THE BOOK’S FOREWORD disclaims it to be a synthesis of Christianity, or a systematic presentation of spirituality, or the Christian mysticism that ought to accompany evangelization. Yet it is a little of each of those, being a product of spiritual conferences in different places and to a variety of audiences, for the most part in Latin America.
Grouped together, the conferences assumed a central theme: the following of Christ. I could not agree more to the back-cover blurb that deemed the book an ideal manual for disciples and disciples-to-be of spiritual-renewal communities and those who deeply desire to follow – and live – today the values of Jesus Christ.
To say that it touched me is not only an understatement, the book compelled me to attain the fruits obtaining from living the standards of discipleship.
The add-on value that took a hold of me (and resolved a write-up) was the dedication of its pages to Mary, mother of the church and privileged model of our following Jesus.
Allow me to walk you through the practical, step-by-step guide to true Christian discipleship in contemporary times.
Chapter I, Conversion and Following, introduced itself with a Gospel from John 21:18 “I am telling you the truth: when you were young, you used to get ready and go anywhere you wanted to; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands and someone else will tie you up and take you where you don’t want to go.” It is repeated twice on pages 6 and 11.
This Gospel reveals to us the basis of all spirituality and gives back to us the demanding simplicity of Christian identity. It is Jesus who asks us if we love Him, like he asked Peter; it is we who answer that we do. It is He who invites us to follow Him. And that’s all. As simple as that. Not like Peter who, after three years of ministry, recognized Christ but the nature of the kingdom still eluded him. We have an advantage over Peter because we already know the three times he denied Christ and the three times Christ asked him of his love. We can now avoid his crisis because we already understand the superficiality of his conversion. Like him, we will also overcome that crisis because, like it taught him, it will teach us to make our response more mature, deeper and qualitatively different from “three years ago.” Aware of our limits and faults, the knowledge will make us humble, like him.
Peter’s discipleship is a paradigm of the conversion process of every Christian.
Following Jesus is the root of all Christian demands and is the only criterion by which we can evaluate our spirituality. To follow Christ is the decision to submit all other following on earth to the following of God-made-flesh. It speaks of conversion, of “selling all” evangelically to acquire that pearl and hidden treasure which is the following of Jesus. Only God can demand such a following and it is in following Jesus that we follow God, the only Absolute.
Chapter II, The Face of Jesus, posits that the originality and authenticity of Christian spirituality consists in our following a God Who took our human condition upon Himself. Jesus of Nazareth, like us in all except sin, is the only model for our discipleship. Making the encounter with His humanity the starting point of our spirituality. Because the historical Christ is our model, it uproots our Catholic spirituality from the illusion of “power” of an extraordinary, miraculous, and purely divine Jesus, which dehumanizes Him. It frees us from the temptation of adapting Jesus to our image, ideals and interests. It is only through Jesus of Nazareth that we can know God, His words, His deeds, His ideals, His demands. It is in Jesus that the true God reveals Himself: all-powerful but at the same time poor and suffering for love; absolute but also someone with His own human history, someone close to any person. Just as we don’t know Who God is unless we discover Him through Jesus, we can never really know what prayer, or poverty, or fraternity, or celibacy is, except in the way Jesus came to know these values, in His humanity.
The message of the Gospel about the person of the Lord presents the religious dimension of Jesus, profoundly united to the Father, in communication with Him, dependent on His will, a man constantly cultivating this intimacy and Whose impressive prayer clearly demonstrates this. He often went away to pray, in the midst of His activities, and passed whole nights in prayer. His crucial moments in life were completely dedicated, in prayer, to the Father, a dedication that transcended His personal or cultural situation. He really prayed, as a need of His humanity to communicate with His Father and express His love for Him. His contemplative life did not separate Him from other people, or human conflicts, or replace His mission. As He was a man of God, he was also a man among men, absolutely approachable. This great paradox of Jesus remains as an inexhaustible norm of discipleship.
Another characteristic of His human personality is the attractiveness of His message. He spoke not like the scribes and Pharisees but as one with authority. Amazing coming from the son of a carpenter in the context of a very simple culture then.
The personality of Jesus is also marked by fidelity to His mission. He had a goal, an ideal and a commitment which He followed to the end.
Chapter III, Following Jesus in My Brothers and Sisters, has the Doctor of the Law asking Jesus who His neighbor is. It was an obvious attempt to put Jesus to the test of the idea of neighbor that He was preaching. Jesus did not respond with a definition but with a now famous parable of the Good Samaritan. The parable that clearly defined the Gospel of mercy and compassion, with which we can identify, for its universal and timeless value.
My neighbor is anyone who has the right to expect anything from me, the one who God puts in the way of my own personal history, the one in need, the poor person, in whom Jesus reveals Himself as the needy one. The option for the poor, which the Gospel mandates, is to serve our neighbors not only as people but also as social situations. The Christian option is not for poverty but for the poor, above all for the permanently poor in my path and part of my society.
Christianity does not teach us that, in fact, we are already brothers, something that is unreal. The experience of hatred, division, discrimination (my input), injustice and violence that we see daily tells us just the opposite. We are not brothers but we can become so. That is the teaching and capability that the Gospel gives us. But to become such depends on our attitude of demonstrating our charity, of committing ourselves to others. My neighbor is not the one who shares my religion, country, family, or ideas. He is that one to whom I am committed.
To become a brother to another presupposes leaving “”our world” to enter “the world of the other,” his culture, mentality, needs, poverty. To make oneself a brother presupposes, above all, entrance into the world of the poor. A world that is devoid of riches, knowledge, power, lifestyle and prejudices of a society that divides into classes and is unjust on all levels. The idea of neighbor proclaimed by Jesus to the Doctor of the Law leads to a universal brotherhood, justice and reconciliation.
Chapter IV, Following Jesus in the Poor. Jesus identifies Himself with the poor. Thus, Christianity comes to be the only religion where we find God in human beings, especially, in the weakest of them. There is no Christianity without this sense of brotherhood, this sense of the poor, which is as essential as the sense of prayer. Jesus does not only ask us to have a sense of the poor brother, with whom He identifies, but that we ourselves become poor, that we follow Him in His condition as a poor person. The demand of evangelical poverty is an essential element in the following of Jesus.
The blessedness of poverty sets free in love. The freedom it produces is at the service of a dynamic charity which becomes more and more universal and limitless. It would not be possible to love the way Jesus wants us to without truly having a poor heart. Christ’s call to each Christian is a universal demand of Christianity, “no one can be My disciple if he does not renounce all that he possesses.” Blessedness of poverty consists not only in a certain lack of, or detachment from, money or material goods. Other elements of poverty are not so obvious as only “material” poverty is stressed, but with the passage of time, and as the life of faith matures, we discover a very real and inherent dimension of a true poverty of spirit. Detachment in the face of prestige, criticism, power and advancement are forms of poverty to which God calls the Christian.
The discourse of Jesus on the poor and poverty is incomplete if it does not include what He said about the rich and riches. For Him, the radical ambiguity of wealth consists in its tendency to become “lord” of the human heart. This “god” leaves no room for no other. Either we serve the God who frees us or the god who, by enriching us, chains us to the earth. To serve money is to both make god out of the earth and to pervert the purpose of its goods and the person who uses them. Christ’s warning in this respect is clear, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth… they are precarious and futile… pervert the heart and the reason for existence… For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
Jesus is so severe with the rich. We are all aware of His admonition to the rich man about the camel and the eye of the needle. Which has a redeeming intention for the rich man to change. A discovery that converted Zaccheus and made him share his wealth with the people he used to exploit, a sign of reconciliation and restored brotherhood. Thereby making cursed money a means to fraternal charity and social freedom.
Chapter V, Following Jesus the Contemplative. The following of Jesus is revealed to us as a gift from God: the gift that Christ offered to the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, which becomes to us a kind of inexhaustible water which will never allow us to thirst again, makes us born again in the Spirit and transforms us from egoists into followers.
The gift of God comes to us in a special way in prayer, which communicates to us the experience of Jesus, a contemplative experience necessary if we are to remain faithful to the demands of following Him. To follow Jesus is to follow Him also in His prayer and contemplation, in which He expressed His absolute intimacy with the Father and His complete giving of Himself.
To know how to integrate prayer within the psychological demands of our day is to know an impressive fact: Christ, the perfect man and head of all humanity, prayed. He prayed and made prayer one of the focal points of His life. His prayer was – m is – the salvation of humankind, and acts upon and influences what humanity and technology cannot: sin, liberty, faith, love and redemption. By incorporating our prayer into His, we enter in a real way into collaboration with Him in the profound salvation of humanity and history.
The ability to find Christ in others does not come from our own psychological effort but from a grace that comes forth from our conscience, the fruit of faith nourished by prayer, the experience of Christ as its source.
Christian prayer is on another level than that of statistics, psychology or technical advancement. It is not in competition with them nor endangered by humanity’s progress, so long as this prayer is authentic, that is, an expression of a personal love for God and others. At the end of our days, we shall be judged by our love. Not so much by prayer, although it is a special proof of our love for God that leads us equally to love all others, inevitably, if it is authentic. Prayer is not a refuge in God that separates us from our commitment to others; it is an ever-growing prompting that reveals to us that this person that we meet in prayer we ought also to meet in others. (Would it not be reassuring if, in our parting shot with friends, we conclude the oft-exclaimed meme Kita-kits with sa panalangin?)
All Christian prayer has an ecclesial dimension which means a Christian never prays alone, even in the most private moment of prayers. The Christian always prays as part of a whole, which is the church, always in union wiith all humankind (the Gospel of inclusion) and always in a certain sense “with the church.”
The contemplative today is the one who has an experience of God, who is capable of meeting God in history, in politics, in our brothers and, most fully, through prayer. Christian contemplation will guarantee the survival of faith in a secularized or politicized world of the future.
Chapter VI, Contemplation and Commitment. Rev. Fr. Segundo Galilea was born in Santiago, Chile on April 3, 1928, ordained a priest in 1956 and died on May 27, 2010. His insights on this chapter largely draw from the desire that the faith of his fellow Latin Americans does not become alienated from their lives and from the history that they are called upon to live. He wrote that the last three decades have seen two types of “Christian lifestyle” which could be described as the “religious contemplatives” and the “committed militants.” The first are very sensitive to the values that properly speak “religious”: to prayer and its practice, the liturgy, sacraments and transcendent dimensions of Christianity, which are/were less sensitive to the temporal or social dimensions. The second group emphasizes more their commitment to historical tasks, social militancy, the “praxis” of liberation, in the sense of an integral, evangelical liberation that implies the overthrow of social, economic and political subservience.
Many Christians see themselves as participants with the Lord in redemptive tasks that are part of the building up of the kingdom. From a tendency to question their faith and lose it, they now tend to strengthen it, to recover prayer, and to rediscover its meaning. Christians committed to liberation are contemplatives insofar as they capture what God desires for “the other” and make of this the heart of their commitment. They are contemplatives because of their capacity to maintain the universal character of charity.
Contemplation means to really experience God, even though obscurely, in every phase of human life. It is the capacity to meet Christ, and the experience of having met Him, through a vigorous and incarnate faith, as in the contemplative witness of Saints John and Peter. The experience of Jesus in the service of our brothers also gives a whole social dimension to Christian consciousness, transcending individualistic and private consciousness and contemplation with intimate tendencies.
In order to find Jesus in “the other,” in order to discover “the other” to whom I must give myself and not as an extension of myself and my interests, I need to go out of myself, to die, to crucify selfishness. To the extent that we die in order to live for God, we die to live for our neighbor and vice versa.
The figure of Moses is typical of the politico-mystic experience of God in the desert which influenced him to lead his people toward freedom. Service in the liberation of people through their participation in power is a very likely definition of a Christian politician today. The contemplative quality of Moses in this experience led him to come face to face with the absoluteness of “the other” in the solitude of the burning bush, and with the absoluteness of “the others,” in whom his experienced faith led him to discover a people among whom God dwells and to whom he had to announce the freedom of the people of God.
From Moses to Jesus, the biblical message gives us two views of the contemplative commitment to liberation. In the mystique of Moses, liberation takes on a temporal and political face and prefigures the total liberation in Christ. In Jesus’ mystique, the full sense of liberation is present, with an eschatological and decisive face, saving and transforming both humanity and society from within.
Chapter VII, Following Jesus Faithfully Even to the Cross. Jesus was absolutely faithful to the mission given to Him by His Father; He was complete love and fidelity. To follow Jesus in His fidelity to the Father is the peak of Christianity. His fidelity is painful and full of conflict; He had to bear the burden of sin and the force of evil of those who opposed Him, an opposition so strong it brought about the failure of His public life and rushed Him into death on the cross. The cross is the sign of the ever ruling power of evil, sin and injustice in the world. It is also the supreme proof of the fidelity of Jesus. Jesus crucified taught His disciples and all generations a new way to suffer and die, through fidelity to a cause.
It is not enough to carry the cross: the Christian difference is to carry it as Christ did. Taking up the cross is not a stoic acceptance or resignation but the attitude of one who carries the commitment to the full extent. This is the new manner of carrying the cross that Christ teaches us with His death: transforming it into a sign and source of love and dedication, for a liberation that is always incomplete but guaranteed through the promise, one that will see its complete fulfillment in the resurrection and exaltation with the Father. The Father takes up Christ’s cause in the moment of His martyrdom and reconciles those who suffer abandonment and desperation as the supreme form of impotence and oppression. The identification of the oppressed with the cross is not their identification with the humiliation of Christ but with His resurrected power, the power to effect the liberation of themselves and of others. If we have been brought to the crucifixion, we have in the crucified Christ the firm promise that the power of the resurrection will never allow those who suffer and die for the sake of justice to be defeated forever.
Chapter VIII, The Radicalism of Following Christ. The political connotations of the word “radical” define the suspected person as an extremist, a foolish one, an imprudent person, the opposite of balanced. In the language of the Gospel, a radical is one who goes to the root of things, one who accepts the teachings of Jesus with all their consequences, the inevitable condition for following Christ. Jesus was a radical. He set forth in new terms the idea of conversion to God, the change in our life and ethical and religious attitudes, establishing His Gospel as the only absolute. This was the perception of the governing and priestly classes of His time and by His disciples. For many of His relatives, this was a symptom of madness, a radicalism which cost Him His life.
He was radical in His demands. For Him, the Christian must be salt and, if the salt loses its ability to give savor to others, it is no longer good for anything. The Christian commitment must also be like a light capable of illuminating the world. The choice for Christ must be a radical one, occupy first place and above parents, children and life itself. Every good, every value must be sacrificed when it becomes incompatible with the radicalism of His choice, like the one who sells all he has to acquire a pearl of great price or hidden treasure. Christ’s choice is to establish Himself as humanity’s only absolute commitment, doing away with the false balance of “serving two masters.”
Jesus demands a total discipleship, carried to ultimate consequences. The gate to His kingdom is narrow, those who follow Him must leave their comfort zones, do away with worldly attachments and, once on their way, not look back. He asks people to be born anew, become like little children, occupy the lowest place, after having lost and crushed their lives like the grain of wheat. We are no different from the pagans if we do not pardon offenses seventy times seven times, love our enemies and not judge another. His evangelical criteria deem the apparent useless contemplation of Mary more valuable than the productivity of Martha.
Chapter IX, Following Jesus Who Makes Us Free. Christianity is the freedom that Jesus brought to the world, one that also takes place within us, an exodus from our servitude, enslavement and sins. Freedom is a quality that people acquire through a growth process throughout their entire mature lives. Maturity implies freedom and constant self-improvement. How to grow and acquire maturity are conditioned by humanism, tempered by psychology and founded in love. Love is the crux of our life and what makes our freedom develop. Love is essential in affective maturity, in the capacity to be objective about things, to separate oneself from situations, to look at them from the outside, to communicate and give oneself without always needing to receive something in return. The same holds true for social maturity, which presupposes the ability to integrate oneself into any group without feeling greater or less. A socially mature person is able to become part of a group without feeling that the norms of that group are a threat to his personality.
This is a very important characteristic of the church, where people belong to a diocese, community or congregation with which they are not in accord on everything. This puts them in a state of constant crisis and gives them the sensation of being attacked and overwhelmed, an immature perception. Because the church lives in an era of great transition in its pastoral activity, it appears ambiguous. Those who do not have a sense of personal fulfillment should not blame the church but, rather, their lack of freedom and maturity that deters them from putting up with ambiguous situations.
Free, mature people live by convictions and have a consistency between their values and making them part of their inner nature. They do not say one thing and do another. They know their capacities and limitations, are realistic with themselves and have the courage to say yes or no.
Equally a sign of maturity and freedom is the capacity to put aside values incompatible with personal vocation. For example, some people have committed themselves to celibacy at one point in their lives, a value. This implies renunciation of matrimony, another value. Mature people choose one or the other according to a personal, definitive way. The capacity to choose alternatives, without conflicts or anxieties, is a sign of maturity and freedom.
Chapter X, Jesus and the Liberation of His People. Fr. Segundo’s book was published in the 70s, long before the Islamic State terror group hit the headlines for its atrocities in Mosul, Syria and Aleppo. In December last year, it published on its media outlets the names and addresses of thousands of churches in the United States calling for its supporters to turn the Christian New Year into a bloody horror movie. It is only the grace of God that thwarted what could have been more mournful, wicked tragedies.
Fr. Segundo’s Latin American society is characterized by the “little ones” who suffer all kinds of injustice and other sins, the liberation of which their Christian brothers commit to. The demands of the mission remain if Christians truly follow Christ and His Gospel. They must influence society in favor of the poor through their apostolic mission that, as Christians, their action should have a socio-political dimension, with Christ and the Gospel as their model. However, they seem lost in the maze of a socio-political pastoral approach and do not find inspiration in the Gospel, because they do not see Jesus as a model in this field. While thankfully not a major cause of concern, as the ISIS atrocities were, the demands emanate from the absence of a Cristology that responds to the uneasiness with social and political dimensions. Because what many of those Christians received did not prepare them for a socio-political reading of the life of Christ and the Gospel.
Integration of this Cristological dimension is necessary to grasp the liberating and temporal dimensions of the words and deeds of Jesus, the foundations of everything else: relations between and among the church, society, politics and pastoral activity. The lack of a correct reading of the Gospel leads to deformed views of Jesus’ stand on the socio-political situation of His time. To speak of a redemptive-historical Incarnation of the Son of God is not just to affirm that God became man at a determined and identifiable time and place. It is also to affirm that Jesus came to participate in some way in the historical, religious, social and political movements of His time which influenced and conditioned His activity. In the messiahship of Jesus, there was no seeking for anything temporal or political and He avoided being a social leader. His message did not contain a strategy of political liberation, He was fundamentally a religious leader Who announced the kingdom of God as a religious, pastoral message.
In proclaiming the condition of the new human being in the Sermon on the Mount and in the beatitudes, Jesus created a new prophetic consciousness in his disciples and in the Christians of the world. To the extent that the values proposed by the beatitudes penetrate the hearts of the people and condem any socio-political structure incompatible with those ideals.
Chapter XI, Mary, Follower of Jesus. If we do not return to the Gospel, Jesus does not live in us and we will not discover Mary, the Mother of God.
On page 5, Items 29 and 30 of “True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin,” St. Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort had this to say: “God the Father wishes Mary to be the mother of His children until the end of time and so He says to her, “Dwell in Jacob,” that is to say, take up your abode permanently in My children, in My holy ones represented by Jacob, and not in the children of the devil and sinners represented by Esau.
“Just as in natural and bodily generation, there is a father who is God and a mother who is Mary. All true children of God have God for their father and Mary for their mother; anyone who does not have Mary for his mother does not have God for his father. This is why the reprobate, such as heretics and separatists, who hate, despise or ignore the Blessed Virgin, do not have God for their father though they arrogantly claim they have, because they do not have Mary for their mother. Indeed if they had her for their mother they would love and honor her as good and true children love and honor their mother who gave them life.”
In the seriousness of its stories, the Gospel shows us Mary’s radical faith, unyielding confidence and commitment to a call that led her to loneliness and the cross, an altogether authentic follower of Jesus. She gives Christianity, once and for all, not only the grace of the greatest fidelity but the charismatic grace of the fidelity of a woman-mother. In order for Christianity to be rich and complete, it must reflect the values of this fidelity, a complete giving of oneself, of absolute abandonment to the love and promises of God. Her fidelity, fruit of this confidence and total giving of self to the Word of God, gives to Christianity the maternal-feminine dimension of the following of Christ, making it an integral part of the faith experience.
The poor are able to identify with the Mother of God, see in her a woman of the people, poor and united with their aspirations. They are able to go beyond the sociological poverty of Mary to see in her the sign of her radical interior poverty. On delving into the message of the poor Virgin, a sign and condition of the freedom of the heart, those who look for their liberation and development will be able to avoid the ambiguities of materialism and alienation, taking upon themselves the demands of an interior liberation. From the moment of her fiat to the annunciation until its completion on Calvary, the poor see one of their own overcome the confusion, anguish, sense of failure and temptations that assailed her yet did not weaken her commitment. In her Magnificat, Mary hoped for a God Who will put down the rich and the mighty and exalt the poor and the lowly, a hope that is not personal and eschatological but refers equally to a change of the structures that impede the historic realization of the cpromises of God. Mary’s gift of maternity and her constant association with the work of Christ were not given to her as a privilege or a miracle. It was, for her, a commitment and a service to Jesus and to all humanity.
A following that – it is prayed – breeds followers.
*by Segundo Galilea, 122 pages, translated from the Spanish by Sister Helen Phillips, M.M., published by Claretian Publications
by ABRAHAM DE LA TORRE