The Call to Evangelise Founded on loving intimacy with the Lord
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by Fr Anthony Doe All booklets are published thanks to the generous support of the members of the Catholic Truth Society
CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY publishers to the holy see
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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 The Call to Evangelise the Church and the World . . . . 4 Relationship with Jesus Christ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 The Presence of Our Lady . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 The Gift of Jesus’s Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 The Grace of Baptism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Intimate Union . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 The Gift of Mercy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Embracing the Mystery of Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Ongoing Conversion of Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Proclaiming the Presence of Jesus to Others . . . . . . . 43 Living in Communion with the Father . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Jesus’s Sacramental Presence Empowering Us . . . . . . 56 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
All rights reserved. First published 2014 by The Incorporated Catholic Truth Society, 40-46 Harleyford Road London SE11 5AY Tel: 020 7640 0042 Fax: 020 7640 0046. © 2014 The Incorporated Catholic Truth Society.
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ISBN 978 1 78469 009 0
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Introduction
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e are living in a world and a Church that are manifesting all the signs of a profound need to discover the living presence of Jesus Christ. As the Saviour of the whole human race, he alone knows the ways in which every person can find the yearning for true happiness to be fulfilled. This reflection will draw on many strands of human and spiritual experience to demonstrate how this can only take place with the cooperation of his devoted followers. We will see how becoming an intimate friend of Jesus Christ will enable us to share his gifts that have the power to change the essence of human existence and transport it into the world of spiritual joy. As this reflection will attempt to show, this can only take place once the space for contemplative prayer is established, enabling Jesus to share the depth of his Spirit with us. It is this movement of love alone that will heal our wounds and enable us to undergo a true conversion of life that will then give us the power to communicate his living presence to others. We will now take up these themes in greater detail.
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The Call to Evangelise the Church and the World
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ne of the great movements of the Holy Spirit that has been taking place since the Second Vatican Council is the growing awareness, within the Church, of the need to evangelise with a new spirit of loving urgency, a truth that has found a particularly powerful articulation in Paul VI’s exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi and Pope Francis’s Encyclical Evangelii Gaudium. The Catechism of the Catholic Church likewise makes it clear that all its members are, by virtue of the grace of Baptism, called to witness to the living presence of Jesus Christ to others, (1270, p. 287) to proclaim a message of hope and salvation, particularly in the face of human suffering and the power of evil. What has been emerging most clearly in recent years is the necessity of presenting this message of salvation, not only to an unbelieving world, which is manifesting such an urgent need of finding a new connection with the message of the Gospel, but also to many baptised members of the
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Church, who, for all manner of reasons, have never been able to experience the person of Jesus Christ establishing his loving presence in their own personal lives. The Disorder of Our Present Day Culture
These realities are part of our present day contemporary culture, which is rooted in a fiercely pragmatic philosophy of living that insistently attempts to enfold the hearts and minds of all people, substituting the joy of a spiritual encounter with the God of love with the worship of a sensual hedonism that has become for many totally addictive. This is having a deeply disturbing influence on the way we now define the whole concept of personal fulfilment and the meaning of human existence in itself. Needless to say, the breakdown of moral and spiritual values that has been the result of this cultural revolution is now having serious effects in our society, depriving many people of an inner sense of stability and a genuine experience of their own personal value. This is now having a detrimental effect on family life, and it is our young people, especially who are particularly vulnerable in the face of these disintegrating forces.
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Relationship with Jesus Christ
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n the years leading up to the Second Vatican Council it was becoming increasingly clear that a radically different understanding of the transmission of faith was needed if the message of the Gospel was to be received, in all its life-giving quality, in a rapidly changing modern world. Catholicism, for the vast majority of practising Catholics, was understood to be the authentic Christian tradition that was handed down through successive generations, like osmosis, within families and institutions. It carried within itself an unquestioned authority that facilitated a cohesive structure of beliefs that were unambiguous in the demands they made on all members of the Church. However, what has become clear is that this fostered for many a very institutional understanding of Catholic identity that emphasised a strict adherence to behavioural demands, morally and spiritually, as the ideal to be sought at all costs.
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The Call to Intimate Union
This, sadly, often happened at the expense of experiencing a personal encounter with the merciful love of Jesus, whose one desire is to draw each baptised member of the Church into an intimate loving union with himself, a relationship of mutual joy that fulfils the deepest yearnings of the heart. The heavily institutional model of the Church having passed, its replacement, centred on this call to intimate union, can only come alive effectively when this truth is communicated directly, through the grace of the Holy Spirit, by members of the Church who are themselves experiencing Jesus’s living presence within them. An authentic life of faith is then rooted in this personal initiation into the healing love of God, embodied in his Son. It is he alone who can provide the life-giving context in which the message of the Gospel, developed through the teaching of the Church, can be embraced in all its depth. Salvation can then be understood in a truly Pauline sense as coming, not from strict adherence to the Law, but from personal faith in Jesus Christ who is himself the total embodiment of the Law and the Prophets.
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The Presence of Our Lady
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his relational understanding of membership of the Church, as the Body of Christ, therefore places the capacity to receive the mystery of God’s personal communication of himself at the very centre of our understanding of worship. This finds its most powerful expression in the prayerful response of Mary the Mother of Jesus to the invitation of the Archangel Gabriel to receive the living presence of the Son of God into the centre of her life: “let what you have said be done to me” (Lk 1:38). Our Lady allowed the Holy Spirit complete access to her whole being, thereby enabling Jesus to incarnate his presence within her, as she enfolded the Body of Christ as an integral part of herself. This truth is of great importance as we begin to reflect upon the call, through the Sacrament of Baptism, to be a member of this Body that was brought to birth in the first place by Our Lady’s willingness to receive the gift of God’s love in all its fullness.
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The Gift of Receptivity
Receptivity and the desire to surrender to the gift that is being offered, a dynamic union with the person of Jesus Christ Our Saviour, is the gift of the Holy Spirit that God the Father wishes to bestow upon each of us who is being called to beone of his Son’s disciples. Our Lady, the one person who has lived out this gift to the full, is supernaturally herself filled with the deepest yearning to support and accompany all those who are likewise being invited to live this eternal reality. Indeed, it sums up the very essence of her vocation, which is to live totally in communion with her Son’s desire to share his unique love for every human being, placing the gifts of her maternal sensitivity and the experience of her own journey of faith at the service of all who receive this call. Sharing in Our Lady’s Prayer of Surrender
Just as she brought to birth the Son of God, who has drawn her into the deepest communion of love, not only for himself, but for his Father and all those created in his image and likeness, it is her maternal presence that facilitates, through the Holy Spirit, a communion of total loving identity to be born between her Son and his disciples. Once this begins to takes place they can discover this amazing involvement of love permeating their whole being. This takes place as she is able, through
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her own receptivity to the mystery of God’s love, to then help each individual soul to gradually become free to make her prayerful surrender, at the Annunciation, their own. It is only Mary the Mother of God who can do this for each of us. We will now examine more closely how this freedom can be acquired through her loving support and inspiration, beginning with the practical challenge that faces us right from the outset. The Place of Inner Silence and Prayer
One of the key features of our modern culture is the domination of the media and the world of the internet, with its enormous emphasis on immediate access to knowledge and virtual relationships. One of the practical consequences of this phenomenon is a loss of a true understanding of the need for periods of inner reflection and that creative space of silence which alone can open up the interior world of the soul. It is here, above all, in these two very important areas of human experience, that the true life of the spirit can begin to be nurtured, through the gift of grace, and so reveal the mystery of Jesus’s love for the individual. Once this begins to take place, a transformation of life is initiated and the salvific meaning of the Gospel can then come alive in a deeply personal sense. It is in this context that the true gift of Catholic identity can then begin to grow
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for the benefit of the individual and for the life of the whole Church. The crucial question, therefore, that now needs to be faced is, how can this prayerful silence that nurtures a real intimacy with God be established in such a way that it becomes a normal permanent feature of the daily life of believers? Once we see how this can begin to take place we will have a context in which other equally important issues can then be addressed: the gift of Baptism with its invitation to ongoing conversion of life; the call contained within it to become a true disciple of Jesus Christ, by embracing the mystery of his love for us; and the challenge of bringing this lived experience of relationship with him into the lives of others.
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The Gift of Jesus’s Love
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t is important that we are clear about the starting point that sets the whole process in motion. In the Farewell Discourse of Jesus at the Last Supper in St John’s Gospel, the spiritual foundation of the life of discipleship was outlined in all its depth as Jesus reflected about the intimacy of love that his disciples were being called to share. Jesus, in answer to Philip’s question concerning the presence of the Father, makes it very clear that he and the Father are in a total bond of love that defines who they are to one another and to the world, “To have seen me is to have seen the Father…you must believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (Jn 14:9,11). Now it is to share in this communion of love that Jesus places at the very centre of the invitation he has given them to be his disciples: “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Remain in my love.” Receiving the self-gift of Jesus, that carries with it the love that the Father has for him, is, therefore, the first requirement for anyone who begins to take their spiritual call seriously.
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The Gift of Spiritual Joy
Furthermore, Jesus is very clear concerning the effect that this love is to have on the recipient: “I have told you all this so that my joy may be in you and your joy be complete” (Jn 15:11). Joy, the spiritual gift that brings serenity, peace, reassurance and above all an inner sense of freedom, is to be the fruit of Jesus’s presence within us. It is in fact another way of describing the living presence of the Father as he comes to us through Jesus. To remain in this gift of love, a participation in the dynamic intimacy that already exists between the Father and the Son, can only be possible when the Spirit of love, the Holy Spirit, that is generated by this loving union, begins to have a serious impact on the one who has accepted the call and is slowly experiencing the joyful freedom of heart that it brings. It is, as Jesus tells us, the Advocate who will then be able to reveal the way this truth is meant to be lived. This can only happen once that place of receptivity, of silent prayer, begins to be established in such a way that the deeper levels of our humanity are engaged in the process. It is then that a new way of life gradually begins to emerge that becomes integral to our way of being. The Action of the Holy Spirit
The Holy Spirit does this by activating our inner world of desire, which, as we will see, flows from the fundamental need that is at the heart of every person, for love and a
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real sense of fulfilment, which he directs to the person of Jesus. It is the Holy Spirit alone who can arouse within us a particular longing to know everything we can about Jesus as his presence is revealed to us, through the Sacred Scriptures, and to do it in such a way that a growing desire to be united with him, in the depths of our being, slowly grows within us. It is this dual aspect of desire that then encourages us to create that place of silence where meditation on the ‘Word’ of the Lord can then move us gradually into a state of loving surrender where we are able to receive the gift of Jesus’s revelation of himself, who leads us into the heart of the Father, in the prayer of contemplation. It is this dynamic inclusion in the life of the Trinity that gives true meaning to that creative place of silence which opens up the deepest levels of awareness and draws them into this growing intimacy with our loving God. It is none other than the coming alive, through the power of the Holy Spirit, of the Sacrament of Baptism that defines the vocation of every disciple of the Lord and reveals the mystery of love that alone can lead us into the fullness of life. Furthermore, it is vital that at every stage we remember how intimately involved Our Lady is in this life-giving process, constantly interceding on our behalf. She is always holding us in moments of doubt and difficulty, when we are faced with the reality of our own weakness and sinfulness, encouraging us never to give up on this
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journey of faith and new life. Above all she is there to help us come to a true understanding of the depth and wonder of Jesus’s personal love for each of us, the reality that she herself embodies for the whole Church and the world.
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