Many of us want to improve our prayer life. And with the new year, it may be one of our resolutions to spend more time doing religious activities. We may be committed to reading the Bible in a Year or doing a daily random act of kindness. Maybe some of us just want to go back to mass every Sunday. While these or other resolutions are good and important (please go to mass every Sunday and Holy Day), we need to make sure to remember the purpose of why we are doing them.
Our Catholic faith is a religion. Religion comes from the latin word meaning ‘to bind’. So when we are in a religion, we are binding ourselves to a community and a way of life. Why? Well many religions have their own end goals, but in the Catholic faith, our religion is for the purpose of knowing Jesus, the Son of God who leads us to His Father, through the power of the Holy Spirit. We are meant to bind ourselves to a community of Persons who is our loving God.
Because religion is concerned with guiding a large group of people, it naturally sets up ordered rituals. Catholic rituals are to help form us to be open to receiving our end goal, the love of God. But sometimes we can get lost in the allure of accomplishing the ritual, and forget why we are there: to be with God. Our capitalist mentality of putting enough work, sweat, and tears into something in order to gain what we want in return (like heaven) can tempt us into treating our spiritual resolutions as a checklist to be completed or a self improvement plan. While these mentalities can help us awaken our desire for God, they can be detrimental to our relationship with Him in the long term.
A relationship is not a check list. It is not a place where we go to gain or earn something. Rather a true relationship is meant to be a communication of selves between at least two persons. Through this communication, the two or more become one. They are unified, not uniform. Their oneness binds, while their unique individuality still remains. A great example of this is marriage. A man and a woman come together, giving themselves fully to each other. This communication brings them closer together, and they may even pick up personality traits from each other. But they still keep what is inherently them because they must have something to communicate for the relationship to remain. A marriage lived well will enhance the best parts of each other of both the man and the woman for a unified good.
Whenever we are in a relationship with God, the same should happen. We should be with God and communicate ourselves to him, and because of who He is and who we are, He will bind our brokenness and heal the parts of us that we are most ashamed of. But he will also strengthen the parts of us that are good, true, and beautiful, enhancing them for the communication of His love to other people. And in this process, we do not become mindless drones, but our personalities are enhanced to the heights that they are meant to fly to. A relationship with God lived well will enhance our person to who we were created to be: saints.
But this cannot happen whenever we are a slave to a system or ritual. These good things are meant to foster a disposition of communication rather than to be a goal to be accomplished. We need to stay true to our resolutions not out of an obligatory proof of our love for God, but to place ourselves in a situation where we are with God and He is with us.
So as we begin this new year and our resolutions, if we are committed to growing deeper in our faith, let’s remember that it is about HIM, and not what we accomplish. It is about love and not pride. And it is about being in relationship with the God who desperately loves us and has done everything He can to spend eternity with us. (Oh, and we should also remember this at Lent too).