I Am With You Always

By Benedict C.F.R. Groeschel

A Study of the History and Meaning of Personal Devotion to Jesus Christ for Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Christians

The devotional life of Christians over the two millennia since Jesus' birth has been one of motion, changing and growing in response to the challenges presented to the Church, the temperaments of newly baptized nations, and controversies about how we can and should relate to God. And yet the core of authentic Christian devotion has not changed-it remains today, as it was in the time of the Church Fathers, the trusting and personal encounter with Christ that is both open and foundational to the life of all Christian believers.

In this book the well-known spiritual writer and teacher Fr. Benedict Groeschel, C. F. R., surveys the development and trials of Christian devotion from the days of the martyrs until the twentieth century. Tracking it through the centuries and among "sadly divided branches of Christianity", he finds a commonality of experience and even of language that is constantly ignored among Christians themselves. By observing what "image of Christ" the canvas of common devotion portrays, he hopes we will move "not to discredit this image, but to sharpen it and make it more consistent with the New Testament and the ancient Church".

Though the devotional life is sometimes brushed off as unimportant in comparison to a theological understanding of Christ, Groeschel warns that such dismissal threatens to make distant, unknown and obscure the Savior who said "I am with you always." The answer instead is to draw near to Jesus in devotion and with authentic expressions of that devotion, which themselves help paint the image of Christ found concretely in revelation onto the minds and daily life of the devout.

Begun on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and the result of years of preparation and a whole life of guiding people as priest, public preacher, psychologist and spiritual director, this book will help Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant believers gain not only a comprehensive view of how pious Christians over the centuries have lived out their devotion to God, but the examples and perspective they need to live more devoutly today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Feb 18, 2011
• ISBN: 9781681492391

Book preview

Acknowledgments

This book has been more than a decade in the making. So many people helped with it over the years that that I am afraid it is difficult not to leave someone out. I feel, however, that I must make the attempt to list as many as I can remember.

First of all I am deeply indebted to the team of personal editors whose help was indispensable: James Monti in the beginning chapters and Charles Pendergast throughout eight years of extraordinarily capable assistance. More recently John Collins has carefully helped with the completion of this book.

Dr. Ted Campbell of Southern Methodist University provided the initial inspiration for this work. As he has done for so many of my books, Fr. John Lynch provided a remarkable original painting for the cover, this time of the Annunciation, when the Son of God first came to be among us and to remain with us always. I am also very grateful to Dr. Timothy George of the Beeson School of Theology for his input on Evangelical spirituality. The exploration of Orthodox devotion was made possible by the staff of St. Vladimir’s Seminary in Yonkers, New York, and their excellent library. I am indebted, as well, to the faculty of St. Nersess Armenian Seminary and particularly to Fr. Kerekin Karparian, pastor of St. Gregory Armenian Church in New Rochelle, New York, for their guidance on Armenian spirituality. Special thanks go to Fr. Michael Plekon for his advice and council on Eastern Christianity and to my co-worker Fr. Eugene Fulton, who is a Catholic priest of the Byzantine Rite. Finally, I am deeply grateful to the sisters and the staff of the Corrigan Memorial Library of St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, New York.

We have carefully sought and obtained permission to cite many works and authors in this volume and we are grateful for all permissions we have received. Special mention must be made of the Classics of Western Spirituality series published by the Paulist Press and of my friend Richard Payne who guided this great publishing project. Finally I want to express my thanks to the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, many of whom assisted me in various aspects of this project, and to the staff of Trinity Retreat, who provided much support and encouragement. My thanks go, as well, to David Burns and Helen Carbone.

I will always keep in my prayers those who assisted us in this very substantial project, which had to be done during the spare time of all involved, in between many other responsibilities.

Introduction

The Unique Qualities of Christianity

The study of the various religions of the world reveals that although they have much in common, each is unique. This is especially true of Christianity, which has at least three distinct characteristics. First, it is the religion of the God who suffers and dies, who assumes the full scope of the human condition with all its tragedies. Second, most of Christ’s followers believe that Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, is still close to them. They believe that His voice is heard in the Scriptures and that His mysterious presence is experienced in the sacraments. Even the most unsacramental of Protestants acknowledge and respond to the presence of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit in very personal ways. Nothing in the practice of most sacramental Christians denies the personal experience of Christ apart from the sacraments, for example, in personal prayer. Quite the contrary is true. The medieval Catholic writer St. Bernard of Clairvaux speaks of three comings of Christ: at the Incarnation, at the Last Judgment, and His invisible presence among those who believe in Him.¹ Christ’s words Behold, I am with you always, to the close of the age (Mt 28:20) are embraced wherever Christianity is taken seriously.

The belief in Christ’s presence gives rise to Christianity’s third unique characteristic: personal devotion to Christ—a response to Him as friend; a deeply felt sense of reverence, gratitude, trust, dedication, repentance for our faults; and ultimately an all-encompassing impulse to love and serve Him. This experience is properly called Christian devotion. One might object that this personal response is not lacking in the other monotheistic religions. That is true. Because the Son of God took on humanity, however, giving God a human face, Christians are capable of a very personal, intimate, and loving devotion to Him. This differs considerably from the relationship of a devout Jew or Muslim with the Lord in which the most profound experience of God is likely to be one of reverence and awe.

This book is about Christian devotion, its meaning and importance and its many varieties of expression. It is interesting to note that throughout its two-thousand-year-long history, devotion to Christ has been amazingly similar across the sadly divided branches of Christianity. This largely unrecognized similarity has been obscured by polemical battles over theology and the interpretation of history. In doing this study over several years, I have found very little explicit recognition of the essential unity of Christian devotion despite obvious similarities. With the coming of ecumenism in the twentieth century, there was some acknowledgment that we worship the same God and follow the same Jesus Christ, but few realized that the best representatives of the various branches of Christianity loved their Founder in much the same way and expressed their devotion in similar terms, consciously and unconsciously borrowing from one another.

Doing the research for this volume has been a constant source of delight and amazement. In the last half century alone Orthodox iconography, or sacred art, permeated European Protestantism and brought a new flavor to all Europeans seeking to worship Christ. We have seen Protestant Pentecostals influencing Roman Catholic worship, while Catholic charismatics were seen in St. Peter’s Basilica, with the Pope accepting their experiences enthusiastically. Spiritual writers of the Catholic tradition, like Thomas a Kempis, Francis de Sales, and Thomas Merton, are being accepted across the spectrum of Christian denominations. As we have said, in all these expressions the central focus is love for and devotion to Jesus Christ.

An Astounding Meeting

I became aware of the universality of Christian devotion when I attended an ecumenical meeting of Christian leaders at the invitation of Cardinal William Keeler of Baltimore. I was astounded to see on the program a lecture on the meaning and propriety of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which was given by Dr. Ted Campbell, a noted Methodist theologian and historian and now professor at Southern Methodist University, Perkins School of Theology. Dr. Campbell drew fascinating parallels between the Sacred Heart and Protestant devotion to Christ.² My head was reeling when he mentioned that Thomas Goodwin, chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, a most un-Catholic person, had preached a three hours’ sermon on the subject of the holy Heart of Jesus and His love for sinners. As I listened, I became aware of why I had felt at home when I had preached at Protestant services in the 1960s and 1970s, the heyday of ecumenism. Although a traditional Catholic, I have never felt out of place in either Orthodox churches or in most Christian denominations called Protestant. We all believe that Jesus Christ is somehow with us and that our response to His presence must be love—even though we express that love in different ways. Because of this I began the most interesting and revealing intellectual adventure of my life in writing this book.

Devotion—A Vital Question of Our Time

Often the leadership of Christian churches (including my own) appears not to give sufficient recognition to the importance of devotion to Jesus Christ. Strangely, some clergy seem troubled or annoyed by those for whom Christ is the most real person in their lives. Hostility to devotion takes many forms, including cold mechanical clericalism and an intellectualized form of belief that constantly attempts to express the faith in terms acceptable to the contemporary culture. Another source of opposition to devotion is a kind of religiosity that substitutes induced states of consciousness, like recollection and alpha rhythms, for mature prayer. New Age types of religiosity fall short because devotion is a personal relationship. Recollection and meditation can be helpful, but they are no substitute for a real relationship with Christ.

Strangely, there is no generally accepted definition of devotion. To some, the word signifies the most meaningful experience of daily life; to others, it suggests sentimentality, an embarrassment. Some of the very people who feel that the colorful devotion of simple souls is distressing may themselves be very devout and experience Christ’s presence profoundly. They just fail to recognize the same reality in others who express it differently. A very devout young priest told me that as a result of prejudice from his seminary training, he felt an automatic chill when he heard the word devotion.

When looking for a descriptive definition of Christian devotion, I turned to the account of the first recorded prayer to the ascended Christ—the words of St. Stephen at his martyrdom (Acts 7:55-60). First, the martyr sees the heavens open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God. As he is being stoned to death, he prays two distinct prayers: one asks that the Lord Jesus receive his spirit, and the other is a request that the Lord will forgive his enemies. These are clearly prayers to Jesus the Lord. Later we will explore the full significance of this type of invocation, especially in the Pauline writings.

After an analysis of many devotional prayers and some personal introspection, I think that a good descriptive definition of devotion to Christ will have the following elements.

1. A powerful psychological awareness of the personal presence of Christ, or a very strong desire for that presence.

2. An immediate appeal to Christ about personally significant things in one’s life. This makes devotion a real relationship and not simply a meditation. The personally significant thing may be an imperative need (Lord, receive my spirit) or a strong desire (Lord, that I may see) or a fear (Lord, save me lest I perish). It may be a spiritual need (Increase my faith), or the need of someone dear to us (Lord, have pity on my son). It may be simply a desire to be silent in Christ’s presence (Come aside and rest awhile). We must relate to Christ not only with our minds but with our hearts.

3. We must be willing to do what He asks. This is interesting in Stephen’s case. Not long before, Christ had given the command: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (Mt 5:44).To people of that time such an injunction did not make sense. It had to be accepted on faith. With Stephen, we see a follower of Christ fulfilling this command for the first time in the most dramatic circumstances. Stephen does what Jesus asks, although he may not really have understood why he had to love his enemies. I am not sure that we understand it well even now.

4. Stephen did not fail, but we often do. Some of the psalms (Psalm 51, for example) are beautiful prayers of repentance, and we see repentance in the New Testament—that of St. Peter, for instance—following the failure to be loyal to Christ. Repentance is always part of Christian devotion.

5. Devotion must include trust in Christ. Christ often rebukes the disciples for their little faith, in the sense of trust in Him. He also praised the faith of those who did trust in Him. Faith in the Gospel is always immediate, personal, and includes the idea of trust. Trusting himself to Christ in the hour of death, Stephen makes a clear statement of his belief in life after death; Lord Jesus, receive my spirit (Acts 7:59).

Not only does Stephen trust, but he petitions: Receive my spirit. In most cases devotion includes a prayer for God’s merciful providence to grant some favor or grace. The centurion asking for the healing of his boy (servant or son) does so with a confidence that impresses even Jesus (Mt 8:5-11).

6. Finally, mature Christian devotion has a kind of simple eschatological element to it, in which the devout person is thinking not necessarily of the end of the ages, but of his own mortality. The devout are sustained by the hope that at the time of death, they will see the face of Christ in a new way, that He awaits them.

To summarize this definition, we can define Christian devotion as a powerful awareness of or longing for Christ’s presence, accompanied by a trustful surrender to Him of our personal needs. To this is joined a willingness to do His will and a sense of repentance for any previous failure to do so. We must trust Him not only with our present need but also with the salvation of our souls and those we care about. Finally, in some way we must anticipate our meeting with Him at the hour of death.

With this definition of devotion in mind, we begin our journey through twenty centuries of Christian history. There will be divisions, scandals, failures, persecutions, and every other kind of trouble and tragedy that descends on men. The history of Christianity is not a trip to the land of Oz; it is an integral part of the struggle of human existence. Christians fail, sin, and do stupid things; they fight with and kill others. Crimes and atrocities will be committed in Christ’s name. On a personal level, those who try to follow Him will go off the path. Some will give up altogether. Through it all, however, there will be a Presence, one so subtle that a fool may ignore it his whole life while claiming to be Christian. This Presence is so powerful that those who pursue and embrace it throughout life may, according to Christ’s own promise, do greater works than He did. Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age (Mt 28:20).

Our personal response to these words and to that Presence is Christian devotion. It was there when the first Christian martyr surrendered his spirit to Christ. That Presence and that devotion will also be there when the last Christian, at the point of death, prepares for the face-to-face encounter with the risen Lord.

Suggestions on How to Read This Book

I am hoping that many people who are not avid readers of long books will nonetheless find this book interesting and helpful to them. If you are familiar with substantial books these suggestions are not for you. But for those who are somewhat daunted by the length of I Am with You Always, I would like to make the following suggestion: that you read the first two chapters and then look through the table of contents, picking out chapters that are in line with your own interests. For instance, if you are a Protestant, you will find Chapters 10, 13, 15, 16, 20, 22, and 24 particularly interesting. Those who are Orthodox will find the chapters on the early Church along with Chapters 18 and 25 of special significance. If you are a Catholic who, for example, loves French spirituality, then Chapter 14 will be particularly to your liking. After you read the chapter in which you have the greatest interest, then you may want to look at the chapters around it or go back chronologically to see how it fits in. It is not expected that everyone who approaches this book will read every line. It might be very helpful, however, for all readers to examine the portions devoted to the twentieth century to find out where we seem to be going with devotion to Christ.

PART ONE

CHRIST FROM THE EARLY DISCIPLES

TO THE AGE OF FAITH

1   Finding the Lost Christ

Only someone who has been devoted to Jesus Christ and has learned to make some sense out of life because of Him can appreciate what it means to love Him. Yet how can we be devoted to or say that we love someone whom we have never seen, whose human voice we have never heard, whose hand we have never touched? Those with no faith in Christ find such personal devotion incomprehensible; those with little faith find it annoying because, sadly, they feel left out. Yet they may be moved or at least impressed by the vibrant relationship with Christ they find in someone else, especially if the devoted person is a simple soul. Skeptics may be touched by the faith of a poor old woman, but smirk at the sincere devotion of an educated person. Those with a weak, secularized faith, partially undermined by rationalism and materialism, will often criticize those who say, I know him (1 Jn 2:4). And it is they themselves who do not realize that they have little faith.

A Desperate Situation

If I have learned anything from five decades of work as a priest who is also a psychologist, it is that ultimately we are all desperate. Some cannot avoid a continual, sometimes acute sense of desperation. Others, who consider themselves quite healthy, fall imperceptibly into what Thoreau calls lives of quiet desperation. Still others pass through times when they wonder if they can survive the day. The reason for this sense of desperation is not difficult to discover: the human situation is desperate in itself. Most of us seem to be on a journey from obscurity to oblivion. Those who have achieved some notice by the rest of the world often appear to be fools. They may not, in fact, be any more foolish than the rest of us, but their folly is celebrated or at least exposed. The few with real virtue who are well known often manifest a seriousness or ironic quality that suggests they know that the human situation seen apart from the promise of eternal life is desperate. I recall this message coming across clearly but subtly in a conversation with the novelist Walker Percy. He revealed both a strong Christian hope and a bleakly realistic view of the human situation. Only through a personal faith in Christ had he escaped Thoreau’s quiet desperation.

A Passing World

Our cherished relationships and all the things that we value are fragile; all we have will disappear in the inescapable event of death. Faced with this reality, thoughtful people search for an answer to the riddle of human existence. Different religious figures have given different answers, shown different ways, made different promises, and have led very different lives—the tranquility of the Buddha, the passionate battle of Muhammad, the awesome and truly God-given authority of Moses. All of these are inspiring responses to the sorrows and difficulties of life, to the desperate human situation. And then there is the response of Jesus, called the Christ.

Jesus of Nazareth

No great religious figure, no prophet is as inscrutable, as mysterious, or as enigmatic as Jesus of Nazareth. Obscurity, political insignificance, fatigue, betrayal, torture, and finally capital punishment hardly seem to provide answers that will attract those who desperately seek the meaning of life. His words are not like an epic poem. His short life, though sorrowful, does not read like a Greek tragedy. He is not a hero pitted fatefully against an evil world. His most famous followers—Paul of Tarsus, Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, and Teresa of Avila—seem to have more of the overt characteristics of great religious figures than He does. There are many prophets, apostles, mystics, and martyrs of charity; but there is none like Him. Jesus of Nazareth stands alone because simply, directly, without any inner conflict He does the will of His Father, whom he calls His Abba. And He calls others to find the answer to life’s desperate questions by doing the same. His words Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done (Mt 6:10) are His answer to the desperate human condition.

He is not consoling like the Buddha or charismatic like Muhammad, or mystically directed like Moses. This thoroughly devoted Person of simple purpose does many things that we moderns find difficult to accept. We would reject them as distasteful, outrageous, and even paranoid, should we discover them in the life of a contemporary. Indeed He is always a problem for those who study Christianity from the outside and even for those believers who study it from within. They are shocked by Him. He claims to have come down from the heavenly Father, to be one with God, to give His Flesh and Blood as a sacred Meal in memory of Himself; He condemns the hardhearted if they do not accept Him. Not only does He promise eternal life but He says He will return from the dead and take His followers to His Father’s house. Innumerable people through the centuries have believed that He does exactly this. He continues to draw millions of souls to Himself in our day, and many more will follow Him in the future.

Who is Jesus of Nazareth? Who is He to me, to you, to the people of our postmodern age? This question has elicited many answers, the first from His closest associates on earth, and His very early disciples, including one who claimed to have met Jesus on the road to Damascus after He had died and risen to life. Answers have also come from those who were deeply influenced by His disciples in the first three centuries. In turn, these early leaders and bishops influenced an impressive collection of brilliant and dedicated men, the Fathers of the Church, beginning with the Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325). It was these bishops (or overseers) who codified the writings that make up the New Testament. Thus the final collection of those books was approved as public revelation almost four hundred years after Jesus’ death. A powerful, consistent, intellectually impressive body of thought about Him became the living tradition of the Church. The writings of the early Church Fathers and the pronouncements of Church councils provided the foundation for future beliefs on the subject of Jesus Christ.

A Sign of Contradiction

In the course of the centuries, some questioned the teaching of the early bishops, as others had questioned the apostles before them. The resulting controversies have continued to give rise to clearer definitions, always with the goal of keeping the original experience of the apostles alive and whole. We will survey some of these controversies, especially the decisions of the early Church that were meant to preserve the mystery and meaning of the original message of Jesus Christ.

Jesus and the Scholars

In recent centuries scholars have tried to reconstruct from the Scriptures and other ancient writings a picture of the historical Jesus. Some such scholars were committed to Christianity; others were indifferent; and a number were actually hostile to it, although in a camouflaged manner. Unfortunately, in much historical reconstruction, theory replaced faith. Because so much of this research is done without the obedience of faith (Rom 16:26), and because the acceptance of particular theories is so dependent on the fashions of the moment, these endeavors have often done more harm than good to those seeking to know Jesus Christ.

As Pope Benedict XVI points out in his book Jesus of Nazareth, the search for the historical Jesus and the historical-critical school of biblical scholarship that this search engendered are flawed for a number of reasons. He states:

As historical-critical scholarship advanced, it led to finer and finer distinctions between layers of tradition in the Gospels, beneath which the real object of faith—the figure. . . of Jesus—became increasingly obscured and blurred. At the same time, though, the reconstructions of this Jesus . . . became more and more incompatible with one another. . . . If you read a number of these reconstructions one after the other, you see at once that far from uncovering an icon that has become obscured over time, they are much more like photographs of their authors and the ideals they hold.¹

The Holy Father shows us that most of the attempts to conjure up a historical portrait of Jesus that is scientifically reliable have produced a common result: the impression that we have very little certain knowledge of Jesus and that only at a later stage did faith in his divinity shape the image we have of him. This impression has by now penetrated deeply into the minds of the Christian people at large.² He goes on to point out that this is a bad situation for faith because its point of reference is being placed in doubt: Intimate friendship with Jesus, on which everything depends, is in danger of clutching at thin air.

A different and more sensible approach is recommended by the Holy Father and has been detailed in a document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission.³ The commission, under the director of then Cardinal Ratzinger, called for an approach to interpretation and understanding of Scripture that may be characterized as symphonic or holistic and by the combination of different approaches—textual, critical, narrative, traditional, doctrinal, and practical—in defining the pastoral and spiritual use of the Scriptures.

The Purpose of This Book

The purpose of this book is neither to offer a critique of contemporary biblical studies nor to point out the spiritually debilitating effects of some of these studies. My hope is to assist the committed disciple of Christ toward a better appreciation of the meaning of Christ and the Paschal mystery of His life, to open the eyes of those who seek meaning amid the desperate turmoil of earthly existence. Most committed disciples can probably see their own desperation described by Augustine in the Confessions: I was sick at heart and in torment, accusing myself with a new intensity of bitterness, twisting and turning in my chain in the hope that it might be utterly broken. . . . ‘And thou, O Lord, how long? How long, Lord? . . . Remember not our former iniquities.’ ⁴ Those desperately seeking Christ will only be confused by the muddle of theories, ideas, and conjectures that they may hear when the Gospel is supposed to be preached. To them I hope to offer some clarity and help.

Jesus and the Individual

Soon after his election as Bishop of Rome, Pope John Paul II published an encyclical letter called Redeemer of Man, which became the cornerstone of his pontificate. He called Christians to center all thought and action on the mystery of Christ. The Pope, a very active participant in the Second Vatican Council, could see that it was necessary at this time for Catholics to focus their collective and individual attention on Christ:

Through the Church’s consciousness, which the Council considerably developed, through all levels of this self-awareness, and through all the fields of activity in which the Church expresses, finds and confirms herself, we must constantly aim at Him who is the head, through whom are all things and through whom we exist, who is both the way, and the truth and the resurrection and the life, seeing whom, we see the Father, and who had to go away from us—that is, by his death on the Cross and then by his Ascension into heaven—in order that the Counselor should come to us and should keep coming to us as the Spirit of truth. In him are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, and the Church is His Body. By her relationship with Christ, the Church is a kind of sacrament or sign and means of intimate union with God, and of the unity of all mankind, and the source of this is he, he himself, he the Redeemer.⁵

This impassioned plea may seem at first rather generalized, calling for a corporate commitment of the Church to Christ; however, the Pope quickly emphasizes that this first concern of the Church for union with Christ is also most particular and individual:

The Council points out this very fact when, speaking of that likeness, it recalls that man is the only creature on earth that God willed for itself. Man as willed by God, as chosen by him from eternity and called, destined for grace and glory—this is each man, the most concrete man, the most real; this is man in all the fullness of the mystery in which he has become a sharer in Jesus Christ, the mystery in which each one of the four thousand million human beings living on our planet has become a sharer from the moment he is conceived beneath the heart of his mother.⁶

John Paul II then extends his plea for a well-informed devotion to Christ, seeing this devotion as the foundation of all genuine ecumenical endeavors. He introduces an idea that he will develop later in his pastoral office, namely, that although Christian churches are divided, they are united in proclaiming Christ as Savior of the world:

All of us who are Christ’s followers must therefore meet and unite around him. This unity in the various fields of the life, tradition, structures and discipline of the individual Christian Churches and Ecclesial Communities cannot be brought about without effective work aimed at getting to know each other and removing the obstacles blocking the way to perfect unity. However, we can and must immediately reach and display to the world our unity in proclaiming the mystery of Christ, in revealing the divine dimension and also the human dimension of the Redemption, and in struggling with unwearying perseverance for the dignity that each human being has reached and can continually reach in Christ, namely the dignity of both the grace of divine adoption and the inner truth of humanity, a truth which—if in the common awareness of the modern world it has been given such fundamental importance—for us is still clearer in the light of the reality that is Jesus Christ.⁷

Every year, millions of people end their earthly lives filled with hope in Christ, seeing in death a passage to a far better life. Hundreds of millions, in fact, almost two billion, call Him their Savior because they believe that He has saved them from a meaningless existence followed by a descent into endless oblivion. Throughout the centuries, billions have called Christ their Deliverer from futility, despair, and eternal nothingness, while millions have fought against Him. His teaching and His Church have been bitterly resented by those whose hope did not go beyond this world. The twentieth century saw the worst of Christ’s enemies. The bizarre scene of Josef Stalin spending his last moments shaking his fist at the heavens is an incredibly ironic symbol of modern hostility to Christ.

Different ages have seen Christ as a Savior in different ways. One age has stressed that He is the Eternal Word of the Father, another has seen Him as King of Kings, and yet another has concentrated on His suffering humanity. In our time He has been viewed by some as the liberator of the oppressed, while to others He is the living expression of the Divine Mercy. Each of these titles is important; each reveals an aspect of the mystery of Christ, of God come among us. For many reasons it seems that the Christ of our time is the Divine Friend, not simply the Friend of all, but the Friend of each one, the Friend of those who are desperate in their loneliness. It is not surprising that at a time like ours, when individual fulfillment and the right to privacy are emphasized, that Christ will be seen by sensitive souls as the Divine Friend.

A Christless Christianity

Recently, an eminent European prelate and scholar, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna, remarked that Jesus had become a distant and obscure figure to many in northern Europe. He is not denied, but has become unknown. This is not an accident. The rationalist biblical scholar Rudolf Bultmann, who was very much in vogue for several decades, observed that the more he studied Jesus of Nazareth, the more obscure He became. Perhaps the obscurity was due to the way He was studied. One cannot begin by studying God. One begins by worshipping God and then goes on to contemplate Him with awe and reverence.

As a result of an excessively intellectualized approach to theological studies one often hears that the preaching of the Gospel is out of touch with the needs of people. Much preaching is academic, hamstrung by the limitations of rationalism. Another complaint is that preaching has become purely ethical and largely humanistic. Serious young people, born into the mainstream churches, including the Catholic Church, depart for Evangelical or Fundamentalist churches, because they did not hear Christ preached in their first church.

What’s wrong? I think the problem is that many believe in Christ but do not truly know Him. Some even deny that there is a way to know Him, even through the dark glass of faith (see 1 Cor 13:12). This book is about knowing Christ as we must come to know Him in the context of our lives, through the teaching of the Christian faith, which has grown and developed continuously from the original revelation two thousand years ago.

They Did Not Worship Him⁸

As Christ becomes more and more obscure to us, reverence for His sacred person continues to be eroded. What follows is a blatant disrespect for life, the environment, one another, family, friends—God Himself. Often religious people, with an incredible lack of sensitivity, dispense with signs of reverence toward God. We see this on the part of both Catholics and Protestants. One is happy to say that this is much less obvious in the Eastern churches, whether Orthodox or Catholic. For example, despite St. Augustine’s admonition that to approach the Holy Eucharist without a prostration or bow is a serious sin of irreverence,⁹ one observes a distressing lack of reverence on the part of Catholics for this central mystery of the Church’s worship. Things are not much better among Protestant Christians. A famous Protestant preacher and politician once addressed a national political convention with St. Paul’s words to the Corinthians (Eye has not seen, etc,. . . [what we are going to do]) regarding the mystery of eternal salvation as a description of his party’s platform. This was shocking, if not intended, irreverence.

As the word of God, Scripture must evoke profound reverence. Yet careless preachers often reduce these words to a handful of confetti. In the blandest of tones a well-meaning but thoughtless person may dispense ill-conceived ideas lacking in a grasp of the teachings of the Church Fathers, the decisions of ecumenical councils, or, on the part of Catholics, the authoritative teaching of the Pope. Such casual arrogance stems from a lack of awe and an inability to respond to the mystery of God; it leads to the trivialization of the Gospel, religious indifference, and ultimately to a loss of faith.

A Book for All Devout Christians

Despite many problems, there are still strong signs of religious faith in the Western world. These signs are most obvious in the United States, but they exist in most of the industrialized nations. Vital signs of faith are even seen where committed Christians comprise only a small percentage of the population. Regardless of their sectarian affiliation, these Christians believe that the resurrected Jesus of Nazareth, now reigning at the right hand of the Father, knows them immediately and individually, calls them to a greater discipleship, responds to their prayers, judges their sins, offers merciful forgiveness, and waits for them at the end of their lives with the salvation He bought by His life and death.

By an odd set of circumstances—and I hope by the workings of Divine Providence—I started to write books and preach the Gospel message in the media (usually EWTN) in the early 1980s. The ensuing publicity was unplanned, unexpected, and undesired because of the spiritual danger of vanity. Most of what I hope the Holy Spirit has led me to say and write has been addressed to my fellow Catholics and to Orthodox Christians. It has been a delightful surprise, however, to find that many Protestants and even members of other faiths respond to what I preach. I regularly receive encouraging letters from people who are not Catholics. Temptations to vanity are fended off by critical letters from some Catholics and others who think that I am too conservative. Although I try to accept criticism and learn from it, I never accept being called either conservative or liberal: these are essentially political designations. Conservative means maintaining the status quo, and I think the status quo stinks.

When I try to sort out the critical reactions I receive and that others receive, I am often left with the feeling that we are criticized because we try to be devout. This does not mean that we are more faithful or virtuous or Christlike, but that we find devotion—a personal loving response to Jesus Christ—to be the most important element of our faith experience. Christian devotion is not limited to any denomination; it is obviously widespread and varies with intensity throughout the Christian world. So this important topic gave me the chance to write a book for all devout Christians—something I have always wanted to do.

I began this book on a pilgrimage in the Holy Land. There I found the concepts and chapters opening effortlessly before me. I was deeply moved to walk the streets of old Jerusalem and the Via Dolorosa, along the shores of the Sea of Galilee, and to go into the dungeon of the house of Caiaphas. This proved to be the perfect setting in which to write. It brought me to the realization that this book has been inside me for years. The sacraments are the most important spiritual encounters with Christ in my life, but these God-given signs focus our minds and hearts on the more general encounter with our Savior that all Christians share. The individual’s inner icon or image of Christ is expressed in devotion. It represents the encounter with God’s saving grace intelligently and devotionally formed by the shining picture of Christ given in the Scriptures, expressed especially in the Gospels and left to us by those who knew Him personally when He walked among us.

The image of Christ, provided essentially by revelation and early tradition, changes in perspective and emphasis from age to age, from culture to culture, from denomination to denomination. Christians in the industrialized nations will have an image of Christ very different from that of their co-religionists at the time of the Reformation. We need to look as objectively as possible at this devotional image as Christians move into the third millennium, not to discredit this image, but to sharpen it and make it more consistent with the New Testament and the ancient Church. This will help us embrace the image of Christ more devoutly. Though we all see through a glass darkly, we must try to see as accurately and devoutly as we can so that some day we may know him as we are known by Him (see 1 Cor 13:12).

2   You Have Known Him

Knowing Someone

Before considering devotion to Christ, we must ponder the psychological process of knowing another person, especially one we have neither seen nor touched. Some personal psychological introspection will be helpful here. In the following analysis of the process of knowing another person, I will avoid complex terminology but attempt to use insights from accepted theories drawn from the study of human cognition.

There are many ways to know a person. All are colored by the needs and experience of the one who does the knowing. For example, let’s consider Marie, a mother of three. To her parents Marie will always be their child, even if she is caring for them in their old age. To her husband, she is a very different person. He knows her in an entirely different way, yet he loves her as much as her parents do, perhaps even more. She is known and loved as a spouse. To her oldest child—a fourteen-year-old boy—she is a source of conflict. He loves his parents, but resents them because they are in the way of his need for independence. He knows his mother both as the source of his own life and its greatest opposition. To her nine-year-old daughter, Marie is the greatest mom in the world, the giver of almost all blessings and the center of all authority. To her four-year-old boy, Marie and her husband stand at the center of the universe. They are, in fact, in the place of God.

Marie is seen differently by her siblings, her in-laws, her friends, the people in the church choir, and the garage mechanic, whom she does not trust. She is seen very differently by her brother’s ex-wife, who thinks Marie interfered in their marriage. She is seen differently yet again by the crabby lady down street who called the police because Marie’s dog chased her cat. Finally, there is the person Marie knows as herself.

The question of identity becomes more complicated when we consider someone who is absent. Marie has cousins in Ireland whom she has never seen. They write occasionally, exchange pictures, and speak on the phone at the holidays. She is the smiling face in a family snapshot, the friendly voice on the phone. Someday Marie, like all of us, will be simply a memory in this world. Voices filter through time and imagination: That’s your grandmother Marie, the one on the left in the wedding picture in the blue dress. She was a great girl, Marie. It’s too bad she died so young. She was very brave and had a lot of faith, but the cancer finally got her. A great person. But someone pipes up, She was bossy and too religious. She used to say that she prayed in tongues. My family thought it was all crazy. Others join in: Listen, if it weren’t for Marie, where would your family have been when the house burned down? Marie made room for everyone. Yeah, but she was bossy. Don’t talk about my aunt that way. She’s with God. Obviously there are many ways to know the same person. Even you.

Knowing Someone You Never Met

Before we come to the question, how do we know Christ? we must ponder the experience of knowing someone we have never met. First of all, we have intellectual notions of those we have not met, and in this way we can be said to know them. Millions of television viewers in the last decade of the twentieth century had the impression that they knew Pope John Paul II or Mother Teresa, an impression that came from information read or heard, and especially from television images. Many people meet me for the first time and say, I know you from EWTN. Some actually act surprised that I don’t know them as well. We also may feel that we know historical or religious figures: Abraham Lincoln, for example, or St. Thérèse of Lisieux or Anne Frank. Mental images of such people are so alive in the imaging faculty of the mind that we may feel we know a person from history better than we know the person next door.

It is obvious that we are able to know a person better if there is an emotional as well as intellectual component in our experience of knowing. I may also know someone who hates me but who does not really know me. I may resemble somebody whom my enemy is uncomfortable with or feels threatened by. Hatred, jealousy, and resentment may color a person’s knowledge of another, so that it can be said that only an image, and not the person, is truly known. This image may profoundly influence the behavior of the person who thinks he knows another. One may spend much energy hating an image that doesn’t represent reality. Images of people we have never actually known are particularly powerful; they color our lives, direct our actions, and even shape our path in this world. For example, Frenchmen differ greatly about the image of Napoleon, and Englishmen see Henry VIII in a variety of ways. If all this is so, then we must accept that our individual image of Christ will greatly shape our understanding of the Christian life.

Knowing a Saint in Heaven

Many Christians, myself included, try to know and even prayerfully communicate with those who have passed into the transcendent reality of eternal life. If you grew up in the old Catholic world you knew the saints and thought of them as your friends. You believed that they knew you and would pray for you. I continue to pray to saints and count many of them as my friends. How this communication is accomplished I leave to God.

St. Augustine is one of the few people in the ancient world who ever engaged this question. In the Confessions, speaking of his friend Nebridius, whom he considers so pure a soul that he is already with God, he writes:

[H]e was a most zealous seeker of the truth. Not long after our conversion and regeneration by Your baptism, You took him from this life, by then a baptized Catholic and serving You in Africa in perfect chastity among his own people, for he had made his whole family Christian. And now he lives in Abraham’s bosom. Whatever is meant by that bosom, there my Nebridius lives, my most beloved friend, Your son by adoption and no longer a freed-man only. There he lives. For what other place is there for such a soul? There he lives, in the place of which he asked me, an ignorant poor creature, so many questions. He no longer puts his bodily ear to my lips, but the lips of his spirit to Your fountain, drinking his fill of wisdom, all that his thirst requires, happy without end. Nor do I think he is so intoxicated with the draught of that wisdom as to forget me, since You, O Lord, of whom he drinks are mindful of us.¹

Augustine obviously assumes that God Himself, His ubiquity, His omniscience, and His love for creation are the medium by which those in eternal life know and are known by the people on earth. In the early Church there are many examples of people knowing, honoring, and offering prayers to saints. Thus in the Vatican necropolis, where the bones of St. Peter were discovered (and in 1968 declared authentic by Pope Paul VI²), the following inscription from the first half of the fourth century was found, clearly asking the intercession of this apostle:

PETER, PRAY CHRIST JESUS FOR THE HOLY CHRISTIAN MEN BURIED NEAR YOUR BODY.³

There are many ancient examples of Christians believing that a saint may know and care about the living on earth. More important is the fact that early in the Christian era people believed that they were friends of the saints. This was especially true of the Mother of Jesus, whom early Christians saw as the Gate of Salvation and Mother of the Church. Prayers to Mary date from as early as the third century.

As time went on, explicit prayers to other New Testament figures, such as John the Baptist, Peter, Paul, and John the Apostle, became common. By the fourth century, in both East and West, in public and in private, people prayed to the saints.⁴ They believed the saints knew them and interceded for them before God.

In devotion to the saints there is a consistent experience of being known by someone, a human being beyond this life, and also of knowing that person from Scripture or accounts of religious history. There is also the very strong experience of being helped by them.

Knowing the Angels

Apart from praying to saints, there is the profoundly mysterious devotion to the angels. This is a deeper mystery even than knowing a saint, who once lived in the world and shared our human experience. Almost all who are called saints left some historical record behind. Angels are unknown, except by some extraordinary revelation, usually in the Scriptures.

Beginning with the obvious fact that these mysterious beings are helpers sent by God—hence their name, which means messenger—believers in the God of Abraham have always had a healthy respect for angels. The evangelists speak of the appearance of angels at the Annunciation or the Incarnation of Jesus, at His birth, His temptation in the desert, His agony, and His Resurrection. It is not surprising that Christians were curious about angels and soon began to ask for their help.

All of this is of particular interest to us as we consider how you can know a person whom you have not met. How do you know an angel or even imagine one? We must rely on revelation or theological tradition for the little we can know about angels. Most of what theologians tell us is in the negative: how angels differ from us and yet remain persons, how they are ultimate sources of responsible action, that is, responsible individuals. Faith sees them as nonhuman persons. St. Thomas Aquinas tells us that each angel is unique, that they are not members of a species, as we are. They exist out of time. They had one choice for good or evil at the beginning of their existence, and that choice determined whether they would be angels of light or darkness.

People have some images of angels from the Bible. Among the most powerful of these for me is the angel of the agony, who comforted Christ in the Garden of Olives (see Lk 22:43). This deeply moving image has inspired many to pray to the angels to be with them in their suffering or peril, and especially at the hour of death.

It is an angel who brings the good news of salvation, the message that is also the occasion of the virginal conception of Jesus Christ. Great artists have often tried to capture that mysterious moment on which the fate of the world hangs. From the mystical communication between the Virgin and the angel painted by Blessed Fra Angelico to the extremely sensitive Annunciations of the Pre-Raphaelite English painters of the late nineteenth century, these invisible noncorporeal beings have been celebrated in paintings. The premier African American artist, Henry Tanner, in his mystical painting of the Annunciation that hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, depicts the angel as a mysterious shaft of light. Nevertheless, the expression of the humble Virgin clearly demonstrates that she is being addressed by a real but not human person.⁵

Can We Pray to Jesus Now?

Devotion to Jesus (experientially but not theologically) has much in common with devotion to angels and saints. It is relating to an unseen person. It has been part of Christian life since the Church’s earliest days. Beginning with the prayer of St. Stephen, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit (Acts 7:59), there has been deep, spontaneous prayer to Christ. It has grown theologically and psychologically as people became more aware of their inner selves and needs. In East and West, personal devotion to our Savior has been the outstanding feature of Christian life.

It is particularly interesting to note that when Protestant Christians rejected the idea of devotion to the angels and saints, they did not reject devotion to Jesus Christ. While such devotion was not obvious in the Calvinist tradition in its beginnings, fervent prayer to Christ grew and flourished among Lutherans, Anglicans, Baptists, and others. In the great religious revival of the early nineteenth century, devotion to Christ was warm and fervent, especially under the influence of John Wesley’s disciples and the many people influenced by their piety.

Is Devotion to Jesus Special?

We come to the question of whether there is anything specific about devotion to Christ. Most readers will probably agree that there is something unique about such devotion, but what is it? Does this difference pertain to how Christians at a particular time understand Christ as known from the Scriptures or the tradition of the ancient Church? Is the difference determined by secular history, education, or culture? Of greatest importance is the question: Do some of these differences arise independently of the individual who prays? Simply put, is a believer’s experience different when praying to Christ from the experience of asking the intercession of a saint or an angel? It is important to emphasize that theologically, there is an essential difference between asking something in prayer of a saint, even the Blessed Virgin, or an angel, and asking the help of Christ, the Son of God. It is the difference between the creature and the Creator. Devotion to Christ is made further complex by the fact that you cannot pray to Him only in His divinity or only in His humanity. He is one Divine Person with both human and divine natures.

In the Gospel account of the marriage feast of Cana (Jn 2:1-11), we observe the intercession of the Mother of Jesus, as well as her apparent disregard for His preference not to help the embarrassed host. Once importuned (so to speak, since there is no accurate word for this interaction of a human with the Divinity in these familiar terms), however, Christ acquiesces to His Mother and works an astonishing sign, fulfilling at one and the same time the role of Son of God and son of Mary, that is, Son of Man. The vocabulary developed by humans for their dealings with one another is inadequate to describe our interactions with God. It is all the more inadequate in describing God’s initiatives or responses to us. Even the Scriptures limp because of this inadequacy of language. Some inspired writers struggle with this problem by using superlatives, metaphors, and similes. St. Paul occasionally coins new words. It is important to think about the fact that the words we use to describe our dealings with God and especially His dealings with us were not developed for this purpose. We must always approach the Divine Being through a cloud of profound mystery. Even the term God and others directed to Him—divinity, transcendent, adoration, infinite—are not fully understood by those who use them. In fact, they are very imperfectly understood. Human language, like human understanding, though important, ultimately fails us in our search for God, as St. Paul reminds us when he asks, For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor? (Rom 11:34).

A Warning against Superficiality

Here a warning must be made. We need to grasp firmly the essential idea of the infinite mysteriousness of God. Scripture puts this warning very simply: As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts (Is 55:9). This analogy, contrasting the opaque reality of rocks and soil with the quasi-infinite clarity of the sky, is even more meaningful to us who live in a time of great telescopes than it was to those before us. We should keep in mind the mystery of God as we ask: Does Jesus know and care about us individually? Do we believe that He knows and can help us? This leads to further speculation. Can He who once lived on earth and experienced the limitations of physical existence—hunger, fatigue, death—know all the people on earth and relate to each in a way totally beyond our comprehension? The way the ascended Lord knows us transcends the way a saint or angel can know us. Christ, who is God, knows us with the knowledge of God. Our analogy for dealing with this astounding mystery is our own very limited relationships with one another. Even the most intimate human relationships fall short of what faith tells us about Christ’s relationship with each one of us. As the eternal Son of God, He has perfect knowledge of each person at any time and thus knows far more than we do about ourselves.

St. Paul observes that spiritual things can be understood only by spiritual minds (see 1 Cor 2:11-16). We must approach the great mystery of our relationship with Christ reverently and keep before us the immense mystery of divine knowledge and divine love. Our two most powerful analogues, one drawn from physical reality, the quasi-infinity of the heavens, and the other from psychological realities, the complexity and richness of a loving human relationship, invite us to the far greater experience of believing that the eternal Word of God, Jesus Christ, knows and loves us in a divine way.

The First Prayer to Jesus in Heaven

As we saw, the prayer of St. Stephen at his martyrdom is regarded as the first recorded prayer to the ascended Lord. Since that time the devout have gradually come to believe that they know Christ, that they are known by Him, and that in prayer they speak to Him. For many this is a deeply felt reality. Many of the earliest prayers to Christ are found in the accounts of martyrdom, such as the following from the acts of St. Theodotus of Ancyra, a tavern keeper who died around the year 302: Lord Jesus Christ, who hast made heaven and earth, and who never forsakest those who hope in thee, I give thee thanks that thou hast granted me to conquer the dragon and to crush his head. Give rest to thy servants, grant that I may be the last victim of the violence of our enemies. Give peace to thy Church, snatch her from the tyranny of the devil. Amen.⁶

Prayer: Personal, But Not Liturgical

The prayer of Theodotus is personal. It assumes Christ hears and responds to the one who prays, and that the supplicant knows that Christ is forgiving and compassionate. It is, to put it simply, a devotional prayer. It is not liturgical, because it is not a prayer of the whole Church as the Mystical Body of Christ on earth. Liturgical prayer is efficacious because it is the prayer of Christ Himself. The prayer of an individual Christian is efficacious insofar as that person is open to Christ’s grace and allows Christ to pray in him. The following prayer is even more obviously personal. It comes from the ecclesiastical writer Origen (184-254):

Jesus, my feet are dirty. Come and slave for me; pour your water into your basin and come and wash my feet. I am overbold, I know, in asking this, but I dread what you threatened when you said: If I do not wash your feet, it means you have no companionship with me. Wash my feet, then, because I do want to have companionship with you. And yet, why am I saying: Wash my feet? It was all very well for Peter to say that, for in his case all that needed washing was his feet: he was clean through and through. My position is quite different: you may wash me now, but I shall still need that other washing you were thinking of, Lord, when you said: There is a baptism I must needs be baptised with.⁷

Extraliturgical prayer, what we will call devotional prayer, does not compete with liturgical prayer but complements it. In private prayer the assumption need not even be made that the individual meets and knows Christ by reason of membership in the Mystical Body. A nonChristian may pray simply as a member of the great family of God. The assumption in private prayer is that the one praying is known and loved by God as an individual, either as a member of the Church or not. The person may know little or nothing about the nature of salvation and may not even be baptized; yet he calls out to Christ like the Syrophoenician woman in St. Matthew’s Gospel (15:21-28) and is heard. It is a dangerous presumption on the part of a Christian to decide whom God will hear or not hear.

Devotion in the Old Testament

The