From the earliest age I've had an awareness of a presence that is both extraordinarily intimate to me, within me, and yet in another way quite distinct and external to my person. Rarely have I been without the awareness of this "other" within, speaking in the voice of my conscience, comforting me, encouraging me and also calling me to accountability.
I've always believed and have been taught that this is God. Foremost, this presence is infinitely loving. I associate this also with the love and care of my parents and broader family and have always felt a kind of synergy working between what I received from them in the way of tender care, the awareness of God within, and the proclamation of this God through the scriptures and the mystery of the liturgy, the sacraments and the beauty of nature.
I suppose I would say I learned how to feel and connect with the love of God at the hands of others who showed me God is love by their words and deeds. Now I imagine the Christian is not alone in the perception of God inside their souls, so I suppose I have not addressed the question how do I experience Jesus specifically ?
Since Jesus is a historical person, experience of Him as such is, I believe, connected to the Church. What can be an otherwise vague and intangible sense of God's presence was made concrete and tangible to the disciples of Christ in the past and is made visible and tangible to us today through word and sacrament. The Scriptures and the traditions of the Church help us to better understand who this Jesus is by ever remembering what He did, as his mission and person are one. His Incarnation, life and Passion express precisely who he is. The Holy Mass, offered daily, renews the memory of His deeds and makes them present again.
Foremost, for me, I come to Christ in eucharistic worship. Placing myself before this specific mode of His presence and learning to respond to the greatness and depth of such a gift, I hold the Holy Eucharist in my heart all the day long (or strive to). Even when I eat a meal- a sandwich, break off a peace of bread with jam, drink from a cup of juice or a pint of beer with friends- I feel eucharistic awe well up, and alight these simple acts with joy. Of course, it extends beyond food, though the meal is important to me as something quite more than consuming bodily nourishment.
Lately, as I hope I am coming towards some measure of maturity, it is specifically the attempt to self empty, to engage in small but not insignificant acts of self sacrifice that I feel Christ present- paradoxically, first as an absence followed by an intensified presence. It is near the dark and fearful gap between what I know I should do, the satisfactions, sloth or apathy of the present moment, and that not yet present sublime happiness, that He abides.
