Christian Reality

It's all making more sense, now.

I am really grateful to Fr. Giussani and for the books we are reading in School of Community, which are the fruit of, yes, his theological study, but even more so his life and his relationship with Christ. What I have found in the last couple of years of my familiarity with the movement Communion and Liberation is that I find words to express experiences and desires of mine that had seemed ineffable before. And for someone to give me words that unlock my heart is one of the most beautiful things I can imagine.

One of the big things he insists on is how there is only one way to become a Christian, and it is the same way that Peter and Andrew and James and John became Christians -- by encountering Christ. They encountered the Jesus of history, the Son of God in the flesh, and we do, too. Only because Jesus has ascended into heaven and sent the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, to be with us, we meet Him in His Body, the Church. But we really do meet Him. In the Church, in the Sacraments, in the unity of those who follow, led by the Bishops, we really do encounter Christ. And when we encounter Him, we are amazed, we wonder, we are drawn, we are attracted. We are called. And we must engage ourselves; we must follow.

I read an interesting post last night touching on a discussion of St. Thomas Aquinas' about faith. As I followed the link in the post to the actual quotation from the Summa, I noted that he spoke of faith as a perfection of the intellect. Or, as Giussani would say, faith is a method of knowing. I've probably read this sort of thing from Aquinas many times in the course of my grad school ponderings, but it took Giussani to put some flesh on this truth and make it useful to me.

But, more than a new way of understanding theological concepts, Fr. Giussani has helped me experience reality differently. I feel like I've told this story of my joining my parish choir about 500 times now, but perhaps that only comes from my thinking about it so much. Anyway, that story starts here. I think right now, the way I experience the choir is as a community, a microcosm of the Church. We gather with a purpose, with a real belonging to each other for this purpose of leading in worship. As the story of my welcome shows, it is a community open to others. There is freedom, there's not a heck of a lot of pretense, and a Pharisee-type will be seriously challenged. This experience really changes the way I experience the liturgy. The other day there was the reading from Acts where Paul was bidding farewell to one of the churches as he was to sail off towards Rome, and he talked about having exhorted them with tears, and they were mostly grieved by his saying none of them would ever see him again. And I understood how a congregation could experience that grief about their priest/Bishop. It is the normal, human reaction to living in Christian community with someone who has opened his life so that others could live. The hymns we sing make sense, like about us "becoming bread and wine" for each other. (See, in the past I would have just sort of rolled my eyes, wondering what kind of theological aberrations were cloaked in this kind of talk.) The experience of worshipping God, of saying "God, I give you my life, I offer my life, I open my life to anyone, to anything that comes from your hand" is made possible by this kind of experience of the Church. And I even see why we bother to belong to parishes in the first place. It isn't just enough that we get to Mass somewhere, so we can check our obligation off our to-do list. It is part and parcel of being a Christian to belong to other people in some kind of meaningful way. Maybe not to all in the same way, and so it is fitting that within parishes there are other small groups. Fr. Mike had completely the right idea with promoting the various households on the campus of Franciscan University, because this is something we need to mature as -- and to become -- Christians.

It's happened to me, maybe it has happened to you, too. I go to a Mass that is not a typical setting for me, either visiting somewhere, or some unusual circumstance, and it is harder than usual to enter into the worship. It takes maybe more mental effort. I think these moments call us to recognize our belonging and to stretch it, to become so conscious of it in an awkward sort of sense of uncomfortability, that we grow. The image I'm thinking of is a volunteer plant, one that seems to grow up out of nowhere. We need to bring how we have been nourished by Christ in another setting, another community, and share that experience in the midst of people with whom we've not had that experience before. Hopefully, the reception is warm and the recognition of the one life we live in Christ is immediate. If not, I guess we beg and Christ answers with His presence. This is called being missionary; this is called being Christian. There just is nothing else.