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Fr Sean again.
Are You Well-Connected?
Bishop Fulton Sheen noted that the greatest insult you could heap on someone is to say he or she is useless. No one is useless. God creates everyone at the moment of conception with the ability to make a positive difference in the world. A reporter asked a businessman how he got to be so wealthy. He said that when he and his wife married they had only five cents between them. “I bought an apple, polished it and sold it for ten cents. Then I bought two apples for ten cents and sold them for twenty.” The reporter asked, “Then what?” The man smiled, “My relative died and left us twenty million!” Good connections make all the difference. To be successful in life we must have good connections. It’s not what we know but who we know that we can rely upon for help to achieve our goals. It is not what we know about Heaven that will get us there but who we know.
In a book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey identified the key habits that enable people to be successful. He showed that effective people are proactive instead of reactive; they begin with the end in sight, put first things first, think win-win, seek to understand before seeking to be understood, synergize, and continue improving their skills. Habits, good or bad, are actions that we do repeatedly until they become embedded in our unconsciousness so that they become second nature to us. Our actions flow from our intellect and will, both of which are faculties of our soul. To develop good habits we need to seed our minds with the kind of thoughts that when planted in our soul shape us into effective people. To be effective Christians we must seed our minds with God’s thoughts and plant them in our soul. As God’s creatures our effectiveness depends on our adherence to the purpose which He gives us. Connection to the Creator assures us of achieving our purpose which is to know, love, and serve Him here on earth and after death to be with Him forever in Heaven.
How do we connect with God? By letting God connect with us first. “It was not you who chose me, it was I who chose you to go forth and bear fruit” (Jn 15:16). How does God connect with us? He initiates His connection with us through Jesus’ presence in His Church in the Sacrament of Baptism. There Jesus enables us to “put on the new nature created in God’s image, whose justice and holiness are born of truth” (Eph 4:24), giving us a new identity, a new nature, and a new destiny as His adopted brother or sister. We can’t be effective if our sinful nature isn’t replaced by a new loving, life-respecting nature. The highly effective Christian, as is evidenced in the saints, is the man or woman who thinks and acts humbly, justly, mercifully, gracefully, and truthfully. Faith, hope, charity, humility, prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, peace-making, prayerfulness, worship, and service are the habits of an effective Christian.
To be an effective Christian community or parish or diocese we need to be continually connected to Jesus. That’s why He founded His Church on Peter to be His Bride, His Body on earthHe is the source of Christian fruitfulness. “I am the true vine and my Father is the vine-grower … Live on in me, as I do in you… I am the vine, you are the branches. He who lives in me and I in him, will produce abundantly, for apart from me you can do nothing” (Jn 15:4-5). Effective Christianity is impossible without Jesus since He is the vine and we are the branches. When we try to be effective while ignoring Jesus we, like branches cut off from the vine, wither and die. This is why so many baptized people have rendered themselves ineffective workers in the vineyard of the Lord.
How does Jesus make us effective Christians? Through His Church’s Sacraments, especially in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass where we hear His Word, celebrate His real Presence in the Holy Eucharist, the re-presentation of His sacrifice on the Cross, and receive Him in Holy Communion. In that action of His, through the ordained priest, Jesus visibly inserts us into Himself as the branch is connected to the vine, and energizes our soul so that we can go out and effectively promote life, love, and enthusiasm in a world wallowing in death, hate, and apathy. This is a real connection with Jesus, not a symbolic gesture, as He Himself revealed. “Let me solemnly assure you, if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. He who feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has life eternal, and I will raise him up on the last day” (Jn 6:53-54). Jesus isn’t speaking symbolically but literally. He makes the reception of Him in Holy Communion the essential and effective nourishment for our soul: “For my flesh is real food and my blood real drink. The man who feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in Him” (Jn 6:56). No one can be in Christ unless Christ is in him or her. Thus Jesus guarantees a continual connection with Him since we need on-going spiritual nourishment to be effective witnesses to what is real, true, good, and beautiful. This is why He commanded His Apostles on Holy Thursday when He instituted the Holy Eucharist and ordained the Apostles to the priesthood to “Do this in memory of me!” (Lk 22:19).
Jesus is the best connection we can ever have since He is the only one who has risen from the dead and has the power to raise us up from suffering and death. We couldn’t be better connected because He alone enables us to achieve the fullness of our potential. Look at the difference in Paul when Jesus connected him to Himself. He alone enables us to “love not in word and speech but in deed and in truth …and love one another just as He commanded us” (1 Jn 3:18-24). Actions speak louder than words. Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit obeying the Ten Commandments assures us that God has connected us to Him. “Those who keep His commandments remain in Him, and He in them, and the way you know that He remains in us is from the Spirit He gave us.” The Holy Spirit urges us to “let the coming generations be told of the Lord that they may proclaim to a people yet to be born the justice he has shown” (Ps 22:26-32). If we’re not connected to Jesus we can’t hand on the Faith to our children. And since only Jesus can make human beings effective persons in a fallen world, if our children aren’t connected to Him they’re doomed to failure in eternal death. Is this the legacy we want to hand on to them? Wouldn’t that be an act of injustice to them? Don’t they deserve the best from their bishops, priests, and parents? Jesus acts justly towards us in His Church where He makes it possible to be connected to Him and thus achieve the fullness of our potential, namely to be God’s image and likeness and be co-heirs with Him (Rom 8:17) to His Kingdom. There is no connection with anyone that’s more important than being connected to Christ Jesus. Without that connection we wither and die and leave the world a worse place. (fr sean
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