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Who
was Christ? Who is Christ? These are questions that remove us from
an immediate experience and demand an intellectual explanation of that
experience.
Now, imagine how it was for the
Apostles and disciples who lived with and followed Jesus: they had intimately
experienced Him in their lives. They knew His compassion, His wisdom,
His love, His divinity. They felt Him in their hearts,
and they didn’t have to ask themselves anything more than, “Do
I believe in Him?”
But after His death an entirely
new situation opened. As the Church grew, and in order to spread the Gospel,
the Apostles had to start explaining Jesus to persons who had never
seen or heard of Him. And that’s where all the problems
began.
How could three years of experience
be communicated? Which events were more important than others? And how should
any particular event be interpreted?
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The
Tradition of the Catholic Church has preserved
the essential instructions Christ gave to the Apostles, but the Bible itself
records only a small portion of what Jesus did and said during His ministry
in the last years of His life.
Much happened,
therefore, that never got recorded.
 But, “through the
remarkable visions that God granted to Anne Catherine Emmerich, people of
today are allowed to witness some of these profound and stirring events”
(TAN Books and
Publishers).
These visions
are so psychologically astute, and they so astonishingly explain the divine
mystery in all of Christ’s actions, that any serious reader will discover
an entirely new dimension to his or her faith. |
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No wonder we have the admonition
from Hebrews: Do not be carried away by all kinds of strange teaching
(13:9). No wonder creeds had to be composed and heresies stamped out. Experience
is pure, childlike and innocent, but the explanation of it has to flow through
the briars and thorns of language and intellect that shred purity into tatters.
The psychology of teaching the Faith is not simply
a matter of knowing the love of following Jesus
in person; it also becomes necessary to answer the questions, “Who was
Christ?” and “Who is this Christ?” And in doing so, we enter
the realm of doctrine.
So what’s the point of doctrine?
Many persons today talk of developing “Christ consciousness” or
of making use of “Christ energy”—as if these were commodities
of some sort—and they see Jesus as a man who achieved the highest level
of humanity, just like Buddha or other wise teachers. But, quite frankly,
in Catholic doctrine, Jesus didn’t achieve anything of His
“own,” really—His life in this world was an act of God. And
that makes all the difference in the world.
As an “act of God,”
Christ doesn’t come into our hearts through meditation or ascetic
practice—or through political acts of social
justice. He comes to us as a result of our giving ourselves to Him in
love. It’s an act of surrender. A devout Christian
doesn’t seek Christ to get something but instead simply offers
Christ everything. After all, Christ, as true God and true Man, offered
us everything.
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Though He was
in the form of God,
Jesus did not deem equality with God
something to be grasped at.
Rather, He emptied Himself
and took the form of a slave,
being born in the likeness of men. |
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—Philippians 2:6–7 |
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An experience of sacrifice—of
love—does not need explanation. It simply
is, just like God says, “I am that I am.” But without
doctrine—however tattered—we lose the understanding of the
“act” of God, thereby also losing the meaning of holy
sacrifice—and all of our own sacrifices then become only an act of the
self. Lost in pride,
with divine meaning lost, with no sense of doctrine to guide us, we pull
everything with us back into the darkness.
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Now, it’s
true that the Catholic Church through the ages has had its share of
individuals—laity, religious, and clerics alike—who have been corrupted
with hypocrisy. And even today hypocrisy,
along with heresies of progressive liberalism,
New Age impiety, feminism,
and lifestyles defiant of chastity, continue to
undermine the true teachings of the Church. Nevertheless, anyone who calls
himself or herself Christian has an obligation to return always to
the truth that is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.
It’s the truth that Christ revealed, that the Apostles preached, that
the Fathers defended, that the Catholic mystics have confirmed—and that
Catholic psychology now helps to explain. |
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Why go to Church if it is
