Are We Presenting God To The World Correctly?

I don’t think we can miss the fact that church attendance is dwindling. Any visit to America’s churches will often find low numbers of people under 40 years of age.
None of our communities are immune to this. Pew research recently conducted a poll and found that 37% of American Catholics now say they are spiritual but not religious. That same poll also reported that 20% were ambivalent to spirituality and religion entirely. The trend is slightly higher in the denominational churches nationwide.

The late Blessed Archbishop Sheen, speaking of Catholics, said “We have learned to be inoffensive.”
There is a modern tendency to explain everything, to make our religion understandable and inoffensive.
Bishop Barron has often said that Christianity as a whole has become very beige. We are a generation fascinated with spirituality but often bored by the church.
I will attempt to answer that last statement in this blog.

In an attempt to become more ecumenical with our unbelieving world we have smoothed out the rough edges of our faith and in so doing have lost our appeal to the world. We have lost the beautiful sacredness of our faith and have become very secular.
Simply put, our modern Catholicism is no match for the ethos of secularism which has permeated all of our lives.
We have become very explainable and therein lies some of the problem. We have packaged God in an easy systematic way that is very predictable. Have we made God boring to the superficial observer?

Buddhists have a saying and it goes like this. “If you see Buddha in the road kill it.”   
God is not explainable but we often make Him very touchable, and very ordinary.
The great doctors of our Church remind us that what we think we know of God is not God at all because it comes from our own very limited understanding. The Buddhist saying is very apropos.

Where is our awe and sense of mystery?

Is There Something Wrong With My Understanding?
As humans we often touch our world and gather an understanding of it through experience. We touch a flame and understand it hurts. Our interpretation and understanding of life is built on positive and negative experiences. So as humans it is natural to use experience as a basis to define God.
We say, “God is like this because this or that happened”. Biblical characters did the same thing. However, those inner experiences are very flawed because they are interpreted through our own limited understanding. Seeking to explain God based only on your subjective experience can create a very limited and skewed version of God.
The wisdom and pragmatism of Catholicism shines here as it does not regard your personal experience as a necessary component of defining God, in fact sometimes that experience can hinder us. Retreat-like events often ask attendees to describe an experience they've had with God. What if an individual has no such experience? Does that mean God is not active in that persons life? Of course not, but a lack of experience can lead one to believe that lie. What I am saying here, is we really cannot trust experience or our own interpretation of life to create an idea of who God is.

God asks us to trust Him and not the version of Him that we might have created in our own minds. I am not implying that your personal experience is irrelevant to your spiritual journey. I am however cautioning you on how it is interpreted. Augustine and Aquinas would say be open to the wonder of God while remaining open to the possibility that your thoughts and ideas are also flawed. What I love about the great Catholic thinkers is they challenge us to think bigger because, well, God is more than we can imagine Him to be. Our thoughts are too paltry and too small to capture Him.

The Great and Unexplainable Mystery That is God
God is simply beyond our wildest ideas, hopes and dreams. He is the whirlwind of Elijah, the burning bush of Moses, the warrior king who led David. He is the king of kings and Lord of Lords and yet condescends himself in a manger. He is the peace of a still night yet is the breaker of fortified walls which seek to divide and separate us from Himself.
He both pursues and lures us forward and in so doing is all about us. He is full of seemingly odd contradictions that defy our attempts to capture Him as something explainable. He makes known his mysteries to the simple but eludes the proud. God it seems is perfectly content to hide himself in creation. His humility knows no bounds. I stand in awe that the creator of the universe ceded even his birth to a Roman census. He resists our human attempts to define and categorize him and when we think we finally get it God bursts forth in new and unexplainable ways.
Even the great Doctor of the Church, Aquinas, could not accurately define God. He could tell you what God is not, but not what He is. His was a kind of anti-doctrine said Bishop Barron. At the end of his life Aquinas simply gave up saying that all of his work amounted to rubbish. He conceded saying the only thing we can do is stand in awe of such a Being. Perhaps we should stop explaining and simply marvel. 

Should we Rethink How We Evangelize?
I believe we as a community have failed to present God to our world in a way that is alluring. Our world sees Church as the primary way to meet God and in Church they expect to hear a lot about ethical teachings and moral instruction. They hear the same old, same old. Every religion and every good parent offers that instruction similarly.
What they don’t expect, and do not find, is a journey of self-discovery that leads them to an actual person, the Ancient of Days, the Almighty. Imagine the implications if one were to expect to have an encounter with God Himself and not simply a set of moral instructions? Our churches would be full.
Of this I am sure, God is more, much more, than someone with a bunch of ethical and moral teachings. Have we as Catholics encountered Christ as an actual person?

Humans love the adventure of the unknown. We are born dreamers.  
Is it possible that we have mistakenly tried to explain God in a way that is entirely wrong because we do not grasp it ourselves and, in so doing outsiders dismiss God, and look at us as no more relevant than a good book on ethics? It saddens me.
People do not encounter nor do they discover because they cannot find. They are not passionate because what we deliver is not intriguing enough to merit interest.
Let me explain it this way: No kid will be drawn into the universe of baseball by hearing arguments over the infield-fly rule or the correct distances between bases. The game must be entered into to be enjoyed. And none of us will be enchanted by the world of Christianity if it’s presented like a book on ethics without any expectation that we might actually encounter God.

Bishop Sheen said “Christ’s legacy was not an ethic or a collection of moral precepts.” I would not argue with the late Archbishop. We are missing the substance of Jesus’ message.
God comes to us with reckless abandon, Christianity is not our search for God but His search for us. The cross not only includes salvation but an invitation of friendship. And Friendship with God-not simply worship, discipleship, seeking, or ethical uprightness-but real intimacy with God is what he desires. That’s what I am trying to say in this blog and that is what we are missing.

On a recent afternoon a group of men from our church did some street evangelization. We met a young man who said the problem with Catholicism and Christianity as a whole is we are not conservative enough. I think what the young man meant to say is that we have become secularized and beige in our approach to the gospel message.

I paused and thought about that statement for a few days. That young man felt that people were not interested in us because we were not interesting enough to pay attention to. We’ve made God explainable and uninteresting enough to ignore.

Perhaps he is correct