Walk with One: Eucharistic Revival
We are all called to evangelize, and thanks to the gift of the Holy Spirit, we are well-equipped for this mission. It may not mean spreading the Gospel in a foreign land or going door-to-door with the Good News—and it may require overcoming some fears—but the Lord is asking each of us to step out of our comfort zone and evangelize one-on-one.
There is someone in your life right now whom Jesus longs to call to himself. He wants to spark a relationship with them and bless them with his sacraments. In this Year of Mission, Catholics across the U.S. are saying “yes” to a special form of heart-to-heart accompaniment called the Walk With One initiative.
The Stages of Spiritual Companionship
1. Identify
Don’t just pick someone. Ask God whom he wants you to accompany on their journey home to the Church. He will point you to the person he has in mind and open doors for the conversations that need to happen.
2. Intercede
As soon as the Lord lays someone on your heart, begin to pray for them! Ask God to remove whatever obstacles are making it difficult for this person to draw closer to Christ and his Church. Pray for the grace to be able to accompany them well.
3. Connect
Look for ways to build a deeper relationship with this person. Get together with them for coffee or lunch. Listen deeply for promptings from the Holy Spirit as you get to know your friend’s joys and struggles. Share with them some of your own.
4. Invite
Follow the promptings of the Holy Spirit. When the time is right, invite your friend to take a concrete next step in fostering a personal relationship with Jesus and the Church. This might mean joining you for a small group or Mass on Sunday.
My Analysis and Comments
We are all involved in companionship with others: family, coworkers, friends, neighbors, bloggers
.
All of these companionships can involve a spiritual dimension, sharing what is important to us, our joys, sorrows, and hopes.
I think it is good to ask God how we can help others in their spiritual journey, pray for the grace to accompany them, listen deeply for the presence of the Holy Spirit in their lives, and follow the promptings of the Holy Spirit in sharing our own lives. All underlined in green above.
What concerns me about this program is the notion that anyone (including the clergy and religious professionals) should assume the role of spiritual director uninvited. Basil Pennington, a Trappist monk wrote a book above his sabbatical on Mt Athos, the great Orthodox center of monasticism. He did this in preparation for becoming novice master at his Abbey. The Orthodox were astonished that anyone would be appointed a spiritual director. In Orthodoxy each monk seeks out his own spiritual director. And spiritual directors accept that role only after great prayer, discernment, humility and fear. It is considered a grave responsibility.
Journey home to the Church places one in a judgmental role about another person’s relationship to God and other members of the Church. I am wary of even judging those questions for myself. In fact, midway in life I went on a fine directed retreat whose outcome was that I should always be confident in God presence in my life but that it was better for me not to be aware of it. That could be a source of great spiritual pride.
Ask God to remove whatever obstacles are making it difficult for this person to draw closer to Christ and his Church. I found that I could serve people with mental illness by supporting their talents and dreams rather than focusing upon their problems, Betty and I have built our lives together around all the positive interests that we share. While we face our health problems together, we try not to let them overwhelm us.
Get together with them for coffee or lunch. Invite your friend to take a concrete next step in fostering a personal relationship with Jesus and the Church. Thinking about all the time that Betty and I have taken in the past seven years to slowly grow our relationship, and well as all the time that we here at NewGathering have spent over the last seven years growing the relationships on this blog, coffee. lunch and next step all sounds very cheap and trite.
The persons in our parish whom I think are most in need of conversion are our pastor and members of the pastoral staff. They are very resistant to my e-mail suggestions about how they should change what they are doing. Maybe I should invite them one by one to coffee so we could talk about next steps. On the other hand, I guess I really wouldn't want to have any of them for my personal friends, or even engage with them virtually on a daily basis like I do with you.
"What concerns me about this program is the notion that anyone (including the clergy and religious professionals) should assume the role of spiritual director uninvited. "
ReplyDeleteJack, that is my thought as well. It all sounds very Evangelical. Which isn't a bad thing. But I think we need to know that someone wants to be accompanied before we invite ourselves along on their journey.
How to pretend to be someone's friend to get their butts in your seats, their dues in the coffers, all while earning brownie points with the power brokers that will lead to big rewards for you!
ReplyDeleteI thought Dale Carnegie and Amway had that racket cornered.
The local parish has some kind of novena to St Monica for the fallen away going on. Nothing beyond that and putting the names of the faithless in a special box.
But I will be alert to sudden invites to coffee!
“But I will be alert to sudden invites to coffee”. lol!
DeletePutting names of the faithless in a special box is part of this, in fact Step #2. That is what my parish is doing. Supposedly no one by the person nominating the faithless knows the name. I guess I am skeptical.
DeleteExpect Step #3 Contact to follow. Maybe they will decide that you need help at home.
My mother was always afraid of the church leaders who came into your house to help you when there was a funeral. I had strict instructions to guard against that.
"leaders" should have been "ladies" Yeah we had them back then, the Altar and Rosary Society with their bingo gossip fests. My mother avoided them.
DeleteI dunno. If someone is really yearning to turn Catholic or to come back to the Church, maybe the steps offered by Jack's priest will work. But it sounds kind of manipulative--pretend to be a friend and love bomb somebody until they do what you want is how cults operate.
DeleteThe local parish seems to be doing the St Monica thing in conjunction with OCIA starting up. The bulletin says that it is for potential converts and those who want to return to the faith. But I only know what I read in the bulletins I bring home.
Hello - I don't think these steps are intended to set someone up as a spiritual director. Rather, they are a path for evangelization, via the spirituality of accompaniment.
ReplyDeleteThe church insists that evangelizing is intrinsic to Christianity. When we were baptized and confirmed, this became "part of the package" for us. Discipleship includes evangelizing, even though most of us are not very comfortable with it.
I think there are some cultural obstacles for us Americans to evangelizing. One is our great respect for personal autonomy. To be sure, from a civic-life point of view, that respect can be a virtue. But that respect can lead us to eschew any responsibility toward others. "I respect your personal autonomy" can become, "I am not my brother's keeper".
Here is one way to think of it: most of us (and, I think, everyone here) is perfectly willing to be our brothers' and sisters' keepers when it comes to things like providing food, housing, medical care, education and other life necessities and human rights. That is why we give directly to people, and support agencies and charities that do these good works, and support government programs that deliver these goods and services. The church asks that we put faith in Jesus on an analogous footing. We followers of Jesus claim to believe that he is the one who has the words of eternal life, and is himself the bread of life. Why wouldn't we wish to share this goodness with others?
That question leads to the other American obstacle: many of us have had unpleasant experiences with being 'evangelized' (i.e. proselytized) by strangers, co-workers, etc. None of us wishes to foist those negative experiences on anyone else, especially our friends and family members. The suggestions in Jack's post take a different approach: the path of accompaniment.
I don't think we need to be pushy about evangelizing. But we need to own it - to accept that we have a responsibility to invite and welcome those who wish to be initiated (or in many cases, reincorporated) into the Body of Christ. Personally, I believe that some people are genuinely hungry for what Christianity has to offer. From time to time, it may transpire that such people cross our paths in life. If we are living lives of faith, others find that attractive! They may literally ask us, either tentatively or even explicitly, if all this goodness can be for them. When that happens, we must respond.
I don't think we are called to be fake friends; we are called to be real friends. Which is hard for an introvert like me. Everyone has to find their own style. Mine is to try to be approachable. It's like being friends with cats. If you go after them they will hide under the bed. If you sit quietly, and sort of, kind of, make eye contact, pretty soon they will come over and check you out.
DeleteI think God sometimes puts people in your path for a reason
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DeleteWhat Katherine said was better than what I had. I need to learn to shut up. Happy St Aidan's day today. He offers a model for any would-be evangelizer.
DeleteGlad to learn more about about St. Aidan. Lindisfarne sounds like a neat place, still a place of pilgrimage. Also called the Holy Island. Don't know if Aidan had a part in illuminating the Lindisfarne Gospel.
DeleteAidan would have been a good name, except that it was kind of trendy for about a decade. I tried to stay away from trendy names. My husband wanted to name one of our boys Ryan. I wasn't having it. He said it was an Irish name. I said, "so you've never heard of an Irishman named James?" So James it was. I suppose if we were really being authentic we could have named him Seamus. But I don't think he would have thanked us for that.
Jean, I commented before you deleted your comment. But I was still glad to learn more about St. Aidan.
DeleteThe Lindisfarne Gospels were made decades after Aidan's death. Interesting story about Aidan's relics and what became of them: https://bamburghbones.org/a-skeletal-journey-the-bare-bones-of-saint-aidan-of-lindisfarnes-deathly-adventures-through-britain-and-ireland
DeleteFrancis has sharply contrasted evangelization with proselytizing in these following quotes:
ReplyDeleteThe pope specified, however, that "to be a missionary, to be apostolic, to evangelize, is not the same thing as proselytizing," or actively seeking to convert someone.
Quoting the late Pope Benedict XVI, who died Dec. 31, Pope Francis said that "the church does not proselytize, but rather she grows by 'attraction'" to the beauty of God's love.
Evangelization "does not begin by seeking to convince others, but by bearing witness each day to the love that has watched over us and lifted us back up," he said.
"Communicate this beauty to convince people," Pope Francis said. "We are the ones who announce the Lord, we do not announce ourselves, nor a political party or an ideology. Put people in contact with Jesus without convincing them. Let the Lord convince them."
"What I mean is that evangelization is free! Proselytism, on the other hand, makes you lose your freedom. Proselytism is incapable of creating a religious path in freedom. It always sees people being subjugated in one way or another. In evangelization the protagonist is God, in proselytism it is the I."
Another typical thing about proselytizing is that it does not distinguish between the internal and external forums. And this is the sin into which many religious groups fall today. That is why I asked the Apostolic Penitentiary to make a statement on the internal forum, and that statement is really very good."
"Evangelizers never violate the conscience: They announce, sow and help to grow. They help. Whoever proselytizes, on the other hand, violates people’s conscience: This does not make them free; it makes them dependent. Evangelization gives you independence, that is, it makes you free and able to grow. Proselytizing gives you a servile dependence at the level of the conscience and the society."
"Proselytism among Christians, therefore, in itself, is a grave sin."
Also, Frances has said, "The Church is not a soccer team that goes around seeking fans.
Another typical thing about proselytizing is that it does not distinguish between the internal and external forums.
ReplyDeletee.g. invite your friend to take a concrete next step in fostering a personal relationship with Jesus and the Church. This might mean joining you for a small group or Mass on Sunday.
I think it is fine to invite people to join a small group or to go to Mass on Sunday. If it were not for the pandemic, I would have no difficulty in inviting people to my house for the celebration of the Hours or one of the various on-line Masses if they expressed an interest in these things. Whether or not these experiences impact their relationship to God, or the Church is up to them.
I would not attempt to create a relationship of dependency with me, e.g. have them come to my house on a regular basis. Rather I would encourage them to share the virtual liturgical and spirituality resources on my websites with their friends and family.
We each have our own spirituality which is formed around our charisms. Besides the Hours, my charisms include the solitary life (from Merton) communal life (from the Benedictines), and service to others (from the Jesuits). While we should share our gifts (charisms) with others, we should not try to form others in our image and likeness. That is spiritual pride and a form of idolatry.
In interacting with others, we should always be on the lookout for their gifts, the presence of the spirit in their lives rather than focusing upon the beliefs, values, and practices that we think should not be in their lives or trying to place some of our own beliefs, values, and practices in their lives.
Those are all very helpful thoughts, yours as well as those from the Pope above.
DeleteDuring RCIA, we talked a bit about how our conversions might affect our extended families, who were not Catholic. The Church Ladies insisted that we inform them of our conversion and invite them to the Easter Vigil.
The priest was less hard line about this. He suggested that (and this picks up on your idea of indebtedness that I liked) we might try to articulate how the values we were raised with led us to this seemingly surprising turn of events in our lives. "You'll know when it's time to tell them. In the meantime, just keep on loving them."