You’re a Total Romantic? Believe in the One? That’s the Whole Point of Catholicism

In ‘Christ Alive in Me: Living as a Member of the Mystical Body,’ Fr. David Meconi moves beyond a personal relationship to union with Jesus

Romantics believe in “the one,” the mate who completes them. Christians believe in the One, the source of love and truth itself.

In Christ Alive in Me: Living as a Member of the Mystical Body, Father David Meconi admits to “having a personal relationship with Jesus,” but he wants even more.

Christians seek “a personal relationship,” but the Catholic Church calls for “giving God permission to dwell within us, thereby transforming us into another incarnate son or daughter,” a goal “at the heart of the Christian Gospel for millennia.”

The one big thing he stresses: “The only goal in God’s becoming human is to continue his life in ours.” After speaking at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, his new book quickly sold out at the campus bookstore.

The new book starts with Father Meconi encountering a street preacher, asking him if he had a personal relationship with Jesus. He surprised himself with his answer: “I do, but I do not want one.”

“With you and with my friends, with the saints, and with Mother Mary, I would like to enjoy a relationship,” he continued. “But with Jesus Christ, I want something else. I do not want a relationship; I want something more. I want union.”

True union with Jesus is deeper than ‘a personal relationship’?

The word “relationship,” he notes, comes from the Latin word “latus,” meaning “side” or “edge,” so a re-lation-ship is a side-to-side connection, like the old Christian bumper sticker about having Jesus as your co-pilot.

While we seek relationships with people, angels, and saints, Jesus offers and seeks something even more intimate and life-giving to transform you into “another self,” someone super-human, holy, and joyful, perfecting us in complete and total communion.

“Jesus Christ reveals not only the Father to us but also ‘reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear,’” we learn in Gaudium et Spes 22, one of the key 1964 constitutions from the Second Vatican Council.

“The entire point of Christianity, then, is to have our souls melt before the fire of God’s love,” Meconi writes. “This call to divine intimacy means that we must surrender ourselves and all the broken fissures in our souls to Jesus.”

Through this “great exchange,” the Lord offers humanity His own divinity, Meconi writes.

Imagine iron. He explains: “Alone, a piece of iron is hard and resonant, But if that piece of iron is put into a fire, it takes on a new nature. It does not cease being iron, but now it shares in the luminosity and the heart of the flame. In that fire, the iron now takes on dimensions: it becomes aglow, it becomes malleable and able to be worked into whatever the craftsperson needs.”

Fire melting iron represents “our soul in Christ,” Father Meconi writes. “God became human, so we humans could become god-ly.” But, he adds, “Because I am made in God’s own image and likeness, the more I become like God, the more I become my truest self.”

Divine Union: Fully alive within your mate

When Father Meconi was five, his dad became very sick, dying two years later. His mother told him, “We can either be selfish and try to hold on to Dad, or we can give him over to God the Father, and then we shall get them both back.”

Father Meconi found his vocation to be a priest in those days of extreme loss, realizing no human marriage completely makes us who we are meant to be. What about the marriage between Christ the groom and the Church?

“God is not a force or a singular being, but a Trinity of Lover, Beloved, and the Love who eternally unites them,” with love demanding the presence of Father (the Lover), the Son (the Beloved), and the Holy Spirit (Love itself).

“Unfortunately, many of us spend way too much of our lives trying to figure out what exactly the point of human existence is — in other words, in whose image and likeness we are made,” he writes. “When we get the answer to this question wrong, our psyches split, and we spend our lives trying to figure out what brings us ultimate meaning and thus worth.”

Everything in life is a gift (even the messes we struggle to overcome). All of these gifts, he adds, including our very nature and identity, have been given to us “by One who desires we fulfill that nature properly.” Still, we also receive the gift of freedom to choose. “But the ancient stories of human civilization have offered another account of how things should be.”

C.S. Lewis likens our lives to an automobile that can only run on the correct fuel: we are the boxes, and God is our power source. He recalls Lewis and fellow writers challenging another writer on whether he loved them, only to be told, “Love you? I am you?” So it is with our deepest loves.

Love identifies itself with its beloved. As St. Augustine taught, “Let us rejoice that we have become not only Christians but Christ himself,” adding, “Marvel and rejoice: we have become Christ. For if he is the head, we are the members; he and we together are the full man.”

Father Meconi explains, “in Baptism, we are adopted into a new relationship, calling God ‘Father,’ and by extension Mary our ‘Mother’ and all the saints our eternal siblings. Would not the lives of Christians change if each actually believed this? As in any loving adoptive family, the adopted and the naturally-born children are not discriminated against.”

“When the Divine Life is reproduced in us, our lives change,” he writes. “It is a dogma of Christ’s own Church that at Baptism, we have received a share in God’s own life, and here we learn how much the Persons of the Trinity love us, are obsessed with us, are thrilled to have us as his own: ‘For the Lord takes delight in his people ‘(Ps 149:4). The prophet even described this delight in terms of a spousal union, God’s love lifting us out of our sins and doubt and making each of us his own.”