Jesus said to his disciples:
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’
will enter the Kingdom of heaven,
but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.
“Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them
will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.
The rain fell, the floods came,
and the winds blew and buffeted the house.
But it did not collapse; it had been set solidly on rock.
And everyone who listens to these words of mine
but does not act on them
will be like a fool who built his house on sand.
The rain fell, the floods came,
and the winds blew and buffeted the house.
And it collapsed and was completely ruined.”
(MT 7:21, 24-27)
Before I knew about Catholicism, I would have said that it took more courage to think for oneself than to follow a creed. But that was before I had even read or examined the creed and all its implications.
In the 3 years of being an adult convert to the Roman Catholic Church, I have thought more critically, searched my soul more honestly and have confronted my own vulnerability more so than ever before. Once I started to trust God, I left a room decorated purely with my own opinions and experiences and entered a cathedral of collective wisdom. Like a child, I walked wide-eyed in circles taking in the history, the faith, the pain, and the beauty. There was a part of me that resonated with everything I saw. My feeling of relationship to this seemingly foreign world evaporated. I was Catholic and Catholic was me. I absorbed, considered, and thought deeply about this new approach to the world and interestingly, to myself.
I would like to say that the novelty of being a convert never wore off, and perhaps it hasn’t. But it has changed, and without a doubt, matured. In the past 3 years, I have been asked by my Lord to trust Him in the most raw and personal aspects of my life. The former utter relief and amazement at finding my spiritual home turned into a six-month long period of questioning, discernment and much internal struggle as I grappled with what His will was for me, and if I had the courage inside of me to carry that out. Like in today’s reading, I wondered if I would I be a fair-weather faithful, who abandons the faith when it comes to persevering through the painful personal chapters of life. How could I speak “Lord” to a being who I felt was being unfair?
In “Crossing the Threshold of Hope”, Saint John Paul II writes,
“Christ is the sacrament of the invisible God – a sacrament that indicates presence. God is with us. God, infinitely perfect, is not only with man, but He Himself became a man in Jesus Christ. Do not be afraid of God who became a man! It was precisely this that Peter said at Caesarea Philippi: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (Mt 16:16)
It was through a novena to Mary Undoer of Knots that I turned my face fully back toward Christ. My problem was that I had erroneously misunderstood my Lord to be like human leaders who made decisions that I could agree or disagree with, and in turn vote in or out. I had fallen into this fallacious understanding of God, understood through my past human experience, where there is a distinction between myself and God and my job was to submit to God as a before a master. Not surprisingly, I was wrong.
In turning back to Jesus, and being welcomed with his open heart, I learned that to call Jesus “Lord” is to tap into something much deeper than what at first meets the eye. Indeed, to recognize Jesus as Lord is to create an entirely new reality. To name Jesus as Lord is to echo the words of Saint John Paul II: “God is with us.” If Jesus the man is Lord then Jesus is God, and that means that God is here among us. He is here and sharing the greatest power of the universe, Love, The Holy Spirit, with us.
That is part of the great reality of the beginning of our creed. To say “Lord” is not to simply acknowledge that we are “less than”. Rather, to say Lord is to acknowledge the great power behind this reality – that God is here. And in recognition, we are united with God.
With this awesome truth in our hearts, life is not victim to every storm. There is a power greater than all storms, and that power is God. While my own personal struggle persists a way, I have through our Catholic faith developed to see it less as a blame-game case of “why are you doing this to me” and more as a case of “Wow, this is amazing and hard but all things are possible with Christ.” When storms come into our lives, and they will come, we can walk toward our Lord and claim his name and in doing so walk into the reality of God, which will lead us away from our limited perceptions and toward the Kingdom of Heaven.
