Have you been knocked off a horse lately? Perhaps not, but this Pauline jubilee year is a perfect time to ask, “How has knowing the living God changed your life?”

Have you had to change professions? Perhaps you’ve changed your whole way of thinking about the world ... Your practice or understanding of religion? Your understanding of God? What about your sense of your fellow human beings? Do you find yourself consciously part of a larger Body—the Body of Christ— and connected to people whom you were never part of before? Is it like being in love? Has it seeped into every pore of your body and spirit, catching you unawares, and making you realize that even the most treasured aspects of your life cannot remain untouched by this new person who fills your life? Are you filled with good news, news that you can’t keep to yourself, because it’s just too good? Have you come to know yourself in new ways, view your history differently, see yourself as saved and sinner? Do you have new insight into your own restlessness, which has suddenly abated? Is your hunger, the deepest hungers of your being, satisfied as never before?

Yes? No? Never? Once-a-long-time-ago-but it’s-gotten-kinda-stale-now?

When we examine the life and writings of Saint Paul, we find everywhere the marks of his encounter with Christ. Nothing in his life remained unchanged—except, perhaps, his trade as a tent-maker. He rethought and reworked his whole Jewish tradition. He pondered, to the minutest detail, it sometimes seems, the impact of the Christ event on every aspect of life, whether family, slavery or marriage. His experience of Christ wasn’t theoretical—it was real, pulsating with the energy of the Holy Spirit. Nothing was immune to its effects: not his intellectual life, not his religious life, not his social life.

Paul’s experience deserves our attention. Sometimes it seems something to envy: after all, wouldn’t you like your knowing God to be that tangible, that all-embracing? Wouldn’t you want that for every parishioner, every student, every child? The demands of contemporary ministry force us to ponder that question, because it impacts us directly in three important areas: the process of initiation, ongoing catechesis, and liturgical celebration.

Some voices today are clamouring for more “Catholic content” in the process of initiation. The clamour arises out of the hope that the more fledgling disciples know about Catholicism, the more faithful they will be.

Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. What we often forget is that the doctrinal and moral teaching of the Church rests on the encounter with God. Think of any of our most cherished dogmas: Trinity ... incarnation ... resurrection ... transubstantiation. Each word describes an experience of, a knowing of God or God’s action in our world. Each arises out of the community’s experiences of God, and its wrestling with and reflection on that experience, sometimes over the centuries. But knowing the word, knowing about the word, knowing the history of the doctrine isn’t at all the same as knowing the God to whom the doctrine points—and being transformed by the encounter. Knowing doctrine is not the same thing as knowing the living God. Our initiatory efforts must be directed to helping inquirers and catechumens alike encounter God, and be changed by that encounter. Hence the concern for conversion in the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. Knowing ≠ knowing about.

Catechesis poses a similar challenge. Every official document on catechesis and every resource on it loves to quote Pope John Paul II ’s assertion that the goal of catechesis is communion with Jesus Christ. So that people don’t just know about Christ, but can enter into this communion, we must create the conditions whereby people, young and old alike, can be drawn into his life, his way of being, seeing, understanding, acting. The best catechetical resources in the world focus on this encounter. They don’t simply impart information. We confuse the two at our peril.

During preparations for the Easter Vigil, a cantor who had come through a bout of breast cancer a year earlier remarked about “her” psalm, with its refrain, “I will praise you, Lord, for you have rescued me”: “I can really sing that because it’s true, that’s what God did for me.” For her and people like her, who have connected the events of their lives with God’s saving action, liturgy will never be irrelevant because thanking God for God’s action in their lives comes naturally. They know God because of his action. Exercising their baptismal priesthood is not theoretical; offering themselves, their whole lives to God, is the only logical response to God’s goodness. Imagine what liturgies would be like if the majority of those in our assemblies could point to God’s action in their lives, and be ready to consciously thank God for what God has done.

Why is this so important? We often speak of the advantages of ritual prayer: we can anticipate the pattern, we know the responses and, because we don’t have to learn it anew every week, we can enter into it more fully. But these very advantages can also be its downfall: we utter responses without thinking and familiarity breeds boredom. Rootedness in a relationship with the living God keeps liturgical prayer alive. When this rootedness founders, we turn to gimmicks to keep the liturgy interesting.

“Know God?” That’s how an ad for St. John’s School of Theology in Collegeville, Minnesota, begins. It continues, “Learning theology is good. Knowing God changes everything.” Without the experience of God, initiation is reduced to indoctrination; catechesis languishes as information, and liturgy, eviscerated, is confused with ritual.

Is it too much to expect that we’ll be knocked off our horses today? That we’ll know God - in the biblical sense of knowing? If our ministries are to bear fruit, it better not be.

Bernadette Gasslein

celebrate@ustpaul.ca