Christians worship and pattern their lives on the example of Jesus Christ.Christianity is not a religion of the book or of ideas and ideals. Rather, it is a religion based upon a relationship with a person. Moreover, this person is not merely an interesting or inspiring historical figure. He is living, active, working and intimately involved with the world, the Church and our lives.
Yet, God, even in the person of Jesus Christ, remains mysterious to us. We can know God intimately, in Newman’s estimation, so intimately that he physically inhabits our body in the Eucharist, but we can never know God completely. The total- ity of God is beyond our understanding.
God is mystery, not in the sense of that which cannot be known, but in the sense of that which is infinitely knowable. Relationship requires work, and Newman insists that this getting to know God requires us always to be expanding our horizons, changing our perspectives, look- ing ahead, beyond and around.
We must always be getting to know God through continuous prayer and worship, through reading, through study, through intimate conversations, through investment in the life of the Body of Christ, the Church, through service to the sick and the needy, through love for the lonely, through compassion, which is united to his endless compassion.
Not to change in this sense is to worship a God we recognize only as small and meaningless, malleable and ultimately useless. When we recognize among us the living Christ, we fall in love, and falling in love implies a willingness to bend, to accommodate, to get to know.
Fr. Denis Robinson, OSB
St. Meinrad Benedictine Oblate, Winter, 2009
