"A Relationship with God" Apr 1, 2022

A Relationship with God

Understanding personal relationships can help us understand our relationship with God. There is a wide spectrum of personal relationships in our lives. Certainly, we are strangers to the overwhelming majority of people, but there are others in our lives with whom our relationship has progressed from being strangers to being acquaintances—we know faces, names, characteristics. Some of our acquaintanceships have progressed to friendship, and from friendship, at times, to close relationships.

In a personal relationship, each gets to know the other. Relationships also include personal interaction, which takes place through words and deeds. Knowledge affects interaction, and interaction affects knowledge. We need to know something about another person in order to choose how to interact with him. After becoming an acquaintance, do we want to become friends or even best friends with that person? The more we know him, the better we can interact with him. And the more we interact with him, the more we know him.

Relationships grow stronger the more we communicate and share experiences.
The same rules apply to our relationship with God. Who is God to you? Stranger? Acquaintance? Friend? One to Whom you are close? The One to Whom you are closest?

Just as two people at the same workplace, in the same neighborhood, on the same team, in the same classroom, in the same restaurant, even in the same living room can choose to ignore each other, we can choose to ignore God. God does not force us to have a relationship with Him, even though He constantly invites us to know Him. The reason we exist, the reason God has given us the gift of existence, is to have a relationship with Him. We should understand our relationship with God—our knowledge of Him and our interaction with Him—in terms of Revelation and Faith.

Revelation is God showing or communicating Himself to us. God reveals Himself through concepts and words. God also reveals Himself through actions and events. Revelation is God’s communication not only of Who He is and how He interacts with us, but also of how He wants us to interact with Him.

Faith is the intellectual acceptance of God’s Revelation. Faith is the knowledge we get from God’s Revelation. Revelation is God’s giving of that knowledge. For example, when we say, “I believe in one God” when reciting the Creed, we are really saying, “I know there is one God because He has revealed it.” Faith is not only accepting God as He wants to be known, but also interacting with Him as He wants to be interacted with. Faith is the acceptance of Revelation with one’s actions, will, and emotions so that one responds to God with one’s whole life. Revelation and Faith are interactions between God and believers. In other words, Revelation and Faith are the two sides of the whole relationship between God and us.

In a personal relationship, interaction does not automatically give us a better knowledge of the other person. Experience does not automatically provide insight. For example, a person can stay in an abusive relationship because he or she does not realize it is abusive. A person can be loved by others and not admit or appreciate it. Interaction and experience need to be interpreted according to true principles. Our attempts to interact with God and to experience Him will not automatically provide knowledge of Him, but thankfully, God has solved this problem for us. He has given us the Magisterium of the Catholic Church (the bishops under the leadership of the pope) to issue doctrine, which is the authoritative interpretation of Revelation. Doctrine also defines the Faith that God wants in response to Revelation. These are the two places where we meet God.

To be Catholic is to be faithful to Catholic doctrine. If a person is not faithful to a particular doctrine, that person cannot accurately claim to be Catholic on the issue covered by that doctrine. The best single place to find Catholic doctrine is the Catechism of the Catholic Church. As Pope Francis has said: “Since the faith is one, it must be professed in all its purity and integrity. Precisely because all the articles of faith are interconnected, to deny one of them, even those that seem least important, is tantamount to distorting the whole” (Lumen Fidei, 48).

The Catechism describes the Catholic Faith as having Four Pillars, which are the four basic ways of knowing God and interacting with God. The Four Pillars are these:
1.    Creed, which is doctrine about God and supernatural things.
2.    Morality, which is making our actions faithful to God.
3.    Worship, where we encounter God in sacred rituals as we are assembled with others.
4.    Prayer, where we encounter God in our own personal ways.

Morality, worship, and prayer are ways of interacting with God as He wants to be interacted with as long as they are in harmony with Catholic doctrine, which safeguards our relationship with Him.

Fr. Robert T. Cooper, Pastor
Divine Mercy Parish and St. Elizabeth Ann Seton School