John Henry Newman on a problem he noticed roughly 200 years ago ...
It is very much the fashion at present to regard the Saviour of the world in an irreverent and unreal way—as a mere idea or vision ... [offering] vague statements about His love ... [and] while the thought of Christ is but a creation of our minds, it may gradually be changed or fade away.
... so this is not a new problem.
Against this vagueness and blur, in opposition to the Unreality of Jesus the Nice Guy, Newman suggests something that most Catholics would consider novel. He says to know this Person Jesus, you could simply read the Gospels.
... when we contemplate Christ as manifested in the Gospels, the Christ who exists therein, external to our own imaginings, and who is as really a living being, and sojourned on earth as truly as any of us, then we shall at length believe in Him with a conviction, a confidence, and an entireness, which can no more be annihilated than the belief in our senses. It is impossible for a Christian mind to meditate on the Gospels, without feeling, beyond all manner of doubt, that He who is the subject of them is God; but it is very possible to speak in a vague way of His love towards us, and to use the name of Christ, yet not at all to realize that He is the Living Son of the Father, or to have any anchor for our faith within us, so as to be fortified against the risk of future defection.
I know this is difficult 19th century prose, but what he's saying is simply that Christ had a particular character, and was not an amorphous blob, blurry and fuzzy: and His character was, rather disturbingly, Divine.
The theological implication of this fact is what I would call the particularity of the saints.
We are sanctified not as indistinguishable blurry "nice guys" but as very particular individuals with zest and with deliberate things we are and are not. Grace perfects nature, including the nature of our form, our limitations, our personalities.
Young people today seem to think that individuality is all about what music you like. Demographic marketing and the niche of your favorite band defines who you are, and so if you find someone who likes the same garage band as you, you've found (one would assume) a compatible friend. But, on the contrary, the mystery of who we are, and of what we are called to (our vocation) is much more personal and particular and even more biting and painful than the music we listen to.
It is like the stinging taste of salt. And this ringing and stringent flavor is something we are not to deny.
Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men. (Mat. 5:13)
But when was the last time you went to a suburban Mass and had any sense that the particular - the particular anything - mattered?
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