Intentional Discipleship

[Era Might]

A video I liked by Fr. Robert Barron, followed by an excerpt from the Pope's interview last year, which I re-read this morning.

 

My thoughts, listening and reading these, is that one cannot really be a "disciple" (in a narrow or broad sense) without a context in which one lives and dies, not because that context "speaks" to you or "fulfills" you but because that is the community in which one has discerned Christ's voice, "Quo Vadis?" This is kind of an extension of what we were discussing in a previous thread about traditionalism and young people. The danger of that kind of community is that it is pre-selected, where one flees to escape where one has been planted. There can be value in that kind of community, but it is limited, I think. The real "community" of discipleship is not where you feel comfortable, but where you must be, where you cannot flee, not for any ideological reason, but because that is the community you have been given to suffer and live and bear fruit for, even if you want to leave it.  I don't think one begins to be a disciple until they are mature enough to discern what that is. As the Pope says in the interview, one is bound to people, not to ideas or doctrines, which are always perfectly presented. People are always messy, incomplete, a work in progress. Persons are not ideas, and until that becomes real in our lives, I think discipleship is impossible.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO0H0Cdn3C4

 

 

 

“If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing.Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God. Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists­—they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies. I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life. God is in everyone’s life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else—God is in this person’s life. You can, you must try to seek God in every human life. Although the life of a person is a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.”

 

http://americamagazine.org/pope-interview

Edited January 10, 2015 by Era Might

[Guest]

Father Barron is dope. Voris has been attacking him. Dude is a joke.