Freedom and Love

The folks at Sacred Space once again have a wonderful reflection. The timing is interesting. For me, it comes on the heels of some debate about how to nurture teens' relationship with Christ. I think that (at least in my experience) teens aren't really exposed to Christ quite in this way. I think if they were, they would be able to relate to Him more. Most of the time, I see the teens (and myself too if I'm being honest) viewing Christ as this far away figure that they have nothing in common with, since He is perfect and we are not. When I think about it, I don't really think that Christ wants to be a far away figure. He wants to be in each of our lives! Every minute of every day He tries to get our attention, and most of the time we don't pay attention. But I digress. Here is the reflection from Sacred Space. And I really do think that this is a great jumping off point when introducing teens to Christ.

"The adult Christ is hardly intelligible to children before adolescence. But for teenagers he incarnates the highest values of all: freedom and love. As he appears in the Gospel he is the freest of people: unpredictable, and alarming the respectable; a shocking, revolutionary figure whom society eventually found too dangerous and had to put away; a tender and compassionate figure, reacting warmly and spontaneously to all he met; a strong and frightening figure, contemptuous of petty regulations but open to everything living, ready to change the world. Above all, he was a man of supreme interior freedom, not driven by unconscious needs, pressures or anxieties, but doing what he wanted to do, his father’s business. He was the only person who realised fully all that a parent can mean to a child: not merely Law, but the model and the promise of an independent free existence. "