Getting to the Point: unity

Showing posts with label unity. Show all posts

Friday, June 3, 2016

Freedom, With Consequences

I want to follow up on yesterday’s post with the next part of the Mass commentary. There is a unity between what I wrote about yesterday—the impossibility of receiving the Eucharist in a state of mortal sin—and what comes next in the Mass.

After the Lord’s Prayer, the praying of which signifies the fundamental union with God made possible by Jesus Christ which will be brought to perfection in the rite of communion, comes the ritual Sign of Peace in which we express to those immediately around us some gesture of peace and good will.

This has rich scriptural significance. We can think of the Gospel passage where the Lord tells us to be reconciled with our neighbor before we can offer our gifts on the altar.

The Eucharist not only brings to perfection our union with God, but also brings to perfection our union with one another in the communion of Christ’s Body, the Church. And as we cannot receive communion if we are in a state of mortal sin (and hence not in union with God to start with), so we cannot receive communion if we are not in union with the Catholic Church, either.

This is a painful subject—disunity always is, isn’t it? But we cannot wish painful subjects away. Now there is a difference between these two types of union. The question of being in a state of sin is something only the person can answer—conscience is inviolable, and only God and the soul can make that discernment.

Union with the Church, on the other hand, is a matter of the outer forum, visible to anyone who knows the facts of a situation. If a person has made choices in their life that remove them from communion with the Catholic Church, not only should they themselves not receive the Eucharist, but the pastors of the Church have a duty to inform them of this fact.

So, someone who is simply not Catholic, but belongs to some other religion, or who has left the Church for some other system of belief and way of life. People who have made moral decisions that publicly declare that they are not bound by or under the authority of the Catholic Church in any regard. Couples co-habitating without any form of marriage, or people doing intrinsically evil things in their work lives (the Mafia, for example, or the owner of a strip club). People who not only struggle with a homosexual orientation but who are publicly living as gay men or women in a same-sex relationship. People who have taken a public stand opposing the Church in its moral or dogmatic teachings—politicians, say, advocating laws that directly oppose the moral teachings of the Church.

And yes, (since this is the controversy of the day) people who have not only been divorced but have entered into a second marriage without having gone through the annulment process for their original one. Any one of these people in any of these categories may or may not be in a state of subjective sin—I would never dream of flatly stating that—but they have indeed objectively removed themselves from the communion the Church.

This is painful, yes. We are all free to choose what we will believe and what we will do in our lives. But our choices bear consequences. If I freely choose to, say, write a blog post where I flatly deny some basic matter of Christian doctrine, I am indeed free to do so. But I am not free to do so and then continue to exercise my ministry as a Roman Catholic priest. Freedom yes, but freedom without consequences? No.

So if someone has chosen to reject Catholicism, they may do so. But they really must not present themselves in the communion line, then. Reception of the Eucharist is not only about our union with God; it is also about our union with Christ’s Body on earth, the Church.

It is not a question of having to be some perfect Catholic who gets every answer right on a catechism test and never asks a question or struggles with a doctrine. Of course not. It is a matter of the public and manifest stands we have taken in our words and in our actions.

For example, you can really struggle with the Church’s flat statement that sex outside of marriage is wrong. You can not be at all sure that’s quite correct, and still choose not to move in with your girlfriend because you nonetheless want to live your life as a Catholic. But if you and your girlfriend do move in together, you have made a choice to publicly reject the Catholic faith. See the difference?

And so in the Mass before we go to receive communion we ritually express all this, first in our praying to God as our Father and then turning to one another to express our unity as a body of believers. And only then, in a spirit of deep humility and knowledge of our unworthiness, do we come forward to receive the Holy Eucharist, the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, at which point the Mass and all it has signified becomes our own mystery, our own life, and we are drawn into it in fullness and in truth.

Let us pray to receive the Eucharist knowing what we are doing and being vigilant to receive it worthily and well, so that it’s fruits may be shown forth in our lives.

Thursday, June 18, 2015

Shall We Gather At The River (And Everywhere Else, For That Matter)?

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

And with your spirit.

I have begun to go through the Mass bit by bit on Thursdays, to show how every bit of the Mass is something to be lived and not simply a ritual to be undergone.

So we are still in early days here, with the ritual greeting of the priest and the response of the congregation. As I said last week, these ritual forms are important, theologically charged and meaningful. It is well meant, but a terrible mistake for a priest to substitute them with ‘Good morning!’ and similar glad handed informality.

The point of these entrance rites is to gather the community, coming from different directions and filled with different concerns and problems and attitudes, into a single body to offer God the worship in spirit and in truth. All the entrance rites are for that purpose.

And so we begin, as we did with the sign of the cross, by acknowledging that it is the Trinity that brings us together into unity. Jesus, the Father, the Spirit – in our quest to become a unity of faith, we have to know that God is the starting point, not nice human feelings or any other human efforts.

No, it is the gracious gift of Jesus Christ that places us in the love of the Father, a love that is sustained by the abiding presence of the Spirit in and among us, not anything of our own doing that is the source and strength of Christian unity.

I want to reflect, though, on our living out this one moment of the Mass. This is not exactly a part of the Mass we devote much time to, or think about afterwards. Even if the priest is extraordinarily slow of speech and super-duper reverent, this ritual greeting clocks in at under a minute.

It’s too bad, on one level. Because if we Catholics who are at Sunday Mass simply took this moment of the ritual greeting and applied it to our daily lives, factually the world would be transformed in a month’s time. In other words, if our guiding principle as we went through the day was to draw everyone we meet into a space of communion, if our basic principle of action was to extend grace and love to every human being who comes into our ambit, the results would be dramatic and world changing.

It is not a question of dramatically declaiming in the checkout line or the doctor’s office ‘PEACE BE WITH YOU ALL!’ But it is a question of having that sentiment within your heart towards the people in the checkout line and the harried cashier. Which will come out in one’s countenance, tone of voice, choice of words.

It’s about treating people as if they are, you know, people. Not automatons or avatars or annoyances. This is particularly acute in our on-line communications, where the actual human being at the other end of the media can recede into a dim abstraction. I don’t have to belabour what we all know, that digital communications are harsh and nasty and rude in a way that face to face communications never could be, as people would be punching one another in the face if they talked that way to one another within arm’s reach.

Well, we’re Christians, and we’re supposed to do better, folks. No exceptions, no excuses, no ‘but he did it first’ infantilism. Our mission is to spread the grace of Jesus Christ, the love of the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit to everyone we meet – period. Whether we like them or not or think they merit such treatment from us or not.

But it’s not primarily the on-line stuff I’m thinking about. I really am thinking about the supermarket cashier, to be honest. We have this awful tendency to reduce people to functionaries, to simply go through our days not really treating human beings as human beings. Obviously we are not to strike up a conversation with someone who is checking our groceries through while a line snakes behind us all the way to the dairy case. But… a smile? A sincere thank you? A basic warmth, a kind look, a simple acknowledgment that this person is not just a menial worker but a brother or sister? Is that really beyond us?

My experience is that being deliberate and purposeful in this way makes the routine tasks of daily life lighter and more pleasant, that people more often than not respond with smile for smile, warmth for warmth. And then the same thing with co-workers, with neighbours, with fellow commuters, with… well, you get the point. EVERYONE. And don’t forget the people you actually, you know, live with. We can lose sight of the basic call to build communion and family spirit with them, too, taking them for granted or consigning them to the category of ‘burden’ or ‘problem’.

Grace, love, and communion. To go through one’s day putting it out there, and receiving it back when it is reciprocated (‘and with your spirit’), and not fussing too much when it’s not. Gathering everyone in, bringing everyone into a space of communion, or at least trying to do so. If every Catholic who is at Mass on Sunday even tried to do that Monday-Saturday the whole world would be transformed into a much kinder, gentler, and warmer place in a fortnight. So let’s you and I try to do that today, OK?

Wednesday, February 4, 2015

How Not To Waste Your Life

We continue to read through the Pope’s talk to the Curia from December, taking it not simply as a criticism of people we don’t know and who at any rate are Not Us (always so easy to do, eh?), but as an examination of conscience for ourselves (not so easy…).

We are at disease number five, which is the “disease of poor coordination. Once its members lose communion among themselves, the body loses its harmonious functioning and its equilibrium; it then becomes an orchestra which produces noise: its members do not work together and lose the spirit of fellowship and teamwork. When the foot says to the arm: ‘I don't need you ‘, or the hand says to the head, ‘I’m in charge’, they create discomfort and scandal.”

We can see how this would definitely apply to a body like the curia, who are supposed to be all working together for a common goal which is the mission of the Church in its administrative dimension. I can certainly see how this disease can afflict a community like Madonna House, which is called to a profound unity of mind and heart, a profound choice to move together as a body, as a single person, so to speak.

Catherine used the Russian word sobornost to describe the depth of unity of mind and heart to which our community is called. Because we strive for this, we are all well familiar with the tendency to isolate, to pull apart, to go one’s own way. We are all also familiar with the spiritual and practical havoc that can cause in a family, a group.

It may not be so clear how this disease manifests in people who live in the world, who are not necessarily part of a particular well-defined community, but are simply members of a parish, members of a family, workers at this or that secular job, or whatever. But it seems to me that this is no less relevant for all you good people, the primary readers of my blog.

It is so easy to lose sight of the fact, the very simple fact, that we have been put on this earth for one reason and one reason alone: to learn to love God with all our heart, mind, and spirit, and to learn to love our neighbour as ourselves. There is no other ‘reason’ for human life—this is the goal, and hence the guiding principle which is to shape each one of our days.

We are called, no matter what our vocation, no matter what our existential situation, to have an acute care, an acute sensitivity, for unity, for the need of the other, the movement of the other, and to continually strive to bring harmony and peace, concord and amity, into all our human relations.

I believe firmly that the words and vision Catherine Doherty received were not just for MH, but are prophetic words for the Church and for humanity in our day. And sobornost was one of the most powerful and passionate words she received, bringing it forth towards the end of her life and calling us to live it as our primary rule of life.

Our world is filled with hatred and division, isolation and individualism. There is both a hot anger and a cold indifference that can take hold of human hearts today. The choice to have as my first concern the good of my brother or sister, the choice to work first for the task of love and communion before any other job or goal or agenda—this is a radical Gospel call.

But it is needed, if we are to bear witness to the life of God in the world, the reality of God in the world. We cannot love God and hate our neighbour. As Catherine said in one of her last writings to the community, “We must love, and we must show God’s face to everyone. Unless we do this, we have wasted our lives.”

Sunday, January 25, 2015

On The Other Hand, The Pope Is Pretty Important

Sunday Catechism time, and this week I want to follow up on yesterday’s post on the relative unimportance of the papacy in light of the bigger picture—our call to follow Christ, to believe and proclaim the Gospel and to become the saints God made us to be. Just in case you missed yesterday’s post (just scroll down – that’s how blogs work!), or have forgotten what I said, I pointed out that for the greater history of the Church, most of the faithful and even the clergy have barely known the name of the Pope, let alone intently followed every word he spoke (on airplanes or off them), and yet here we all are, Catholics, so somehow the faith has gotten passed down. Our modern Catholic obsession with the papacy and whoever its current occupant is, is not a sign of great spiritual maturity and health.

That being said, the Pope is important. The papacy was instituted by Christ in his commissioning of Peter as the rock on which He would build his Church, and clearly the Lord does not do things without good reason.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines it thus:

The Pope, Bishop of Rome and Peter's successor, is the perpetual and visible source and foundation of the unity both of the bishops and of the whole company of the faithful. For the Roman Pontiff, by reason of his office as Vicar of Christ, and as pastor of the entire Church has full, supreme, and universal power over the whole Church, a power which he can always exercise unhindered. (CCC 882)

The key word here is unity. This is the deep meaning and purpose of the papacy in the Church, to be the visible source of our unity. The invisible source of our unity is the Holy Spirit, of course, operating in our hearts through grace, but it is essential to our Catholic understanding of things that the invisible realities of grace always are expressed in the visible life of the Church.

The papacy has a sacramental quality to it, then. It is not itself one of the seven sacraments, of course, although the Pope is by definition the Bishop of Rome and thus derives his ministry from the Holy Order of the episcopacy. But it is a sacramental, a visible sign of invisible realities. As holy water is a sign of our baptismal seal, and our use in faith of it is efficacious in making that grace of baptism active and operative, so the papacy is a sign of our unity in Christ, in the Church, and our fidelity to that sign is efficacious is building up the unity in love of the Body of Christ, so that it be the sign of God’s presence and love in the world that it is meant to be.

In practical terms, this means constantly striving towards a unity of faith—unity of mind and heart—with Peter being the standard bearer of that unity. That which the Church, led in this matter by the Pope, defines as to be held dogmatically or definitively, we are to hold, or we must conclude that we are no longer part of the catholica, the communion of faith.

And that which the Church, led again by Peter, holds out for non-dogmatically or non-definitively we are to submit to with docility and a spirit of trust. It is the role of the Pope and the college of bishops in union with him to order all these matters; it is the role of the pastors of the Church to instruct the faithful as to that good order—catechesis. It is the role of the laity of the Church to do their best to understand the faith we have been given, according to their individual capacity and the needs of their state of life. A high school religion teacher may need to have a highly developed understanding of all of this; a subsistence farmer in central Africa may need somewhat less.

So the Pope has an important role in establishing what is, and what is not, the Catholic faith, what are the precise intellectual peripheries beyond which we cannot go without ceasing to be Catholic. He also has a governing role in establishing a proper unity-in-diversity of pastoral practice and liturgical norms, and of course of overseeing the good order of the household of the Church—a titanic administrative task in this global era, about which this poor little priest writing these words knows very little—the good Lord has spared me much exposure to that particular difficult work of service in the Church.

Besides striving for unity of faith under Peter’s leadership, I believe as Catholics we are called to safeguard the unity of charity of the Church in regard to the Pope by striving to love him, to support his work for us with our prayers, by having a basic tone of respect in how we speak of the Pope, by being very judicious and careful if we honestly feel we must criticize him, and to offer those criticisms with great caution, great solicitude to not violate the unity of the Church and the bonds of charity within it.

We have to be aware, especially in this Internet age when everyone has a megaphone capable of amplifying our words to the ends of the earth, that words have great power to sow division and doubt, to arouse anger or fear, to weaken the faith of those who are perhaps a bit shaky, to quench the flickering flame or break the bruised reed. A careful, respectful tone, a mindfulness of the central role of the Pope, in particular, as the visible sign of unity, and so a reluctance to break that unity—all of this is what is needed, and is so often lacking in these days.

The Pope is important, and so above all let us pray for that poor man and his near-impossible job, and do our part—not to run the Church with him (nobody’s asking us to do that, thank God!)—but to live the Gospel and to joyfully and generously give ourselves over to the mission of the Church according to our specific vocation and talent.