Preview: Monsignor Benson on How to See and Love "Christ in the Average Man"

On Monday, February 9, we'll conclude our discussion of Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson's meditation on how to see and love "Christ in the Average Man" from The Friendship of Christ on the Son Rise Morning Show. Of course, I'll be on at my usual time, a little after 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central. Listen live here or catch the podcast later here.

At the end of this chapter he warns there is no shortcut to following this path to holiness and then advises, relating this aspect of seeking the Friendship of Christ to those he's discussed before: 

. . . To find Him here is to find Him everywhere. If we find Him here, how much more easily shall we find Him in the Saint, the Sinner, the Priest, the Church and the Blessed Sacrament. . . .

Then he emphasizes that we have to be intentional in following this path:

(1) We have to remind ourselves constantly of the duty, and to remain discontented with ourselves until we are at least attempting to practise it.

And he offers a warning:

. . . Christ caresses the soul, entices it and enchants it, especially in the earlier stages of the spiritual life, in order to encourage it to further efforts; and it is, therefore, a very real spiritual snare that we should mistake Christ's gifts for Christ, religiosity for religion, and the joys possible on earth for the joys awaiting us in heaven -- in a word, that we should mistake the saying of "Lord! Lord!" for the "doing the Will of the Father who is in heaven."{6} . . .

And a way to test ourselves:

Continually and persistently, therefore, we have to test our progress by practical results. I find it easier and easier to worship Christ in the Tabernacle: do I therefore find it easier and easier to serve Christ in my neighbour? For, if not, I am making no real progress at all. I am not advancing, that is to say, along the whole line: I am pushing forward one department of my life to the expense of the rest: I am not developing my Friendship with Christ: I am developing, rather, my own conception of His Friendship (which is a totally different thing). I am falling into the most fatal of all interior snares. "I find Him in the shining of the stars. I find Him in the flowering of the fields. But in His ways with man I find Him not."{7} And therefore I am not finding him as He desires to be found.

Then, echoing his comment in the chapter on "Christ in the Sinner" ("Lastly, it is necessary to remember that if we are to have pity on Christ in the Sinner, we must therefore have pity on Christ in ourself. . . ") we have to remember that each of us is an "Average Man":

(2) A second aid to this recognition of Christ lies in an increase of self-knowledge. My supreme difficulty is the merely superficial and imaginative difficulty of realizing how it is possible to discern the Unique beneath the disguise of the Average. Therefore, as I learn to know myself better, and learn therefore how very average I myself am, and, at the same time, discover that Christ still bears with me, tolerates me and dwells within me, it becomes easier for me to realize that Christ is also in my neighbour. As I penetrate deeper and deeper by self-knowledge into the strata of my own character, learning afresh with each discovery how self-love permeates the whole, how little zeal there is for God's glory, and what an immensity of zeal for my own, how my best actions are poisoned by the worst motives -- and yet, all through, that Christ still condescends to tabernacle beneath it all and to shine in a heart so cloudy as mine -- it becomes increasingly easy for me to understand that He can with even greater facility lie hid beneath that exterior of my neighbour whom I find so antipathetic, but of whose unworthiness I can never be so certain as I am of my own.

His final word of advice: "And then, having found Christ in yourself, go out and find Him in your neighbour too."

Earlier this week I attended a "Lent 101" class offered by our Pastor at Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church in Wichita, in which he emphasized the importance of Fasting during Lent. We have to fast and abstain, he said; that practice is the sine qua non of a good Lent. In covering the other two practices of Lent, prayer and almsgiving, he highlighted spiritual reading and the practice of the Works of Mercy. He further encouraged not only the Corporal Works of Mercy but also the Spiritual Works of Mercy. Obviously, those works of mercy are mostly for the good of our neighbor, the Average Man.

Image Credits (Public Domain): The Good Samaritan, after Delacroix by Van Gogh, 1890 at the top; and [before Van Gogh] Delacroix's Good Samaritan from 1849.