Him?   A PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP WITH JESUS MUST START WITH A CHILD'S FIRST HOLY COMMUNION, AND IT MUST  GROW SIDE BY SIDE WITH JESUS IN THE BLESSED SACRAMENT.

I have recently come across a woman called Sherry Weddell who will be talking on the subject of what she calls Intentional Disciples at the Basingstoke Country Hotel on Friday 18th and Saturday 19th May.  Next week in other words.   This lady came from a Fundamentalist Christian background and was converted to Catholicism by just entering a Catholic Church and feeling the Real Presence of Jesus there.   But in her former Church she took the question of a personal relationship with Jesus very seriously and she still takes it very seriously.   She ask everyone the question "What personal relationship do you have with Jesus"   She gets very strange replies inside the Catholic Church but if you cannot answer the question easily why not come along.   You can book by looking into the Diocesan Website.   I will be there so you can ask me to explain all my scribblings.    


























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