On Encounter with Christ
"The word ‘Meeting’, or ‘Encounter’ … is the most important word of our inner life, because the most important moment for all of us is our Encounter with the Lord, our own personal Encounter with Him. We have all come to Him and to the Church precisely because this Encounter has taken place. I am convinced that God knocks at the door of each of us, while often remaining anonymous. But man can reject Him, can turn his back on Him, can wish that the Encounter would not happen. And for us, who have responded to this Encounter, however weak our voice, most precious is the fact that along our own path we have met You, Oh Lord. …] We can testify that this has infinitely deepened our life, expanded our horizons, opened inexhaustible levels, given us strength for the struggle despite the difficulties on our path.
"Nevertheless, our journey upwards has begun. For you fairly young people the upward path is not always clear, because you are as yet ascending in life’s basic aspects, physically. But when a person reaches a critical point in life, he begins to descend physically. And when you experience this, you will know how precious the fact that the Gospel, the power of God’s Spirit, the Encounter with Christ, gives us the possibility of always ascending to such an extent – that however we crawl, whatever zig-zags we make, however we may trip up, however we fall back – still, we are growing. The natural, unspiritual man always perceives only more and more loss, while we are always gaining. If I were offered the chance to return to my twenties I would be horrified because, recalling this time of my life, I would feel impoverished, robbed in relation to all that I have acquired since those days. To part with such treasure would indeed be hard. That’s why for us this Encounter is always a stimulus, a movement, an invitation to ascend. …]
"If you want to find something real in Christianity, then search for it only through the Risen Christ. Secondly, the Resurrection means victory. It means that God entered our human struggle, the great struggle of spirit against darkness, evil, oppression. He who was rejected, condemned, killed, humiliated, somehow focused all the misfortunes of the world in himself and triumphed over all of them.
“In weakness, in crucifixion God revealed his power, and he reveals it still. I need to remind you that the Apostle Paul said: all of us need to experience the Resurrection, this special Encounter with God, in this life; but this is inseparable from crucifixion. He says (as in the epistle read at baptisms) that we are crucified with Christ, that with him we share sufferings common to us all, inner torments, external sorrows – each one has his own difficulties which he carries in life – if we understand them as participation in the sufferings of Christ, who suffers for the whole world, whose heart bleeds, because that heart contains all the hearts of the world. To die with him in order to rise with him. …] To talk about it is rather hard, more precisely, almost impossible. But each of us who finds himself in a critical situation, an illness, a tough condition, should remember that this condition can be sanctified; we can transform it into a cross. We always need to remember that next to Christ were two thieves, one simply suffered, while the other co-suffered with Christ and heard the words, ‘Today, you will be with me in paradise.’”
