An Encounter

Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete tells me that being a Christian is about an encounter with Jesus that changes your entire life. I don’t dispute what he says, but I don’t know that I can put my finger on such an encounter in my own life. Do I go back as far as my infant baptism? A born-again, come-to-Jesus moment (a cataclysmic, life-altering experience like Saul’s on the road to Damascus?) has not been my lot. My faith life is better described as a long, slow slog led by the brain, not the heart. I believe in God, I believe that Jesus is God Incarnate and that He died so that we may spend eternity in heaven. That’s what I’ve got right now. It is enough, because it has to be.

Father Walter J. Ciszek, S.J., no stranger to persecution and plenty of time to think, as he spent 23 years in Soviet prisons after being convicted of spying for the Vatican, wrote, at some point before he died in 1984: “Faith is the fulcrum of our moral and spiritual balance. The problems of evil or of sin, of injustice, or sufferings, even of death, cannot upset the man of faith or shake his trust and confidence in God. His powerlessness to solve such problems will not be a cause of despair or despondency for him, no matter how strong his concern and anxiety may be for himself and for those around him. At the core of his being there exists an unshakable confidence that God will provide, in the mysterious ways of his own divine providence.”

I like those words, as they are a reminder I seem to need. Life for a Christian differs from a non-Christian in that a certain hope colors the life of the former, and it suffuses every corner, nook, and cranny of existence, adding a shimmer that is there, even though it may be visible only when things are turned just so.