Never Alone

Some Reflections on Chapter 1, "Alone" of Joseph Girzone's Never Alone: A Personal Way to God (Doubleday, 1994)

Joseph F. Girzone recounts his personal experience of friends leaving him as a child and the acknowledgment formed over years of experience that he was alone in the world. "All of us, no matter how extroverted we might be, are very much alone, not necessarily lonely, but alone, unable to share with anyone the deepest secrets of our hearts" (5). His childhood was also permeated with an experience of the presence of God given to him by his mother and the Eucharist. His growth in understanding the way of Jesus leads him to a very personal approach to Christianity: "If Christianity is merely a theological system, it will at most produce a highly educated elite devoid of anything resembling the living Christ in their personal lives" (7-8).

Girzone's realization of the universality and "epidemic" nature of the spiritual need for God (partially indicated by the multi-religious response to his Joshua series) is left wanting when the Church fails to share or teach the lived way of Jesus and of the Christian mystics and ascetics. Though he believes that the Christian way of life can be taught, it is still not something to be simply mistaken for "religious activities and pious exercises": "The spiritual life is something that grows slowly, imperceptibly, way beneath the surface of our lives. ...Real spirituality begins by finding God, feebly perhaps, in the beginning, but more confidently as we travel along the way. ...That is the beginning of spirituality, recognizing the need for God in our lives and placing ourselves in His hands with complete trust, confident of the tenderness of our Father's love for us" (14-15).

There is a real sense of wisdom in Girzone's writing (even only after one chapter) that comes from years of life experience, talking with other people about their lives and understanding the barriers and hang-ups that prevent people from meeting the gratuitous goodness, mercy, and love of God in their lives. Girzone notices the tension, rightly I think, between the sometimes mindless experience of Christian rituals and our need for God in Jesus and God's love for us that can and does come into our lives in the most non-religious of circumstances rather than only in the context of religious rituals. (of course this an assumption of Christianity, but perhaps not conveyed very well by most.)

By emphasizing the personal approach of God to each of us through Jesus, Girzone may help us to re-approach Christianity in the same way that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI also did in the introduction to his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est: "Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction" (Section #1, Paragraph 2; emphasis added). Let us constantly remember that God always accompanies us, always seeks us through the Person of Christ, meeting each of us as the persons that we are.