I sometimes wonder if there are a great many people--simple people especially, poor people, suffering people--who are very close to Christ, who really do know Him and love Him in their hearts, even if they can’t express it, even if it's a secret, even if it's so secret that they themselves don't "know it" in a discursive, reflexive way.
If they love God as the Mystery beyond their own ideas and understanding, it must be Jesus who is empowering that love and drawing it to Himself.
And I am not saying this as a way of saying, "in the human competition over which religion is true, my religion wins!" No! How silly! The point is not about a controversy between different positions or different cultures.
It's about a fact: Jesus is God! He is the Lord of every heart. Wherever there is any good, He is at work.
How could it not be true? Jesus really is God--we must never forget this. This is not "our position"--this is a fact; the central fact of the whole universe and all of history and every person's actual life. It's really true. To affirm it is to recognize a fact. If He is really God then He is really at work, in every person, in every circumstance. Because He loves us. Really!
What a blessing it is to KNOW Him, to recognize His face! The God whom my heart longs for, whom I find a taste of in everything that is beautiful and good: that God has shown His face. To know Him means that He has said, to us, personally, "follow me!"
He calls every person to follow Him, on a journey that begins from many different (and sometimes distant) places. He wants us Christians to be His witnesses, to go onto all the roads and meet the others in their searching, and to walk with them.
