Christ Manifested in Remembrance

By Scott Ferrier, MJ • Phoenix, AZ

The lay vocation requires a strong faith in things unseen and the life in the world to come (Heb 11:10). But one of faith’s chief opponents is our worldly desire for esteem and to make an impression on others. Our lives in appearance are no different than the lives of others who surround us. We laity wear no habit or religious dress that might prompt someone “to ask you for a reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15). 

St. John Henry Newman speaks of a necessary law in the spiritual life, that “God’s presence is not discerned at the time when it is upon us, but afterwards, when we look back upon what is gone and over.” Our God is a hidden God. The meaning of life’s providences is disguised as they happen. Scripture reveals the Lord God as “rejoicing in His inhabited world and delighting in the children of man” (Prov 8:31), yet He remains concealed in ordinary events. We forget He is always there.

Our worldly cares oppose the grace which continually prompts us to turn towards Him. Remember that the Apostles too were “slow to learn” and admonished for their “little faith.” They did not understand who it was who had been with them, until after His Ascension and the sending of the Holy Spirit. 

But we have received the heavenly Spirit. The miracles He worked in the flesh during His earthly life now work invisibly and gently in the members of His Body, inviting our cooperation. St. Paul says to “set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

Newman exhorts us to seek this ‘hiddenness,’ rather than avoid it: “It is the duty and the privilege of all disciples of our glorified Savior, to be exalted and transfigured with Him; to live in heaven in their thoughts, motives, aims, desires, likings, prayers, praises, intercessions, even while they are in the flesh; to look like other men, to be busy like other men, to be passed over in the crowd of men, or even to be scorned or oppressed, as other men may be, but the while to have a secret channel of communication with the Most High, a gift the world knows not of; to have their life hid with Christ in God.”

Christ is manifested at each moment in our remembrance, through the power of His Spirit. Newman invites us to “profit by what every day and hour teaches us, as it flies … to have faith in what we cannot see.” For “when Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory” (Col 3:4).