The E-catechism: June 2001

  A new step
 
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Be confident, He is calling you 
 

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    A new step

    Three years ago a team started to make a "different catechism ". The goal was to think about questions concerning our life and opening to a spiritual meaning.
    The initial purpose was to bring Jesus in our present situations. Did it not happen to those, men and women, who followed Him?
    We met every month, checking our work with each other's appreciation. Thanks to this exchange and cross-examination we have improved and enriched our text. Gradually we found a right pace and we can say that all of us are marked by this experience.
    Many told us that they benefited greatly of the text and they used it. We did hope to be more interactive but this rarely happened.
    Today we want to make a new step in proposing to make an update reading of the texts of the Bible. We have noticed with joy that small groups update and renew with skill the evangelical texts!
    Bring also your way of reading the Gospel, enriched of your experiences and of your faith.

    Jacques Gaillot

PARTENIA

Letters

Topical

Catechism

Special Edition

Retrospective

Archives

Hostory

Link

send email

 

Open Bible 
la bilbe 


Be confident, He is calling you

During Lent of 2001, in the Paris diocese, the baptized-to-be for the eve of Easter received a scarf with the words" Be confident, He is calling you" taken from Marc, 10, v.49.

Getting out from Jericho, Jesus was walking with his disciples when one can hear several calls responding to each other. A call from a blind man to Jesus, "Son of David, have pity on me!" A call from Jesus to the crowd: "Bring him forth!" A call from the crowd to the blind:" Be confident, he is calling you".

enchaînement d'appels...  This chain of calls is necessary for the blind man to come close to the Master. 

Without the cry of the poor man, nothing would have happened, nor without Jesus carefully listening, also without the stimulating action of the crowd: "Confidence!" Between Jesus and us, the message goes through unsuspected intervening persons, sometimes anonymous: "One is calling" "One said to him" These humble links between Jesus and us are a mystery but they lead to an essential meeting. Sometimes every thing seems to depend on very little.

The two following calls, like question-answer, are rather astonishing despite their apparent obviousness: "What do you want me to do for you?" "Rabbi, let it be that I see" Of course can he be interested by something else? However the question of Jesus is useful, he knows that he is going to bring this man into a totally new universe, the universe of vision, impossible for him to figure out because he has never had images in his human experience.

This universe has its marvelous sides but also a dark side where there are things we would have preferred not to see. It is why Jesus is insisting, do you really want to go into this unknown universe, and will you be able to bear it? To enter in a new world, to acquire a fifth or a sixth sense, to say "let it be that I can see", all these represent the risk of an unprecedented emotional shock, the risk to have to reconsider one's limited understanding of the reality, the risk to have to correct the meaning we give to things and to history…

That means that we have to look further and more profoundly, and not imagine that all is known in science, in the spiritual life, in the Gospel, in the Church. Now we have to correct each time our understanding, to accept, if need be, the different knowledge and understanding of our brothers and sisters.

The courage to see is only possible if the call of Christ awakes us and if we answer him with a confidence greater than our fears. Like the blind man who stands up and leaves his coat behind, we have also to leave behind our doubts that paralyze us and then we can proceed. Seeing the truth becomes the fruit of an act of faith, the expression of a more profound thought: " Yes, Lord, I am confident in You who call me to see"