Personal Religion: A Sign of the Times.

Jacques Tetrault, Tenebonne, Canada


    As human beings our starting point is a feeling of great insecurity. We are searching for assurance, trying to develop self-confidence.

    Sooner or later, we become spiritually intrigued, an irresistible intuition calls us to search for the meaning for our own existence. Even though there are numerous paths and ways opened, we usually tend to initially restrict our search to our immediate environment. What one finds there are various forms of dogmatism, established religions or fashionable new trends, cults, or gurus with preset instructions and modes of behavior. This is part of the quest.

    Many stop right there. They have found, or believe they have found, a satisfactory recipe. They join, conform, and follow. This corresponds to adopting someone else's religion. It implies dependency to various extents on other people; so-called leaders or pre-set belief systems.

    A few, more adventurous, more demanding and surely more secure souls, will take greater risks, not being satisfied with packaged goods. These individuals will launch their ship on the wide open seas of personal quest for truth. They dare to leave the protected harbor shores, all sail facing wind and waves; using their inner guidance, their insight, as sole (and soul) compass. These are the intrepid searchers of living truth, who will not satisfy themselves with dead and crystallized truth.

    This is the great adventure for these brave souls who use their faith as a living and active asset. They take the risk of trusting, increasingly trusting God himself, daring to eliminate any intermediary who would presume to translate God's word or God's will to them, in their own living experience. They develop an original first hand personal religion.

    One could argue that these are individualists, free-thinkers, or pretentious people. To my experience they are experienced believers and autonomous persons who strive for unity with God and therefore with all other believers. They have ceased being mortified by the fear of God and have become dedicated and motivated by God's love. Their commitment is no longer lukewarm and temporary but permanent and total. Whatever their initial conception of this reality may at first be, it has become deep rooted and individual. These sons and daughters of God carry on their daily tasks and every day live by becoming increasingly service orientated, offering freely their talents to do God's will more perfectly as they feel his will within themselves.

    Such religious individuals who truly become consecrated to doing good are slowly growing in numbers and represent, I believe, the future of a truer, healthier spiritual living.

    They exemplify the new spiritual path which  is producing a more abundant harvest of fruits of the spirit in ordinary life, as it is lived in an extraordinary way. They have no need of any organization to support them or to promote their deeds, their tasks being essentially of a spiritual nature.

    I anticipate and propose that personal religion as a very promising avenue to restore the spiritual dimension in our world.

    Truth is living, crystallized truths are dead. Man is called to forge ahead and grow renewed continuously. To leave behind any dependency and to venture into a personal communion with God requires some courage, but it liberates and emancipates. Free man cannot continue to obey and be directed by other men as concerns spiritual life. More mature individuals must dare embark on their own personal quest for God. And when he searches for God, God had already found him.

    Since God rules the universe by the very power of his love, what do we really risk in giving him our total confidence and by following his internal guidance? He is my Father and yours. I experience his presence in me and that is where my religious experience starts. I have to risk trusting him. And that is not the end but the very beginning of my personal religious living.

    Do you have a similar experience?

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