In love with Christ; in love with the Church

"You have seduced me, O Lord, and I let myself be seduced."
--Jeremiah 20:7a

Catholic theologian Tim Muldoon, reflecting on Father Robert Barron's Catholicism series, recently pondered over the meaning of the Catholic faith in today's world.  "I find myself dwelling on the basic question of how one can describe this faith, this Church, this tradition, this religion, this community, this worldview, this theology," he writes.  "It is an impossible task!"

Muldoon describes the standard narrative (SN) of the history of the faith and its place in helping build Western civilization, but concludes the standard narrative is no longer sufficient for explaining the hold Catholicism continues to have on over one billion believers worldwide.  No, Muldoon argues, Catholic Christianity continues to thrive because it answers the deepest need and longing of the human heart:

Unlike what many of its critics seem to think, [Catholicism] is not fundamentally about a kind of military-like uniformity of taking orders from the general. It is much more like the way that beachgoers watch the ocean: we go because we respond to a summons from the heart. What the SN cannot convey, and what the critics tend to miss, is that Catholicism is fundamentally about a real encounter with the risen Christ, a response to God's own initiative to seduce us into falling in love with him...[A]t the grass roots, it is about an individual person coming to know another individual person, and repeating what the centurion said at the foot of the cross: surely this is the Son of God.

Muldoon remind me of how I have often described my own journey to the Catholic faith, which I consummated by being Confirmed in the church eleven years ago.  "When you fall in love with someone, it doesn't mean you agree with everything they say or always feel peace and bliss in the relationship," I have said many times, "But it does mean you can't imagine living without them in your life."


And that's true of my relationship with the Church, but increasingly I see that it is so much more.  My faith is more than my love of the Church and what keeps me there is not always the same thing that led me there, as Abbot Christopher Jamison says in his book Finding Sanctuary: Monastic Steps for Everyday Life, of his own vocation as a monk.  "I do not know why I became a monk," he writes, "because the reason I joined is not the reason I stayed."

Originally, I fell in love with the Church - its beauty, its history, its majesty, its people.  Then gradually, I fell in love with Christ, a response to how He first loved me, and relentlessly pursued me and seduced my soul.  Now, I remain in the Church because it is there, through its beautry, its history, its majesty, its people, that I find so many wonderful ways to love Him and be loved by Him still.

O Lover of my soul, you have seduced me and I am so glad I have let myself be seduced!  Continue to woo us through your earthly Church, O Lord, and draw us ever deeper into your love.  Amen.