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Twenty-Eighth Sunday of the Year
15 October 2006
Praised be Jesus Christ! Now and forever!
Dear Friends in Christ,
On 15 October 1981, twenty-five years ago today, the Lord Jesus laid hold of my life and revealed himself to me in a purifying, illuminating, transforming fire of tears and love. That night was the end of five years of atheism and the beginning of a lifetime of discipleship, and I have often been asked to describe the experience. The best I have been able to do in these 25 years is quote the words of the French mathematician Blaise Pascal who was born in 1623 and died in 1662. On the night of 23 November 1654, when Pascal was 31, he experienced a profound religious conversion that shook him out of the conventional religiosity of his time and changed his life; he later wrote about that experience on a piece of parchment which he sewed into the lining of his coat and wore over his heart. Pascal’s description of his experience describes my own, and in part his words read:
From about half past ten in the evening until half past midnight
FIRE!
The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob,
not the god of philosophers and scholars.
Certainty, joy, certainty, emotion, sight, joy.
The God of Jesus Christ.
This is eternal life: to know You,
the only true God, and Him whom You sent:
Jesus Christ
Jesus Christ
Let me never be cut off from Him.
He can be kept only by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Sweet and total renunciation.
I will not forget Thy word. Amen.
Not every Christian, of course, experiences a moment of this sort, and the Lord reveals Himself to us in many ways. But every Christian must know the Lord Jesus, not just know who He is. The Lord Jesus is the crucified and risen Savior of all mankind, and no human person can fully understand his life or find his dignity apart from a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus, for "there is no other Name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4.12).
Thank you, Lord, for the gift of faith and the gift of your friendship. Praised be Jesus Christ!
Father Newman