To whom else shall I go?
“Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.”
From 2022 through 2023, I spent just over a year getting to know the members of the Society of Jesus. Today I still believe them to be the holiest men I have had the opportunity to become acquainted with, some of whom today I even call friends.
Our Lord tells us himself, “By this everyone will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:35) Today, I am convinced that it is sufficient to evangelize the world by a love alone, so far as it is grounded in Christ’s love. The truth is, although by God’s grace I had already come to love the Lord in my adult life, just one year with the Jesuits had convinced me of a need to reorient my entire life around that love. I promise you, it has not been easy. I have lost many friends – many of whom I have sinned with – and have disappointed others who see the Catholic church (and even Christianity at large) to be an imminent threat to their wellbeing. The difficulty is only compounded by the fact that in many ways, I understand why. After all, in America at least, divisions in the Church alone are driven by the prideful hate of humans, even misguided at best.
So then the question is even more grave? Why choose to follow Jesus? The answer is, to echo Saint Peter, “To whom else shall I go?” Grace – alone by which God gifts us faith – maddens the heart with an excessive love for Jesus. Similar to the throws of romantic love, love of God often escapes words and evades any sufficient explanation. In fact, to be in love – and even more, to be in love with God – often confounds all reason when to the mundane needs of human sinfulness, this love may indeed cause suffering. Yet, like the early martyrs, this love finds us rejoicing in these pains, because that is what love does: it possesses us and consumes us until it is our only need.
You see, I have been convinced of and convicted by the love of Christ that I had seen in the lives of people like the Jesuits I had gotten to know, and I continue to be convinced of that love more and more, day by day, in the faces of others whom I encounter in my day to day life. Christ comes to meet us in the faces of his children, scattered throughout the world. In fact, He tells us that we will have encountered him even among the least of us. And in seeing that love, and in being convinced of that love, and being convicted and possessed by that love, I too can only say, despite my own dreadful imperfection and undeservedness, “To whom Lord will I go? You alone have the words of eternal life.” And like Mary the sister of Martha who sat at His feet, I too have found that this love in Christ is the one thing necessary; He is my singular need.
Day by day, I find myself confronted with my own sinfulness. As the psalmist sings, “For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me.” (Psalms 51:3) Day by day, my own imperfections are magnified. Why? Because I choose to stay with the Lord, and to trust in his grace. One might find it somewhat odd to think that love reveals and magnifies our brokenness; but of course it does! To sit with the Lord, and to know him more and more each day, is to learn that even in our proximity, there is an infinite chasm between myself and who He is. This is what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas meant when he says that the face reveals an infinity behind it. The great mystery of the incarnation and the humanity of God in Jesus is that we are privileged to sit with the Lord and to love him in our fleshy humanness, and still to see the great extent of His perfection. It is in seeing this infinite perfection that love of God compels us to be more perfect ourselves; to be deserving of His love despite our undeservedness.
So, why do I follow Jesus? Because, like Peter says in John 6: I have come to believe and to know that He is the Holy One of God. To have come to believe this is a gift of grace alone, a gift that He has given me by His own love, and witnessed in the love of those He calls His own. And how, then, when He has chosen me to know Him, can I ever not choose to love Him? Truly, to whom else shall I go? To whom else, but Jesus?