- Feb 5, 2002
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Dear Father John, what does it mean to have a “personal relationship with Christ?” I pray regularly (rosary, Liturgy of the Hours, etc) and go to mass regularly, however, I don’t know that “personal relationship” would describe my understanding and experience of God. Am I missing something?
Maybe, but maybe not. Let’s start answering your question with a question: When you “pray and go to Mass regularly,” why do you do it? Take a moment to answer that question for yourself before you continue reading… Why do you carve time out of your busy schedule to pray and worship God the Father through Jesus Christ in union with the Holy Spirit? Most likely, your personal answer fits into one of the following three generic answers.
Falling into Routine
First, we can pray and worship out of routine. It’s like punching our spiritual time-clock. We have always gone to Mass and always prayed, ever since we were kids, and we feel a kind of comfortable inertia in continuing to do so. We have a vague sense that one ought to do such things, and we have a vague sense that if we fail to do them we will feel guilty for some reason, and we don’t want to add an uncomfortable guilty feeling to our already over-stressed emotional world. So we keep going through the motions of being a Catholic. Just as it would strike an American citizen as somehow incongruent not to celebrate the Fourth of July, it strikes a cultural Catholic as somehow incongruent not to engage in some basic spiritual practices. If you “say your prayers” just because doing so has become part of your internal comfort zone, you may have fallen into what theologians call spiritual routine.
Continued below.
spiritualdirection.com
Maybe, but maybe not. Let’s start answering your question with a question: When you “pray and go to Mass regularly,” why do you do it? Take a moment to answer that question for yourself before you continue reading… Why do you carve time out of your busy schedule to pray and worship God the Father through Jesus Christ in union with the Holy Spirit? Most likely, your personal answer fits into one of the following three generic answers.
Falling into Routine
First, we can pray and worship out of routine. It’s like punching our spiritual time-clock. We have always gone to Mass and always prayed, ever since we were kids, and we feel a kind of comfortable inertia in continuing to do so. We have a vague sense that one ought to do such things, and we have a vague sense that if we fail to do them we will feel guilty for some reason, and we don’t want to add an uncomfortable guilty feeling to our already over-stressed emotional world. So we keep going through the motions of being a Catholic. Just as it would strike an American citizen as somehow incongruent not to celebrate the Fourth of July, it strikes a cultural Catholic as somehow incongruent not to engage in some basic spiritual practices. If you “say your prayers” just because doing so has become part of your internal comfort zone, you may have fallen into what theologians call spiritual routine.
Continued below.
What does it Mean to Have a Personal Relationship with Christ?
Father John Bartunek explains what it means to have a personal relationship with Christ.
spiritualdirection.com
