Developing A Growing Intimacy With Christ

By Fr. Roy Cimagala

THIS is actually meant for all of us, but especially for priests and consecrated persons who are supposed to lead the way for others to fulfill this duty. The ideal condition for us is to become more and more like Christ, having his mind and heart, having his spirit such that we can approximate our true identity and dignity as children of God just as Christ is the Son of God who became man to bring us back to where we should be.

And by intimacy, I mean that abiding awareness of Christ’s presence in our life, such that it affects even our feelings and passions. We need to set our whole selves to meet this condition because only with this intimacy with Christ can we be able to be also intimate with everybody else, which is the ideal condition in our relation with them.

It’s when we are intimate with Christ and with everybody else when we can really see ourselves in our rawest and unvarnished selves. Intimacy is where the most fundamental expressions of our humanity are made, where we become aware of our personhood, and where our real identity is established and defined.

We have to understand that we have to exert conscious effort to develop our proper sense of intimacy. We should not allow it to develop simply by chance or by some random initiatives. We have to be very serious about it, always coming up with concrete plans and strategies to put it in place and to keep it going.

And the reason for this is that especially today, with so many things grabbing our attention, we always have the tendency to treat God and others in a very casual way, if at all. And so, our relationships will most likely remain in the superficial level and are mainly driven by self-serving motivations and not by love, which is the proper spirit that should animate our relationships.

We have to do everything to grow in our intimacy with Christ everyday. This should be a constant concern of ours. This is the most ideal condition that we can and should be in, and we just have to figure out how it can be achieved.

To be sure, this is no pipe dream. This is not only possible and feasible. It is first of all Christ’s will and he has given us everything so that we can truly get intimate with him, and be privy to his will and ways.

Let’s remember that the world gives us a lot of options to do what we want to do. And though we are given an autonomy to do what we want, and all of them can be moral, valid and legitimate, we should try our best to choose the one that we are convinced is what Christ wants us to do in a given moment.

We have to make sure that Christ strikes us as a living person, and not just an idea, a memory, an abstract character to whom we go as a kind of psychological or emotional prop, or a spiritual ornament.

We need to see Christ in everything and everyone. Thus, we have to learn how to be recollected and to be a contemplative especially in the middle of the world as we go through our temporal affairs.

Let’s be sure that Christ is precisely also in the middle of the world, in our mundane affairs. He is waiting for us there and is expecting us to turn these things to him, since these things are the very test Christ provides us to see if we truly believe and love him or not.

Email: roycimagala@gmail.com