St Catherine lived a deep and
intimate relationship with Jesus; an intimacy that is frequently expressed in
such pictures as Catherine and Jesus walking along with their heads together
talking, or their exchange of hearts. Catherine was also fully aware that such
intimacy was utterly vital for the Christian life. In her “Dialogue” we hear
God the Father saying:
(Chap. 23) I am the
gardener, then, who planted the vine of my only-begotten Son in the earth of
your humanity so that you, the branches, could be joined to the vine and bear
fruit. … joined and engrafted to this vine … you will produce much fruit,
because you share the vital sap of the vine. And being in the Word, my Son, you
will be in me, for I am one with him and he with me. If you are in him you will
follow his teaching, and if you follow his teaching you will share in the very
being of this Word – that is, you will share in the eternal Godhead made one
with humanity, whence you will draw that divine love which inebriates the soul.
All this I mean when I say that you will share in the very substance of the
vine.
This intimacy grows through Lectio
Divina (the prayerful reading of Scripture) – spending time with the Lord,
listening to His words and watching Him in action in the text of the Gospels.
As this passage from the dialogue says, Christ lives more fully in us to the
extent that we follow His teaching; but we will not follow His teaching unless
we are familiar with it, unless we allow His words to “abide” in us (Jn 15:7). It
seems very appropriate that we should remind ourselves of this necessity to
become intimate with Christ through the Scriptures today, being the Feast Day
of St Mark the Evangelist (something I hadn’t registered when I initially
prepared this reflection).
This building of intimacy with
Christ and familiarity with His words is particularly important at the present
time, with people claiming that the Church’s teaching about ‘X’ or ‘Y’ is wrong
and that ‘Jesus would not (or did not) teach that ‘X’ or ‘Y’ is a sin’ – such
claims can often be people turning “their own ideals and indignations into an
image that they call Christ,”[1]
rather than Christ’s own teaching, and only familiarity with His Word
equips us to recognise that.
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