Week 1, and you get to pick what you write, so I’m answering this question:
How would you describe your lived relationship with God to this point in your life?
It was strange to me when I read about how so many Catholics do not have a notion of God as a Person (technically: Persons) with whom one can have a relationship.
I was raised barely Catholic — made my first communion, then spent most of my youth popping in at Palm Sunday and Easter for our annual two-week This Time We’re Going to Start Going Back to Church Every Sunday kick. But I always had a notion of God as someone you talk to, listen to — I wouldn’t have called it “having a relationship”, because I was just a kid. You don’t use those words when you’re a kid. But that’s what it was.
–> Even during my ardently agnostic/pantheistic kick during young adulthood, I still considered God *someone*. I might have claimed He was this Force Blah Blah Blah, but in practice, yes, a Person. You don’t chat with a Force.
The big thing that pushed me back towards the Church was the alarming discovery that I had somehow gotten so far away from God that I couldn’t feel His presence anymore — I was visiting one of the historic mission churches around San Antonio, and was deeply disturbed to drop into an active parish — sanctuary lamp lit — and feel *nothing*. It was so dead wrong I knew I was in trouble.
And the rest is details. I asked God to help me*, and He did. Here I am.
Find more answers over at CatholicMom.com. As always, feel free to share your own answers, or a link thereto, in this combox.
*By “ask”, I mean: Desperately pleaded. Tears. Lamenting. Wailing? Maybe kinda, yeah. Not on the San Antonio trip, but a little bit later, riding down 81/77 in southwest VA. In the privacy of my own vehicle, thank you. I’m not a public-weeper if I can help it.
Jen, I was raised without a religion, so much so that I hate being called a convert- I was never anything until I was a Catholic. I can understand how you felt about not realizing that God was a someONE and not just a someTHING. I have a cousin who was baptised when she was a baby yet was never taken to church and the talks I listen to on Youtube make me sad when they say that this was the norm in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. After Vatican II, there was so much heresy that people thought they were doing the right thing but were, in fact, raising kids who knew nothing about their Faith, leaving them to raise kids who knew nothing. Now we must come from the ashes and raise awareness. Yes, Catholics have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ!
God Bless you! Alicia
I also participated in the discussion at http://through-my-is.blogspot.com/2013/05/lawn-chair-catechism-week-1.html.
This question is so gauzy I can’t think of anything to say.
Oh yes you can, Christian. I know, since I’ve heard you do it.
My relationship with God began as a young teen when I gave him my life at a Protestant mountain-top retreat. Our family was at church every time the doors were opened. I volunteer for many ministries and worked on the staff one summer. I never would have become a Catholic if I had not fallen in love with one. Married in a Catholic non-mass ceremony, but I didn’t convert for a couple more years after becoming at home with the liturgy. God has is own way of bringing us into the fullness of faith.
Nancy – yes! Funny story about that in my family:
-My mom’s mother was Catholic, her father was Baptist. They agreed that they each refused to attend the other’s church, so they decided they’d go to whichever non-Catholic-non-Baptist church was nearest their current Navy base. My mom was baptized in the Presbyterian church as a grade-schooler.
-Fast forward . . . she meets this Catholic boy in college, converts on her own before marrying him.
-Long stretch of not-so-Catholic during the 70’s and early 80’s.
-She finally gets the family going back to Mass using a bit of motherly cunning.
-The last years of her life were spent wholeheartedly devoted to faith . . . and after her death, sure enough, my Dad who’d been a bit lukewarm all those years, when it’s time to start dating again, falls in love with the nicest Catholic lady from the parish over-50 singles group.
Sort of a back-and-forth evangelization. I love it.