THE BEAUTIFUL CHURCH

Our Lent Zoom Course has turned into a series of sharings about the deep treasures of our faith. As it proceeds, I am realising that we were a microcosm of the Church. We are very different people with years of their own experiences behind them. Yet, as others talked, we each recognised our own experience and hopes and graces and frustrations.

Was that just a straw poll of individual Church-going Catholics or was it the phenomenon of a master hand at work in all of us? It was the Holy Spirit working in different ways in each one of us, but producing a symphony of outcome which displays his unifying energy working in each of us.

What we call Church is the functioning of a  coordinated master plan, which is in fact all around us. It is the flow of God’s Spirit in human hearts and persons which is really a gigantic river moving through human history, and gradually drawing all people into itself.

The second body of Christ

After the crucifixion, Jesus went in his glorified physical body into heaven only to return through the Holy Spirit who is forming this new Mystical Body for him just as he formed his physical body in the womb of Mary.

We need to revise all the notions we have of what the Church is, and start to appreciate the breadth of this God-guided phenomenon which is gradually enveloping humanity. Only after that can we reassess what we have been taught about the Church. The true picture of the Church only comes into focus when we have gained a notion and sense of this vast current, working through human history to renew mankind. God is gathering into the life of the Trinity, the children of Adam and Eve. The meaning of the original Greek word for Church, “ekklesia”, is “the gathering”.

The functioning of this entity, Church, is entirely personal. It really is Jesus in his new body reclaiming us through a process of gradually drawing all humanity into communion, nurtured and cherished by the Holy Spirit. And wherever the Spirit forms Christ, Mary is his partner.

The process isn’t finished. We are deluded if we expect it to be. Look how God worked through centuries with Israel. He is working gradually, forming the new Israel, the Church. Our impatient aspirations can blind us to the reality. Are we shrinking in the West? No, we are being reorganised by God in preparation for the next stage which he has planned. Do you think this phenomenon of Church is static? No it is developing. Have we got a handle on where the Church is now being taken by God? No, we will have that when we are deep in the stages which will follow this emerging era, when people will be writing their history books.

This is about hope and a firm belief that when the Father sent his Son, he absolutely well knew what he was doing. And if we aren’t told the whole plan, that’s our look-out. We aren’t meant to see it all, but to walk by faith, which Adam and Eve never did.

We can get stuck on the Church hierarchy which developed organically under the guidance of the Spirit But far more important is the Mystical Body functioning in millions of brothers and sisters all over the world, not the visible representations of the phenomenon. The Pope, bishops, priest and nuns are important, but to focus mainly on them and Church organisation is wrong. Focus on Jesus and on all the evidence of God’s unerring determination, and  on what we know of how he worked in the past, and you will get a sense of how he is active now.

You are a Royal Priest

These words of St Peter's words (1 Peter 2: 29) remind us that a serious obligation has been placed on each of us by God. The next article will explore how that works. it is entitled The Church that Moves Mountains.