AFFAIRS ARE NOW SOUL-SIZED

We are entering a period of deeper Christianity. God has brought us to the stage when it is the brokenness of the human heart resulting from self-separation from God that is to be faced. Each of us is being called to deepen our life of living in Jesus seeking the face of the Father. That is the radical route to the regeneration of humanity.

While each one of us has to follow the lead of the Holy Spirit in making this journey individually, all the other members of Jesus' mystical body accompany us in the communion of saints. In profound ways, they energise us, and we energise them. It is a personal, yet communal progress.

On the deepest level of our being, the spiritual level, we are to become more fully our individual selves as we become more bonded with all of the other members of Christ's body. Organisers of human society assume that we have to become more cloned in order for society to work efficiently. Our Creator, however, broke the mold when he made each one of us, and he has formed us so perfectly that each of us is to sing our unique song in his great harmony of the chorus of love - just like the Trinity - in fact within the Trinity.

More and more of us are to come before our Father to intercede, believing that the walls of our inner Jerichos will fall. Affairs are now soul size. He is urgently calling us to recognise our royal priesthood which requires us to intercede more profoundly. That means a greater life of prayer.

God’s donkeys

Prayer leads us to increasingly becoming agents of God's will wherever and however he shows it to us, which will usually take the form of fulfilling hundreds of humble tasks. It is in these that we will be purified and increasingly collaborate with him in the refining of humankind like gold.

Let us not forget that our King comes riding on a donkey. Not a pretty animal, stubborn, sounding like a fog-horn, designed to pull and carry heavy loads. No one writes songs about donkeys. But there is a cross marked on its back, and for millennia it has carried our aged, infirm, pregnant mothers and precious children. It is the humble servant of the King. And how humble and cherishing our King is!

We are his donkeys today, bringing him to a hungry world through offering him all our works and prayers, the “spiritual sacrifices” St Peter spoke of (1 Peter 2:5).

We must never underestimate the immense power of prayer. When we open ourselves to God in prayer, we journey into his mysterious, ineffable, loving being. Our understanding fails to grasp him, but a knowing grows in our hearts.

That knowing is that undefinable energy infused into us described by words like faith, hope and love. St Paul states that faith and hope will eventually disappear and creation will be restored in love as this age reaches its completion with the return of Christ.

The Holy Spirit is the hidden agent in the Trinity, the catalyst and choreographer of this love which fills the universe. He is bringing the universe into the wholeness and holiness of the Trinity. We are his chosen collaborators. The name of this God-charged phenomenon is Church.

Through his Church, God is gathering all creation into communion

As people today rightly claim their freedom to take responsibility as adults, traditional communities have become fractured and new so-called ‘communities’ are springing up in social media. They are virtual and far from virtuous, lacking the richness of physical touch. But the fracturing is a preparation for the communion inspired by the Holy Spirit to become more apparent. All our natural human groupings are to be transformed into communion through prayer of the heart and the activities which flows from it.

As our hearts grow in the prayer of loving our Father, love and responsibility for others become more active and spreads, and the world itself is gradually changed. This is the dynamic we have to understand. There is a great difference between humanly organised society and natural human communities which are transformed into communion by the Holy Spirit. By natural human communities I mean such things as nations, families and friendship groups.

At Easter, his people first met the risen Lord. In reality, they met themselves as well. Remember how he told Martha “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11. 25)? He did not say "I will be resurrected"; he IS resurrection. It is not just Jesus who rose two thousand years ago, it is us along with all creation that are in the process of rising from the dead within his mystical body. He said:  “I am The Life”. He is among us. Humanity is increasingly being drawn into that life.

That life is Church.