This is part of a read-along hosted by myself and MrsDarwin of DarwinCatholic.
The main page is here.
MrsDarwin's biographical sketch of the author, Robert Hugh Benson, is here.
My introductory post is here.
+ + +
A couple of years ago I got it into my head to write a blog post on the topic of "having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ." Specifically, what that oft-heard, evangelical-sounding phrase even means.
"Obviously," I thought, "we can't have an interpersonal relationship in the same sense that we have friendships with other earth-dwellers. So what is it? He already knows us perfectly. How can an individual soul know him back? In a way that is highly personal and specific to that particular person, not just as a story that's available to anyone?"
My working theory, fairly nicely tied up and following the rule of three: A person can know what Jesus has done for them (by self-examination of their own specific sins and faults that Jesus atoned for. A person can know what Jesus promises them: forgiveness of those sins specifically, truthful answers to the questions in their own heart, the wholeness of the person that they are created to be. And a person can know what Jesus is asking of them, specifically: their particular vocation, the sacrifices asked in each moment, their cooperation in the divine plan.
And it was all very logical and smart, but despite starting to write it many times over a period of nearly two years, mostly in crowded coffee shops—remember those?—I never could make it come out onto the page in a satisfiying way. My formula lacked something. I touched on the idea of "personal" in the sense of being particular to the person who seeks, but I missed the Person Sought. I wrote about "knowing" in an intellectual sense, but not at all in the relationship sense: all savoir and no connaître.
+ + +
In Chapter 1 of The Friendship of Christ, Robert Hugh Benson solves my problem.
When I had first tackled the problem of the "personal relationship with Christ," I had assumed that it wasn't, well, real, but only a kind of symbol or representation. But I hadn't connected it to the many representations we've handed down of Christ as a sort of person we can relate to, and how all of these representations are ways of making something invisible real to us.
Christ is a King: we know something about earthly kings, and the relationship that people have to their king; and we can extrapolate from the flawed kings of history, ruling on fear of power or their tenuous claims to authority, and imagine an ideal King with perfect power and perfect authority, and understand a little bit of how we are to relate to the King of creation. Christ is a Judge: we know something of judges and rules and laws, and we know the delicate balance between ruling in iron accord with the law and ruling with merciful consideration of the particular circumstances, and we can imagine a perfect Judge and anticipate appearing before Him. Christ is born the son of Mary: we know something of babies, how they are vulnerable and poor and worthy of protection and full of promise and adorable, and we know how to love them and carry them around in our hearts, and we can do that with the image of the infant Jesus. And so on and so on. I am not a vowed religious but I figure that those who are have an understanding of Christ as Spouse that works for them. All of these things made some sense to me before. But I didn't really connect it to the "personal relationship" in a practical way.
Benson simply calls "the personal relationship with Jesus"—that pious formula coined who-knows-where—by the name Friend. It seems revolutionary. It seems obvious.
"I have called you friends."
Benson says,
If then there is anything clear in the Gospels it is this—that Jesus Christ first and foremost desires our friendship.
A bold statement! "First and foremost?" If that's so, what can this be other than the euphemistically named "personal relationship" we have been telling each other is so important? And why have we been afraid to call it what it is?
+ + +
There are a lot of surprises here.
For example, as Benson points out, friendship is not necessarily permanent. It has no vow. Even without any fault, or falsehood: "We form friendships, and grow out of them."
Nor, despite its particularity, is it exclusive, or meant to be so.
It might almost be said that we cannot retain the faculty of friendship unless we are continually making new friends: just as, in religion, in proportion as we form inadeqate images and ideas of the divine which for the time we adore, and presently change for others, we progress in the knowledge of the True God.
We friend-make very differently at age five, at sixteen, at thirty, at sixty. (And yet two people who are friends at five may still be friends at eighty. My grandmother's first friend lived across the street in 1926; the two little girls were not allowed to cross, so they played together by rolling a ball across the road. Seventy-two years later they were still best friends; I have a photo of them dancing together at my wedding.)
Friendship with Christ, whatever it means here on earth, must be a strange familiarity, a changeable constant.
+ + +
I think we'll be approaching the subject from a way that Benson might not have anticipated, writing from the time and place that he did.
With respect to place: As an English Catholic convert, he must always have been conscious of the distinction between Catholic sensibilities and Church-of-England ones, and when he writes of Catholics-in-particular I believe he's implicitly contrasting us with Anglicans-in-specific. North American Catholics, of course, though we are no small minority, view ourselves against a different background. Here American-style Protestantism (the ones with a prominent emphasis on "personal relationship with Jesus Christ") and American-style secular culture struggle for dominance, occasionally cooperating. And so when he writes, "It is at once the privilege and the burden of Catholics that they know so much of Jesus Christ," I think he's drawing a comparison to something rather different.
With respect to time:
Catholics...are prone—through their very apprehension of Jesus Christ as their God, their High Priest, their Victim, their Prophet and their King—to forget that His delights are to be with the sons of men more than to rule the Seraphim, that, while His Majesty held Him on the throne of His Father, His Love brought him down on pilgrimage...
If I may generalize, I suspect that Benson wrote for a time when, he thought, many understand Christ mainly as a mysterious, distant, imperial, majestic Divinity. He offered a way to see Christ in approachable humanity, and called it novel.
Nowadays it seems not novel at all to view Jesus as a human being. If anything we are surrounded by images of Jesus-as-our-kind-friend, someone just like us. Perhaps the pendulum has swung too far the other way: Jesus has become in popular culture a tame lion, and we've long lost our idea of Jesus as Holy and King and God. So the corrective that Benson is applying might be thought outdated.
But... perhaps it is not a case of a pendulum swinging too far one way or another, but of going in the wrong direction entirely. I often thought that the problem was one of balance and emphasis, that we needed the right amount of awe, distance, respect, and fear, counterbalanced by the right amount of warmer intimacies like trust, love, and compassion.
But now I wonder if Robert Hugh Benson has the correct corrective. It isn't that Jesus is part King and part Lamb; it is that Jesus is all King and all Lamb: all the things He is, He is at once. He is King and Prophet and High Priest and Victim; He is Bread and Physician and Bridegroom; He is Saint and Sinner and regular average guy; and at the same time He is Friend, suffusing all these things, so that through our friendship with Him we can reach and touch and know Him in all these ways.
+ + +
One more thing. I think Robert Hugh Benson is preparing us, in this introductory chapter, to think about our human friendships which we understand well, and use them as signs pointing us how to become friends with Christ.
But for some of us, it may be more the other way around. We know something of the love of Christ, and if we can understand that the love of Christ is a true friendship, well, then we can figure out exactly how this friendship thing is supposed to work, and learn to be better friends and appreciate the friends we have. And then perhaps that knowledge and experience we can take back to Jesus, and our bond with him can grow stronger, different, more mature: the "conscious companionship" of Jesus Christ that is "the very secret of the Saints."
+ + +
Next up: we begin Part I in earnest, looking in at the interior manifestation of the friendship with Christ, from conversion to conversion. Here's Mrs. Darwin on Chapter 2.
Comments