 I was a DRE for a while, for 12 years, in Champaign, Illinois, Central Illinois. And Champaign is the main campus for the University of Illinois, huge state school. People come from all over the place to be. It's a really, really prestigious, one of the top schools in engineering and sciences and physics in the country. And so there are people from all over the place. So in the apartment that we lived in, it was very multicultural. A lot of people from all over the place, PhD candidates and older students with families. And next door to us for a little while was a Muslim couple from Syria. And we got to know them. They were with us for a while, or they were close to us for a while. And we got to know them. And I don't remember exactly how the story went or what the conversation was, but she was telling a friend of hers that somehow this person asked what I did. And she told her friend he's a teacher of Christ. And I was like, oh, you know, I kind of like that, you know. I never thought about that before. I thought about, you know, faith formation and religious education. And I was the director of religious education. That was my job title. But I never thought about, you know, being a teacher of Christ. But that's it. That's what I was. I was a teacher of Christ. And I was a religion teacher. I wasn't, you know, I was a religious educator. I was a teacher of Christ. And I think that's really it. That's really what we do. We teach Christ. At the heart of it, that's our mission to teach Christ. And, you know, we often describe catechesis as religious education. I mean, it is. And we talk about teaching the faith and faith formation. And that's all good. It's not wrong. But it doesn't get to the real heart of what we're doing. St. Paul said in 1 Corinthians, I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucify. The Catholicism is so big, has so many pieces, so many moving parts to it, so many doctrines that we teach. Sometimes we forget to mention the person of Christ. We forget to mention Jesus. We forget to get to the very heart of what it is. And we make Jesus one part among many things. Like, OK, we're going to teach Jesus today, and we're going to teach baptism tomorrow. And we put things piecemeal. But it's important that we don't just teach him as one topic among many. And I'm guilty of that, too. I've done that many times. In his encyclical, exhortation, actually, on catechesis in our time, I think I mentioned that last time, Pope John Paul II, there I know about catechesis on catechesis in our time, catechesis tradende. So if you haven't heard of that, you should read that. It's fantastic. It's really the first thing that John Paul II ever wrote. And it's so John Paul II. And he inherited a lot of the material, but it's all JP2. And it's fantastic. So this is what he says, number five, about what catechesis is. He says, in the first place, it is intended to stress that at the heart of catechesis we find, in essence, a person, the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The heart of catechesis, we find a person. Do you teach a person, or maybe is a person revealed to you? Do you have the self-revelation of a person? And when they're revealed, do you get to know them more? And if you have them revealed to you and you get to know who they are, there's somebody that you can have a relationship, isn't it? It's a different way of thinking about this, that teaching a person is really not what we do. We get to know people. We interact with them. We encounter them. We have a relationship with them. He goes on to say, accordingly, the definitive aim of catechesis is to put people not only in touch, but in communion, in intimacy with Jesus Christ. Not only can he lead us to the love of the Father, but only he can lead us to the love of the Father in the Spirit and make us share in the life of the Holy Trinity. So this is what we're after. This is Christocentricity, the centrality of Christ in everything that we do and teach. It's vital. It's a vital principle in catechetical methodology. The general director for catechesis talked about a Trinitarian Christocentricity. That's how we understand Catholicism. Trinitarian Christocentricity. It's not merely Christ, but also the Trinity and how he reveals the Trinity. But the Trinity is the central doctrine of the faith. Christocentricity. It's about the person of Christ. It's about bringing people into intimacy and communion with him. It's about revealing the person of Jesus to allow people to know him and understand him and then get to love him and give their lives to him. So that's kind of the goal. So how do we do that? So I want to talk about six ways that you can do that. And these slides, they have bullet points underneath. So you might want to take a picture. You might want to wait until they're all down. Or else you could take five pictures. So they all kind of have this rhythm. You'll see it. So here's the first one. Here's the first one. Refer all topics to Christ. Now, it's funny. I say refer all topics to Christ. That seems kind of obvious, right? That's what we're talking about. Yeah, duh, refer all topics to Christ. It seems like it's easy, but it's not, right? If it was easy, we'd all be doing it all the time. And it's all we'd be doing. So because we do, we get lost in the facts for teaching the whole of Catholicism, all the things we need to teach, that it's hard sometimes to bring out the person of Jesus and refer all topics to Christ. So lucky for us, the Catechism does a lot of this work for us if you know how to look. So let's take a look. If you pay attention, you can see. So let's take a look. For instance, Catechism does work for us. Catechism 748. So Catechism 748 is the first sentence, first article in the section on the church in the first part on the creed. This is how it starts. Christ, the light of humanity. Christ, the light of humanity is quoting Lumen Gentium, the dogmatic constitution on the church from Vatican II. The first article on the church doesn't talk about the church. It talks about Christ. It says, it is the heartfelt desire of the sacred council, Vatican Council, that it may bring all men that light of Christ, which shines out visibly from the church. So it starts out talking about Christ. It doesn't start out talking about the church. Christ is the light of humanity, not the church. The church is the place which shines out the light of Christ, which is the light of humanity. It's interesting distinction. Let's take another look at 944, Mary's role in the church. It says, Mary's role in the church is inseparable from her union with Christ and flows directly from it. The union of the mother and the son in the work of salvation is made manifest from the time of Christ's conception up to his death, it says. So Mary, we understand, in light of Christ. The assumption. It says, the assumption is a participation in Jesus's resurrection and anticipation of the resurrection of other Christians, the sacraments. The sacraments work, they're efficacious, because it's Christ himself at work. It's he who baptizes, he who acts in his sacraments in order to communicate the grace that each sacrament signifies. So how do the sacraments work? The sacraments work because Christ works in them. Christ makes them work, baptism. Baptism symbolizes the mechanic human's burial into Christ's death, from which he rises up by resurrection with him as a new creature. Baptism is a participation in Christ's death. You can see how the catechism itself sort of structures all of that within the context of Christ. And not just, I'll point this out later too, but just to take note of this, not just that Christ is there, but it's how Christ is working in the church and through these things for our redemption. It's not just that Christ is present, but it's what he's doing through these things to make our redemption possible. That's how it's breaking out the distinction. So if you knew from last time we were talking about the mystery of Christ and bringing the mystery of Christ to the fore in everything that you teach, the catechism helps us to do that, helps to see how Christ fits together with that redemption, how the things that we're doing, the things that we're teaching can work towards our redemption in Christ and the bigger picture of the mystery of Christ. Everybody got that? Okay, cool. Next one. Introduce Christ himself. Introduce Christ himself. So how do you introduce Christ to your students? We kind of talked about that a little bit last time, but it's through biblical catechesis. What is the Bible? At least the New Testament and the Gospels. It's a record of the apostles' experience of being with Jesus and what they learned and what he did and they're telling us about it. What does the apostle John say in his first encyclical? That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands concerning the word of life, that which we have seen and heard, we proclaim also to you so that you may have fellowship with us and our fellowship is with the Father and with his son, Jesus Christ. And we are writing this so that our joy may be complete. What do we want you to know? We want you to know we saw God there in front of us. He was there and we're witnesses to that. And we experience him and life with him and we want you to know about it because when you know about it, you'll understand, you'll get the spirit, you'll be in communion with us and we will be complete. Our joy will be complete because we know that you have salvation in Jesus. You will become a new creation. You can have this life that we've experienced. So we introduce Christ by reading the Bible, especially the Gospels. But a lot of other things, if you understand a lot of typology and things you can see how the Old Testament will teach you about what Christ has done. And then the epistles will tell you how all that experience of the apostles is lived out in the Christian life and in the church. Now, this should be a progressive initiation based on the child's age. So you don't think about Christology. That's not what they need. You don't think about theological abstractions. That's not what they need. They don't need to understand historical criticism or where the Gospels came from. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about revealing a person to them. Pretty living in communion with Jesus, having them encounter this person of Jesus. So what kind of things come out of that? To know that Jesus is a savior. He's sent from the Father out of the Father's incomparable love. He's God. He's the Father's son. He's putting right what sin has distorted. He's making us God's children. He taught us. He showed us how to be a good child of the Father, how to live in his strongest desire is that he take us home with him to the Father. Those are the kind of things. We want them to meet the Jesus that in some way the apostles experienced that loving person, kind, understanding, who listened, who accepted sinners, who was merciful to people, and who touched people. You know, that's the thing about the Gospels. You know, we see when people encountered Jesus, they weren't left unchanged. There was something that happened. Either they got really angry with him or they completely were enthralled by him. There was always a reaction of some kind. That's what we're trying to do, to be able to put them in that kind of communion. Somebody had talked about this earlier, but Catechus is the good shepherd. That's a really, really good job with this. Doing an excellent job. And now, Sister Mary Michael has a book that helps you to get a lot of the principles of catechesis of the good shepherd and bring them into ordinary catechesis. It's that yellow book that's out there on the table. What's the name of it again? Teach me with God's pedagogy, something like that. I look forward to read that because she did her dissertation on how those commonalities or how catechesis of the good shepherd can be infused into regular catechesis. I'm really thrilled with that. That's something that I've been looking at in the last few years and it's pretty amazing. But think about the good shepherd. The good shepherd, they used the image of the good shepherd because at a young age, that's exactly what the children need to see and hear. They need to know about love and care and protection. That's what's most important to them. And so the image of the good shepherd, the shepherd who will leave the 99 of fools errand to go and save the one. If I'm that one and he will do everything for me, that's an amazing thing for a child to know. And maybe they don't, hopefully they experience in their home, but maybe they don't. And Bob Rice was talking about that. So those are the kinds of things we're trying to do. We're trying to bring out and help them to see and understand Jesus, introduce Christ himself. An exercise you can do with this is read the opening of the four gospels and see what things you can bring out. What do they emphasize? Because again, the apostles are writing so that they can introduce you to this person that they've come to know. What are the things in the beginning that they really want you to know right away? What's important for them? That's a good exercise to do and to think about. What are the kind of things that you should be bringing out? Questions, anything? Yeah, no, the church does accept it. Yeah, no, it's solid. It is, and again, Sister was actually just telling me that one of the things she does in that book is to show the Catholic roots and foundation of Catechus of the Good Shepherd and how even it applies in Thomistic terms to how it's very much in line with the church. And yes, it's a very good system. That's why I'm excited about her book. The biggest problem with Catechus of the Good Shepherd from a standpoint of a Dawson director or maybe even a parish person is that it requires a lot of very specialized training. That takes a long time to get and it's very expensive to get often. And you have to build a lot of stuff with it. So sometimes it doesn't scale very well or it becomes very difficult. It becomes time consuming and difficult, not impossible to scale, but a lot of times religious education, directors or pastors don't wanna take that time or they think, oh, what do I do with the rest of my kids? So that's kinda something that I'm interested in a lot is how do I take those principles that are so amazing and very similar to the stuff that I was talking about last time and bring a lot of that in? Because they have some really good methodologies, dialogue and all kinds of really good things. The principles are really good. So anyway, kind of an aside, but no, it is and many bishops have endorsed it and it's very solid. So yeah, I know that's a concern for a lot of people. All right, next. Make the gospel central. So this follows from the last one. I kinda said that already, maybe I already said that. If we want our students to know Jesus himself we have to read what directly relates to him about his life and that's the gospels. So we should teach directly from the biblical narrative when you can. So that's not always easy and that requires a bit of practice and finesse. And it's a fine line to walk because you don't want to just read, well, I mean sometimes you can, but when we're talking in this specific thing you don't want to read the gospel like as entertainment. Like you read the story and then you're done. Like a lot of times in textbooks it has like a gospel passage, maybe a small one. And then it's breaking out that gospel passage in the text of the thing, but it doesn't refer to it anymore. And so it says to read these things and how the kids read or tells you how to do it. Well, I think I find it really, really engaging for adults and for children to read from the story. So you're reading the whole story and you're getting everybody into the story and you help them enter into the story and then you're pausing at points to bring out the doctrinal truths. But the caveat there is that you don't want to do too much of that. You can't just be talking about the doctrine because your goal is again to introduce them to Jesus. At least in this aspect of what we're talking about your goal is to introduce them to Jesus. And so if you're doing too much talking about doctrine then you're getting out of the story. You're pulling them away from that immersion. And so you're not getting the effect that you want. So we're not just reading for entertainment and we're not just doing doctrinal stuff but it is possible to get into the story and to set that scene and then to bring stuff out and the best way to do it is to use dialogue. And this is a catechise is the good shepherd thing. It's better if they come to the answers your students come to the answers instead of you telling them the answers. So as you're reading and you find this place where you need to draw out doctrine, you ask questions. It's almost like a group lexio divina in a way. You ask questions. What do you see here? Now you've got something in mind that you want them to know, right? But you're like, so what do you see here? What's happening? And they're telling well Jesus is with the Pharisees and you can bring that out. So how are they reacting to him? Do they like him? Are they angry with him? And get them to enter into the story by asking these questions. That keeps them from zoning out, right? They get participation but then you start to say, so what do you think he's saying here? And they can come up with all kinds of answers and it doesn't really matter if they get the complete right answer but you're shaping the conversation. So you might get a wrong answer and then maybe it's not necessarily a wrong answer but not exactly the answer you're looking for and so you kind of go to somewhere. So what do you think? And tell me more about that. I had talked about that before. But tell me more about what you just said. Why do you say that? And you're getting them to answer the question or to get to the doctrine or the thing that you want to do themselves. And when they discovered on their own there's way more learning that happens than if you just tell them. So then when you've done that for a while and you're satisfied with that then after you've done that dialogue you can tell them, okay, this is what I want you to know. But they're already primed. They've already been moving in it. They've already been engaging with the material and their minds are working. And so it's a little bit different than just telling them and then moving on to something else. Does that make sense? It's something that requires practice and it's something that you can kind of gauge how well you're doing it just by people's reaction, right? If they're not getting it all you know that maybe you need to get into the story more if they're getting bored and you're telling them too much. It's just a fine line. But if you practice it you'll get good at it. And also you get really good at this when you yourself immerse in the gospels. So that's an exercise for you. Pray with scripture. Read the gospel of the day. Do the Bible in a year podcast. Do Bible studies. But the thing is the immersion in scripture, the soaking in scripture every day. Even if you just read the readings of the day. Because as you do that, somebody else was telling me that who was it? She was in the last class. As you do that, you just naturally start to make connections, oh there she is over there. She's, yeah, she's taking it. As you do that, when you soak in scripture that way you just naturally start to make connections. You're doing your lesson and a Bible verse just comes to mind. You see the connection. You say, okay, I'm teaching you about this doctrine but this is, I was reading about this in this gospel or whatever and Paul was talking about this in this epistle and it's there for you. The Holy Spirit helps you to make connections. Nobody helps to pray too. But when you do that, when you're constantly soaking in scripture these kinds of connections just happen for you. And you can do that. You can just teach from the biblical narrative itself and it seems seamless. Does that make sense? So that's a challenge to you, to if you don't do that already to start doing that and it could be very small. It doesn't have to be huge. You could read just a little sub-sex, you know, a pericope, if you wanna use the Greek. A little, just a little sub-sex. You know how the Bible like the New Revised Standard Version has these little sub-heads? It's all you have to read. It's one little subset. It's a couple of paragraphs. If you do that every day, you get a lot of Bible reading. A lot. There's some programs too where there's like, read the gospels in a year. So you sign up and they send you an email and it's all like kind of set laid out so that in a year you're gonna read through all four gospels. That's really cool too. And you have to problem with those emails is that sometimes you get, you feel guilty when you don't read. You have to, then you end up with like, you get really busy and you end up like with a week's worth and which is like defeating the point kind of. But you know, sometimes you have to cram. That's okay, it's not bad. But those kinds of programs are really, really good to be able to get this, to have this in your arsenal. All right. Christ is central to God's whole plan of salvation. So if you're at my last talk, I made this big huge deal about the mystery of Christ and understanding how everything fits together in the large plan of salvation and making that the central organizing principle of your catechesis. So the mystery of Christ essentially, God's plan of salvation, it's our redemption in God centered in Christ and comes into fruition through the church. So that's something that we do a lot of in the Franciscan system here at Franciscan University. And it sort of drives like the order of content and presentation and a lot of other things and how you're gonna do it. And but it's really important to understand. So here's something from CT again, CT five. The primary and essential object of catechesis is to use an expression dear to St. Paul and also to contemporary theology, the mystery of Christ. Catechizing is in a way to lead a person to study this mystery in all its dimensions. It is therefore to reveal the person of Christ and the whole of God's eternal design reaching fulfillment in that person. So the Christ, Christocentricity, yes, but even more important, the mystery of Christ. Not merely Christ today, which is a really bad thing to say, not just Christ, but redemption in Christ. How does it fit in Christ's plan of salvation? God's plan of salvation fulfilled in Jesus Christ. That's the most important thing that you wanna bring out because that's what is going to affect people. That's the message that calls people to change. That's the one that we most understand we can make in our lives, the principle of redemption, the mystery of Christ. So how do all things relate to redemption in Christ? I don't know if you've ever seen, people talk about, they put like, people talk about this a lot here. They say, right at the top of your lesson plan, how does this relate to Christ? So when you're thinking about, you're formulating your lesson, you're thinking all the time, how does this relate to Christ? I wanna go a step further and say, right, how does this relate to redemption in Christ? Christ, yes, but how does His grace work in me? How am I changed into a new creation through Him? How do I invite my students to enter into this mystery? How do I invite them to take the next step in their lives to enter more fully into union with Christ? That's what we wanna think about when we're thinking about making them, bringing them into intimacy and into communion with Jesus. Again, this is a progressive initiation. So one of the best expressions of this is salvation history. So I don't know if you've studied salvation history at all, like Jeff Caven's Bible timeline or Scott Hahn's stuff, but salvation history and understanding that is the best way to draw this out. And when you really understand it, then it's not that you have to go through all of it, but you can insert it into pieces. And there's something I talked about last time too, we call it telling the story. It's the story of salvation. And you do it like in 30 or 45 minutes, depending on the kids, if you have really young kids, you might do it in 20 minutes or so, but I've done this with second graders. I've done it with high schoolers. I've done it with adults. It works for everybody because people are engaged in story. When you tell stories, it helps, you immediately perk up. I know I've been in lectures where people are talking about facts and they're going on and on and on. And then somebody starts to say, so there's this time when I did this blah, blah, blah, and all of a sudden I'm kinda, oh, did he start talking about a story? Okay, I'm awake again. Maybe you just did that. I don't know, but story is powerful, right? It's engaging, it's the way we learn best. And so when you can do that, you can tell that story, it really works. And there's workshops that you can do to learn how to tell the story. And one way you can use the story methodologically in your classrooms is to do it in the very beginning of the year to tell it. And then when you find that you need to explain things, you can go back to it. The story explains everything. Everything can be explained through it. I used to do it in RCIA too. I would tell it in the very beginning and then all through the RCIA time, I would say, do you remember when we were talking about creation? Do you remember when we were talking about this and the story? Remember when we were talking about that and the story? It's the narrative and story of our salvation. It's all of our story, it's your story, it's a church's story, but it's powerful. It's really powerful. So I say progressive initiation because you have to be careful. When you're doing salvation history and you're talking about typologies, typi, I've heard from somebody who I really respect. He was talking about teaching teens. He's been teaching teens lately. And he's been using typologies to teach sacraments and it's really, really engaging for these teens. They really like it. And that's an intuition that I've had. I've done that before too. But even smaller kids can get it too, but you have to be careful, right? You can't get too much. So I say progressive initiation because with smaller kids, you have to make it a little more obvious, but with older kids, you can tell the Old Testament story and then the New Testament story and they can start to make connections. Smaller kids can make abstractions as much. They can't get those intuited connections, but older kids can. And you know a lot of that too. We're talking about biblical catechesis. A lot of that is in the readings of the mass. The readings of the mass combine Old Testament readings with New Testament fulfillments and the typology is there, like Isaiah 22 where the steward gets the keys to the kingdom. Eliakim gets the keys of the kingdom, right? And he says, Isaiah gives them the key because the Lord is saying to him that you are a solid peg for Jerusalem. You are, and everything revolves around you and you have the keys and what you say goes. The steward was the right-hand man of king, the Davidic king. And so then you see in Matthew 16, Jesus says, Peter, I'm making you a rock. It's like he said, Eliakim was a firm foundation. He was a solid peg. I'm making you the rock, the foundation. I'm giving you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. What you bind is bound. What you loose is loosed. Jesus is giving him authority. He's delegating so he can make decisions, right? You understand things from these typological connections. So they're very, very, very good. It's a great way to bring out this mystery of Christ. So telling the story, talked about that. Anybody have any questions? Any questions? Good. No, I'm just kidding. Okay, next. Two more. Christ is the central reality for every person. Make Christ the central reality for every person. Okay, so religious knowledge is not the real goal of our teaching. The real goal is Christ-like living. That's the real goal. Or what Hoffinger called participation in the mystery of Christ. Insertion into the mystery and participation in the mystery of Christ. So this is a willingness to be joined to Jesus. And in a sense, allow him to live in us. Knowledge of Christ is the springboard to Christ-like living. So it's a means to the end that we want. But what we want is for that knowledge to take root and to drive action. That's the most important thing. When the student decides to follow Jesus in faith and it flows in his life choices. I'm gonna talk about decision in a little bit too, but maybe I'll just grab it right now. Or do I talk about it more later? Decision is so important. I forgot to say this the last time. And I wanted to, when I was talking about the gospel and I was talking about the importance of invitation. The decision is so powerful and it's something that we don't emphasize in the Catholic church. Our Protestant brothers and sisters really get this. They get how important it is to make an altar call, to have some kind of outward expression of this decision to be in union with Jesus. To do something. And unfortunately, that's as far as it goes. And so we have the Eucharist, which is the ultimate thing, right? The ultimate, yes, I'm gonna join myself to Jesus. But, and in reality, when the priest or Eucharistic minister says the body of Christ, what we're saying is yes to everything you are, Jesus, and to everything the church teaches, I believe. It's what you're doing. So everybody's doing when they go up there, they don't realize it. Because they're doing it, they just do it. They don't do it with thinking, with full knowledge. When you say amen, you're saying yes, I believe. This is the body of Christ, but also I believe everything in the body of Christ teaches. I believe everything in the body of Christ means all dimensions of my life, the central reality for every person. That's who I'm deciding, yes, I wanna live that life. But we do this out of reflex, and we don't have these points that this is a human thing, is a very human thing to make a decision for Jesus. And a lot of times we don't have that in our religious education. We don't really have a formal way of doing that in our religious education, but we do have times when we do it, like when we say the creed after Easter and we get sprinkled and sprinkling right. We're saying yes, Jesus. We're ratifying our faith. Every time we go up to communion many times in the mass, but we're not doing it consciously. Having something like that is really powerful for people. That's why invitation is so great. You're giving them the opportunity to say yes to Jesus. And decision is just really powerful and it's something that even in the church and even in we think about sacraments, decision is a powerful thing. I was talking to this guy who was asking me afterwards. I was talking about even, think about the mass. Think about the mass. What do we commemorate at mass? Father, what do you commemorate at mass? Jesus at the Last Supper giving the bread and wine to the apostles in his body and blood, right? That's what we're commemorating as the sacrifice. So Garagula Grange said that it was there at the Last Supper in his act of the will where the sacrifice is completed. And the rest of the time, the rest of the weekend, the Paschal Mystery is all a physical outworking of that moment there. And that's the moment we commemorate at mass. His decision to carry out the sacrifice. That's what we commemorate. Decision is so important to us and to enter in the church and we devalue it. That's why invitation is so vital because we're allowing people and that's something as a touchstone that we can point to that people can look at in their lives. If they've actually said yes to Jesus, they may fall away, but they can say, you know what? There was a time when I did say yes. I remember it. And a mentor can point back to that as well. Say you remember, you made this commitment. And it doesn't mean that you may fall away. It doesn't mean that you're bound forever, but well, yes, you are bound forever because and that's what adult baptism is. Yes, that's from the Council of Trent. You decide that you're going to do this. You're gonna follow Jesus and then you're baptized. That's fully formed faith. And if you haven't made that ascent of the will, then baptism is a sacrament of adult faith. So you make the decision of the will. You decide to follow Christ and then you sacramentally enact that in baptism and it becomes real. When you make that decision for Christ, you say, I'm no longer a member of Adam's family. Da da da da, da da da da, da da da da, the Adam's family, I'm a member of Christ's family. And so now the guilt of Adam and his descendants is no longer applies to me because Christ doesn't have that. And Jesus allows you to change sides, to change your allegiance. That's the decision that you make, but it's sacramentally and really made real. You get God's DNA, you become an adoptive son through baptism, but the decision comes first. Okay, so that's kind of a rant, but this is the central reality for everybody. And this is the fundamental task that we need to awaken in our students. We need to awaken this willingness to be with Jesus and to deepen that, to help them to say yes to him in their daily lives, to invite them in small ways and perhaps big ways to say yes to Jesus in daily life, in small and in successive yeses. Now, how do they know they're invited to this because you're inviting them? You're the one doing it. Make sense? Okay, last one. All dimensions of life center on Christ. So, the decision to follow Christ, to participate in the mystery of Christ, to be redeemed, to be transformed into a whole and happy human being, that means that the decision that they're making is that all dimensions of their life are centered in Jesus. So here's a graphic of what that looks like. We really, really make this decision. This is what it looks like. This comes from an organization called Catholic Christian Outreach. They do campus evangelization, similar to focus, in Canada on Canadian campuses. And they have this little booklet called the Ultimate Relationship. And the Ultimate Relationship, let's see. Now it looks like this, a little tiny thing. It's something that you can use to lead somebody through the karygma and then help them to pray a prayer at the end. Prayer of commitment, so that's the decision aspect. This is one of the things in there, though, and they call this the relationships diagram. So we think about this in terms of, on the top part, the top three, we're talking about human relationships. Okay, so in the first one, you see the little ticks around the person. So the ticks represent all the things in your life, your work, your friends, your hobbies, the things that you're interested in, and maybe there's a relationship. But in the first one, you don't have any relationship, so that heart, it's a relationship. So it's outside of the influence of the things in your life. You're not in a relationship. In the middle one, you're in a relationship, but it's like dating. So this person is part of the things of your life, but they're like an equal part along with your work and with your hobbies and your friends and the guys you go smoke cigars with or whatever. That not for the women in the audience. Yeah. Not for the women in the audience. For the men. Okay, so, it's a part of your life, but it's not like, okay, that relationship, it's not something that you're going to base your life decisions on. If you get a new job and you have to move across the country and it's really great for your career and you're just dating this person, you're not gonna consult them. You know, you're gonna say, well, you know, I'm sorry, but I had this new job and you go, right? That's how much that relationship is a part of your life. But in the last one, the center of your life, that's when you're married. So that relationship is in the center and all the other things are peripheries around it, but that person now is involved in every big life decision that you make. You're not gonna move across the country without consulting your wife and what she thinks about it because she might not want to. And if she doesn't, it has to be mutual thing. Okay, so you take that, take that, think about that because it's something we can relate to and put that into faith. So in the bottom half, the bottom three boxes, we think about relationship with Jesus. So Jesus represents the cross. So in the first one, Jesus is outside my life. So I have all the things that are in my life and those are things that take up my time and Jesus is outside of them. I'm not thinking about it. Now, he might be an afterthought or whatever, but he's not part of things. In the second one, he's a part of things, but he's not a big part of things. He's in equal importance to all the other things that happen in my life. So it could be that there's like one of those tics is some sin that you're just not quite ready to get rid of. And you know, Jesus is there and so is that sin and you're just living that way. But in the last one, Jesus is in the center and he's a part of everything and you don't make life decisions without Jesus being a part of it. He's in everything that you do and all the other interests in your life are periphery around that relationship and it's like a marriage and you are committed to him. And a lot of people when they see this diagram they're like, well, you know, so then so here's the question to the people is, so where do you see yourself on this diagram? The second box on the bottom or the third? A lot of people will say, well, you know, I'm most of the people will say, I, you know, sometimes I'm in the second and sometimes I'm in the third. So the next question is, well, which one would you like to be in? And if they say, well, I'd like to be in the third. You say, so it's stopping you. Why can't you be in the third? And that doesn't have to have an answer. You could just leave them there. But depending on your relationship with them, they might be able to tell you. Well, because I don't want to give up sleeping with my girlfriend. Okay, that's valid. Let's talk about it, right? But also a lot of people will say that they're in the second, but they're really in the third because they have made that commitment. And think about marriage. If I can be close to my wife or I can feel far away from my wife, but am I any less married? I stood in front of God and I said I do. And I entered into a bond with her. And so if you've entered, if you've said yes to Jesus, you've entered into a bond with him. If you feel far away from him, are you any less united to him than you were before? It doesn't depend on your feeling. It depends on your decision. What decision have you made? And so you can still be. You can feel a little bit further away from Jesus. It's still being in number three. And I'm not gonna ask you guys to answer, but I just put that to you. There's a challenge for you. Where do you see yourself? Do you see yourself in the first box? If you wouldn't be here if you were. Do you see yourself in the second box or do you see yourself in the third box? Where do you want to be? Where do you want to be? You want to be in the second box or the third box? And if you want to be in the third box, what's keeping you from being there? What's holding you back? And if something's holding you back, go to Jesus with it. Pray about it. If you want to be in the third, but you don't think you can, why not? And what's keeping you today from saying yes to Jesus? Everything all in number three, in the center, what's keeping you from saying yes? And why can't you today? Or when we go to adoration, I don't know if it's tonight or tomorrow, he's probably tonight. When we go to adoration, what's keeping you from saying yes to him right there? Or even going to a chapel and saying yes to him right now, when we get out of here? And if there is, pray about it. What's keeping you? What's holding you back? Is it that important? Because that's the decision of our lives. That's the decision of redemption. Knowing Jesus is what gets us into heaven. It's not how good you are. Not how good you feel. It's being in union with Christ. That's the answer. To St. Peter, when he's at the, when he's hit clipboard at the gates, he says, why should I let you in? Why should he let you in? Because you've been a good person, because you've done a lot of charity, because you know the catechism backwards and forwards. No, it's because I'm in union with Jesus. He's my friend. He's my intimate partner. We're in a relationship. And I'm all in with him. And everything I do. And of course that leads to a sanctified life and sanctifying grace. That's the goal. Christ in the center is the goal.