What is a "personal relationship with Jesus"?

A reader just sent me this excellent discussion of an issue that is important both to evangelical Protestants and to faithful Catholics, but understood quite differently in certain respects. The discussion is by Father Dwight Longenecker, a convert to Catholicism from from Bible Belt fundamentalist Bob Jones University via theology at Oxford and the Anglican priesthood. Fr. Longenecker's article is entitled "Personal Relationship with Jesus" (Standing on My Head, March 8, 2008). The article begins thus:

As an Evangelical I always heard people talking about the importance of a 'personal relationship with Jesus'. The problem is, no one ever said what this actually meant. I wanted to know, what exactly is a 'personal relationship with Jesus.'? I mean, what happens? How do you know you have a personal relationship with Jesus? What did it consist of? I didn't ask these questions out of cynicism, doubt or mockery, but because I really wanted such a wonderful thing. Even now I do not ask the question in any sense of criticism of those good Evangelical folks who sincerely follow Christ. I do ask however, from my own experience and still want to know more.

Fr. Longenecker proceeds to review his experiences from his evangelical childhood in a sort of phenomenological retrospective in an attempt to identify the elusive meaning of the expression "personal relationship with Jesus." Was it the experience of praying? Being sorry for one's sins? Thinking about being a missionary? Confidence that you were going to heaven? The problem he encountered was that he felt more and more that the "personal relationship with Jesus" was more "personal" than "Jesus." As he grew older and had a wider experience of Evangelical Christianity, it all seemed rather sentimental and subjective. He then observes:

I then began to meet a few Catholics who seemed to be closer to Jesus than anyone I had ever met, but they never spoke about a 'personal relationship with Jesus.' Then when I became a Catholic I began to experience the personal relationship in a way I had never experienced before. Suddenly things did not depend on my own emotional world, but on objective realities. Catholicism was something hard and real and solid. "Here" as John Henry Newman observed, "was real religion." The Eucharist was real. Confession was real. The priesthood was real. The visible Church was real. The saints were real. Jesus was real, and my personal relationship with him was very, very real, and I was not sure that what I was experiencing was actually something I liked. Humankind cannot bear very much reality, and the reality of my relationship with Christ entered a new and disturbing dimension.

I began to realize that Jesus, like Aslan, is not a tame lion. He is, after all, the Lord of Life, the Second Person of the Trinity, the Only Begotten Son seated at the Right Hand of the Father in Majesty. He is the one through whom all things were made and in whom all things live and move and have their being. He is the dreadful judge, under whose authority all things in heaven and earth bow down in worship. To be sure he loves me and his sacred heart shines out in divine mercy for me, but am I really here and now to have a personal relationship with him which is only warm and fuzzy religious emotion?

I think not, and realize now that the personal relationship I have to him is of the sort that a servant has with the master, the subject to his monarch and the runaway son to the Father who welcomes him home.

Granted, there is significant overlap in the way evangelical Protestants and faithful Catholics experience Jesus. There is the experience of gratitude for His mercy and forgiveness. There is the experience of His judgment in an edifying fear of the Lord, which the writer of Proverbs calls the beginning of wisdom. There is the experience of a quiet ineffible joy in knowing His love, which undergirds even the deepest sorrows of life.

The profoundest difference, however, is that evangelical Protestants do not typically experience these things in a dependence relationship to the Church. The institutional Church is seen as incidental and secondary. The experience of Jesus is seen as immediate, unmediated, "contemporaneity with Christ," to borrow Kierkegaard's expression. For the faithful Catholic, on the other hand, these things are never experienced as far removed from the precincts of the Church. In fact, if the experience of a personal relationship with Christ is not quite inconceivable apart from the Church, it is something ordinarily and even necessarily defined by the sacramental life of the Catholic in the Church, above all through the Eucharist and the Sacrament of Penance.

[Hat tip to J.M.]