Can’t I just find God Wherever I Can?

A man sees the pointy hats of the Catholic magisterium, smells the rising of incense, hears the bells rung throughout Mass, and sees the reverence given to something that looks like bread.  He observes Catholics abstain from meat on Fridays, pray the Rosary as if on auto-pilot, and hears them invoke the names of many saints he has never heard of.  With what seems like pious indignation, the man sees all these things as amounting to superstitions and aberrations from the Mission that Christ sent His Apostles on, and forsakes the Church.  He claims to truly encounter Christ in the “church” of walking through the woods in silent prayer - and defends his encounter with Christ from his Catholic friends by citing their own pontiff: “Respect for man in his quest for answers to the deepest questions of his life, and respect for the action of the Spirit in man [is necessary, because] every authentic prayer is prompted by the Holy Spirit, who is mysteriously present in every human heart (RM, para. 29).”  So, does this man have the right to remain in his error, simply because he “finds Christ” in nature and gets nothing out of the Faith of his Catholic friends?  The answer is sort of - so long as he continues to earnestly follow the path the Holy Spirit guides him on to open his heart to the gift of Faith.

The world is obsessed these days with making a distinction between being spiritual vs. being religious - i.e., being a Christian and cultivating a relationship with God vs. practicing any specific theological school of thought.  Now, of course there is a contradiction in this false dichotomy: in order to be a Christian, you already do follow a theological school of thought - it just depends whether it is right or not.  However, the attempt to make a distinction between following the dictates of a religion vs. trying to just be a good person is not without its own nugget of truth.  

Christ says that not everyone who merely calls Him “Lord” will enter the kingdom of Heaven.  What is required is a conversion in our souls, a forsaking the life we have heretofore lived and encountering Him as a Person.  But how are we to convert ourselves?  We can’t mandate an encounter with Christ: there is no ritual, practice, or belief that can bring about an encounter with Christ, because an encounter is one subject beholding another subject as another I, and receiving their self-revelation.  It is a passive experience, akin to the intellectus moment Pieper describes.  We can do, act, and say things that set ourselves up for this encounter, but ultimately the encounter itself is a personable action, dependent on the dispositions and relative capacity for love between two subjects.  

Conversion in our hearts cannot happen on our own; in fact, the only way we can be converted is if we are given the inspiration, strength, and disposition to conversion from someone outside of ourselves.  We must be moved with an interior life: we must be given the Holy Spirit.  And the Holy Spirit gives Himself to us, because the Holy Spirit is Person-Gift.  It is in His nature to inspire us, and to draw us closer to Himself.  He does so little by little, always encountering us as another I and meeting us where we are, so that He might break the roofs and blockades we construct over our own heads so that we might see the magnitude of His love.  He capitalizes on and is Himself, “the very source of man's existential and religious questioning, a questioning which is occasioned not only by contingent situations but by the very structure of his being (RM, para. 28).”  And, by meeting us where we are, He teaches us to meet Him as He is.

Here we can see the final refutation of the woods-Church Christian.  While yes, the “ultimate purpose of mission is to enable people to share in the communion which exists between the Father and the Son (RM, para. 23),” and again yes, the potential exists for those of Faith to get caught up in the legalisms of their religion and miss that communal relationship between the Father and the Son, we cannot therefore make up our own rules to abide by so that we might encounter God.  The Holy Spirit meets us where we are so that we might search ever deeper and meet Him where He is at.  It is an act of self revelation, not an act of subjective comfort.  And so, while yes we are always obliged to follow where the Holy Spirit guides us, we are ultimately called to seek Him out with never ending ferocity so that we might live in encounter with God.