Jesus has a vocation or mission for all of us. “To him who conquers, I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give a white stone, with a new name written on the stone which no one knows except him who receives it.” (Rev 2:17) Of course, just like Peter, even we do not know our mission until Christ gives it to us. We need to be listening to Christ in a prayerful way, so that we know what mission He has for us. Christ is certainly the One whom we look to outside of ourselves. However, He also tells us who we really are in the eyes of the Father.

Christ is the real Center of our lives, but He also is the real Center of the Universe. As St. Paul says, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities-----all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. (Col 1:15-17) Theologian Von Balthasar tells us: ...where man retains an awareness that all things are conceived, loved and created in the word of God, it follows that the whole world will be seen as co-creature, as a shared environment; it too becomes an object of prayerful contemplation. For Christ is not an isolated phenomenon, to be neatly excised from the body of world history; he can only be understood as the climax of a total history of salvation which reaches from Adam, Noah and Abraham, right through the history of the Church and the world up to the day of judgment. Just as he is inseparable from the world which he came to redeem, so the world cannot be separated from him in whom it “subsists” and who thus provides its rationale. On the other hand, Von Balthasar warns us that we can easily go astray here and lose sight of the fact that creation receives its goal and meaning from Christ. Modern man is more aware of his share of responsibility for the whole of creation than were his forebears, and, seeing himself as the divinely appointed steward of the world’s affairs, is more easily tempted to regard himself as the ultimate truth of the cosmos. Consequently, he is doubly in need of persisting in the contemplation of the word of God, so that he may bring himself and all other things to the genuine, definitive truth. St. Francis is an example of someone who had a proper understanding of this. He saw all creation as his “brother” and “sister” but always in relation to Jesus Christ and His Truth.

Von Balthasar warns of another barrier that one can encounter as one contemplates Christ. The Christian might be tempted to envy other religions and forms of contemplation, which are not bound, as he is, to a particular number of finite words and propositions in a “holy scripture”, a particular number of utterances, events and anecdotes in salvation history, a particular number of statements, defined by councils and popes and to be accepted by faith as true. The Christian is surrounded by an apparently finite world of truths. In other words, as a Christian gets deeper into prayer, the desire to go “beyond” Christ and the Church in order to reach God can easily arise. This is point where we have to get back to faith in Christ and the Church which He founded. There are so many wrong “pathways to God” which one could take. When we contemplate Christ, how do we know we are not just contemplating our own personal wishes, hopes, and desires?

Christ spent much time in prayer before he picked the apostles as the nucleus of the Church hierarchy. Christ saw the problem and gave us the remedy. The dogmas of the Church keep us on the right pathway in our prayer. Yet this is a path of freedom just as traffic rules and laws seem to restrict our “freedom” but really allow us to reach our destination. In this case, however, the destination is God. For most of us, we need all the help we can get to reach that destination.

– Jim Nugent, CFP