Seven Thoughts on the Church

I.

Sight deceives us.[1] In his famous hymn Pange Lingua, written for the feast of Corpus Christi, St. Thomas writes of the Eucharist that when our senses fail (telling us that we taste, see, smell, and touch only bread and wine) only faith can build and strengthen the heart. Thomas means that it is only in faith that we can « see » the consecrated elements as the body and blood of Christ. The same is true of the Church. What we see is an assembly of people, or a worldwide organization in which some people offer models of charity, others commit horrendous sins and prosper. But if we are to understand how to imagine the Church we must begin with what faith tells us and work out from there. And so, I offer my first two theses as the theological frame within which we can approach questions about the character of the Church as a community of human beings.

First, then, the Church is a life, the life of the incarnate Christ in which we live and which lives through us. To understand this sentence we must bear in mind the most basic of principles about the person of Christ: Christ is the Word of God with his flesh—and thus the « person » that we encounter when we meet Christ is the Word of God. Christ is thus unique and we should never forget that he is not bound by the constrictions that bind human persons. We may encounter him as friend and as Lord, but he is also the power through whom all things were made and who holds the world in existence, the Word who shares all that it is to be God. Remember also that we human beings are created « according to, » or « after the image »: the only one who exhibits the fullness of personality is our archetype, the Word of God. Our capacity for communion, for loving interrelationship, finds in Christ both its model, and a reality that exceeds our imagination. And thus it is this unique person who draws us into union such that we live in him and he in us, and this is why at heart we must term the Church as « mystery. »[2]

Here we might follow an argument that Augustine of Hippo offers in a sermon.[3] Augustine speaks of Christ as being one and complete (using the Latin word integer) in three ways. First, the Word of God is a perfect unity insofar as the Word is God, one of the three divine persons, distinct without difference in the fullness of the simple divine unity. Each of the divine persons is not a « part » of the Godhead, but each mysteriously is the fullness of the Godhead, and the three together are also the one God. And, so, the Word is the true complete unity that only God can be.

But, second, the Word is also a perfect unity as the Word made flesh—the Word takes a human flesh and soul into the unity of the Word’s person. We may speak of Christ our God because the flesh and soul of Christ are truly united with the person of the Word, and we may recognize that all grace flows through the humanity of Christ because it is one with the person of the Word.

However, Augustine continues, the Word also chooses to be a perfect unity in a third way, in union with his body the Church. As God, the Word unites the members of his body to himself so that we may truly say we are « in » Christ.[4] This is a striking list because it does not list three degrees of unity, from more to less; rather, it insists that through the power of God the Word sustains perfect unity in three ways.

However, when I talk of our living in Christ, I am also speaking about our sharing in the life of the Trinity. As we are drawn into the Son, so we are drawn into the relationship of Son with Father, and Father with Son. In the New Testament and in the Christian tradition the Spirit is frequently spoken of as the one who fills the apostles and draws Christians into the body of Christ, strengthening and apportioning appropriate gifts and roles to us all.[5] Those who are drawn by Christ into his very own life, are drawn into the Trinitarian communion. Because when one person of the Trinity acts, the other two are also acting, we may speak about this process using all the resources we are given—the Father draws, the Spirit fills, but always we are speaking about unity in Christ.

The life and unity into which we are drawn is also the unity of the angelic hosts and the saints with and within the Triune God. It is thus also the harmonic unity intended for us as rational, loving, creative beings, in which we will be to each other an icon of the Trinitarian life. The unity that lies at the foundation of the Church is thus an eschatological unity, the unity that will be ours at the end.

And so, imagining the unity of the body of Christ is a task for the intellect and imagination that involves us in reflecting always on the power of God and the mystery of the Triune unity. And thus, speaking of the Church as primarily a life into which we are drawn is not to offer a unitive or a pluralist « model » of the Church; it is to speak of the most basic theological foundation of any subsequent discussion of the Church.[6]

II.

No one terminology or symbolism can capture the essence of the Church, and that is in part because of the relationship between my first thesis and this second. To be in the body of Christ is to be in the Trinitarian life. But the same terminology of the body of Christ has, since the writing of the texts that came to constitute the New Testament, also enabled discussion of the relationship between the body and the head and thus to emphasize the distinction between the real unity that has begun to be ours and its eschatological fulfilment. The head of the body has gone before us, ascended beyond us, and draws the body to follow.

The Church that we experience now is thus both the unity that will be ours at the end, and a flawed community riven by sin, by a constant lack of harmony, by the failures of human beings in history. The unity of Christ’s person, into which Christians are baptized, is the foundation of the Church and it shines out for us from time to time in the lives of the saints or in the exchanges of fellowship we may meet in our Churches and religious communities, and it is recalled for us and presented to us in every eucharist (as I discuss in the next theme). But our experience of this unity is also always one of the tragic gap between our aim, on the one hand, and the confusion, and very partial disrupted unity that can so easily mark our day to day experience of the Church, on the other.

But, my point in drawing attention here and throughout this essay to the failure of Christians is not to sketch in only dark hues, but to draw attention to the space in which living Christians abide as a place of both disappointment but also of faith and hope. The Church is, then, a mystery, because it is at its heart the mystery of Christ as the Word made flesh. But it is also a mysterious tension between the unity that now has begun, and that which will be the Church’s at the end. The reality that we now have, we have in hope. For the Christian, however, to speak of hope is not to speak of a reality that is not ours but for which we hope. Rather, it is to speak of hope for the full realization of the communion into which we are already being drawn. To speak of possessing this unity in hope is to speak of the tension that constitutes Christian life now. To understand this tensional space better, we should reflect next on the Church as a sacramental reality.[7]

III.

One very popular recent theme in thinking about the Church—a theme that has crossed back and forth between Catholic and Orthodox theology—is to emphasize the eucharist as an event in which the Church is most truly seen, and which, in a famous phrase, « makes » the Church. To approach this helpful theme we might begin by recalling that Vatican II’s decree Lumen Gentium describes the Church as « the visible sacrament of . . . saving unity » (§9).[8] This statement articulated a foundational truth about the Church as a whole, and offered a frame within which discussion of the individual sacraments could be better understood.

A sacrament is a visible sign that brings about that of which it speaks; it is a sign that points to an inner grace that accompanies it. For example, when a person is baptized, the death and rebirth of which the ceremony speaks actually happens. In the same way, the Church is both a sign of the restored human community, and it brings about that community. Now, the eucharist is the sacramental act through which the Father draws us into the saving actions of the Son. As our high priest, and as the lamb who is sacrificed, Christ offers himself to the Father, but in so doing he offers those he has united to himself; as God and one with the Father Christ also receives that sacrifice, enfolding us in the life of the Trinity as the angels (whom we join and imitate in the liturgy) are also so enfolded. Because we share here in the crucified and risen Christ, in the eternal perfection of the life of God, we participate in the end of all things that is to come. The various traditions of ritual dress, language, and movement that have gradually and providentially evolved in the Church signify all these various elements.

Thus the eucharist makes present the Church in its true nature, but it also may be said to « make » the Church because the mystery of the eucharist does not repeat Christ’s sacrifice or imitate a past event; rather, it is a divinely given ritual through which the Son unites us into his own one sacrifice. Of course, the very fact that Christ as head of the Church over and over makes present this event as a sign of the unity that will be ours at the end, shows us that we look towards the end and that it is not yet here. The Church’s sacramental structure is thus given us because of my second theme: we are living both in and towards the end.

The Orthodox liturgical theologian Alexander Schmemann described the liturgy as the place where the Church reveals her true nature, and where the nature of reality itself is revealed. He spoke of the eucharistic liturgy because there we see with full force the place of the Church in the economy of salvation, we see the Church confessing that it gathers in Christ and the Spirit with the angelic hosts, and we see the Church confessing its pilgrim status and the need for constant contrition.[9] But it is important to remember that the eucharistic liturgy is the center of a broader liturgical life. In all sacramental rituals, and in all the daily offices of the Church, Christians are united to the whole body of Christ in prayer, and they are joined, through the action of Christ and his Spirit, with the worshiping community of the angels who participate in the divine life.

IV.

In the patterns of speech, movement, and order that have always been central to its liturgy and to its life the Church is a symbolic structure. Remember, first, that the created order is intended to reflect its creator and to nurture the contemplative praise of the creator that is its true end. If this is the true end of creation, praise of the Creator should not be understood simply as one activity distinct from others (as we so easily think in the wounded creation through which we strive). The harmonious multiplicity and interaction that should constitute the life of the creation is essentially a constant praise of the creator.

Unfortunately, the wounded creation that we inhabit never exhibits such harmony fully, and as part of God’s economy of redemption new symbolic realities and actions have emerged under divine guidance to reveal to us both what the creation should be and how in contrition and worship the creation may accept the gift of its restoration. Thus, the ritual life flowing from the early covenants, the worship associated with the first and second temples, and now the Church’s liturgical life, with the eucharist at its center, constitute a succession of providentially ordered symbolic patterns of language, image, and action that reform us to better understand reality and history, to better perform the creation’s true activity.

The root of this symbolic universe is to be found in the ways that Christ himself and then the earliest Christians spoke of themselves, their world, and the Church by using the language of the Jewish scriptures. The complex interrelated and interacting languages of the temple and its worship, the language of messianic prophecy, the descriptions of Israel being led into the promised land—all of these are important examples. The language of developing Christian worship is imbued with the very same worlds of symbolism. The patterns of movement that gradually developed within the physical spaces of worship likewise are imbued with reference to the character of our life in Christ and the Spirit, and towards the Father. The rich accounts of the symbolic meanings of ecclesial structures, liturgical rituals, and language that developed through the early and medieval Christian centuries all find their heart in Christian meditation on the symbolic language of Israel interpreted in the light of Christ.[10]

This symbolic world speaks in material and temporal terms of what lies beyond these categories, inviting us to reflect upon it and simply to rest in its complexities. But the symbolic world of the Church is not best understood as a gateway through which a higher insight may be grasped such that the symbolic world is no longer necessary. This would be to have far too simplistic a sense of human progress, and a misunderstanding of the role of our created existence. Human progress towards greater knowledge and love of God is halting, unpredictable, and involves many reverses as well as advances. Thus we have need of a constant schooling of the heart and imagination. We should not, for example, imagine the liturgy as inevitably forming Christian minds, rather that it can, with God’s help, and that it is constantly available to nurture us as we fail.

It is also a mistake to consider present human interactions and symbolic activities only preliminaries to a static disembodied eternal state. The unity of the body of Christ is a harmonious unity of contemplative embodied souls (however much our embodiment will then be transformed). And so the life of eternity, one of contemplation and praise, is surely also one in which interaction will be to us full of meaning(s), revealing to us the love of God. The symbolic world that we are now called to inhabit is a preparation, a preparation suitable for a time of both hope and contrition certainly, but also a preparation for seeing again the cosmos and each other fully in all its and our created complexity.[11]

Finally, a symbolic imagination of any depth is also of necessity a traditioned imagination, an imagination that is formed by and seeks to think within a tradition. This is so simply enough because depth of meaning emerges and flourishes as commentary and reflection builds. But it is also so because we exist within an economy of redemption in which the Christian scriptures comment on and breathe both in and out the images of the older testament. Given the existence of a tradition so rich and complex, a tradition so attuned to shaping the imagination of Christians into a new vision of the created order, we surely would do well to handle it attentively and nurture it lovingly.[12] I return briefly to this point at the end in considering what it means to « think with the Church. » And so, it is time finally to turn to one of the most difficult set of questions that arise when we consider the Church—those concerning the authority and visible structure of the Church.

V.

When we hear the term « authority » we modern people find it easy to be concerned about our autonomy: is this an authority we must obey against our will? How may we resist if we do not agree? This is, however, a bad place to begin; we should instead first consider the authority of the Church to proclaim the gospel or the authority of the Church to identify particular figures as saints who should be remembered liturgically.

The Church has authority to proclaim the gospel because it is enabled to preach by the presence of Christ and his Spirit. The Church has long been described as sharing in Christ’s « prophetic » office; this does not indicate an ability to foretell the future but rather the Church’s ability to speak truthfully about God’s reality and action in history, parallel to the manner in which one of the central tasks of Israel’s prophets was to declare the true nature of God. Note, for example, the manner in which one of the structuring themes of Acts is that, empowered by the Spirit the Church preaches and unfolds the meaning of the gospel despite internal failures and arguments.

I offered also the example of the Church’s authority to identify saints. Whether this comes in the form of the highly centralized practice that has become institutionalized in modern Roman Catholic practice, or in a more diffused recognition of locally arising devotion, identifying someone as a saint is a recognition that in the community of the Church God raises up some who proclaim the gospel through their lives and/or teaching in hues that enable us to see that gospel more fully. And thus it is a quite natural corollary that God would give this community the authority to identify such people for us. In this sense, once again, the Church’s authority is a fundamental consequence of its function in the divine economy. But, if the Church speaks with authority, that authority must be vested in actual human offices and persons, or it will be purely notional.

For Catholic Christianity there is no indication in the New Testament or the Early Christian period that the Church is other than one visible communion of local Churches sharing a common faith. This is seen quite simply and directly in the manner in which Paul and the apostles in Jerusalem argue with each other and come to a decision that they then take to be a norm for the wider Christian community. One might develop a similar argument on the basis of Hebrews and Ephesians. Christ is the one origin of all (Heb 2:10), and in order to restore unity among God’s children Christ joins together those who share in flesh and blood (Heb 2:14). Christ has built us into a house in continuity with the one house over which Moses presided (Heb 3:5-6). In Ephesians, all things hold together in Christ, but the « household » of the Church is built on the unitary visible society of the « apostles and prophets » (Eph 2:20). The same perspective is seen continuously on into the following centuries. Thus, to give just one example, in the second century the Church of Smyrna sent an account of the martyrdom of Polycarp to all the communities comprising « the holy and Catholic Church. »

Of course, these early Christian statements are compatible with different visions of how that visible communion is organized. The first few centuries of the Church’s history see emergent networks and structures through which different communities share their faith and engage in conversations over discipline. There is, however, little indication that such structures are viewed as purely secondary aspects of the Church’s structure in comparison to the internal organization of the Church in a particular locality. For Catholic Christians the emergence of ecumenical councils and the practice of appeal to Rome (and the history of Rome’s reflection on its bishop’s status as the inheritor of Peter’s role among the college of apostles) constitute natural and providential developments of such trans-local structures.[13]

The development of such structures easily seems to many modern readers a movement from an original charismatic community to the dead weight of humanly constructed institutional hierarchies. While reading the history of the Church in this way certainly appeals when we are horrified by some of the more sinful and tragic aspects that have flowed from the exercise of authority in the Church over the centuries, two things are missed when we do. First, we miss the importance of ecclesial structures as providentially given ways for the Church to remain true to its proclamation; over the centuries structures of authority have made possible movements of reform as much as they have enabled corruption. Second, and far more intimately, we miss the ways in which the structures of the parish and the diocese provide a framework within which sacramental life may flourish, and the one with spiritual gifts aid his or her fellows. The Christian must, thus, resist any simple opposition between the charismatic and the institutional.[14]

Connection not only in space between different Churches, but also in time, is a constant reminder that in the economy of salvation God constitutes one historical and visible society of the body of Christ as a sign of the unity in which we were created and which we will be at the end. A person, consequently, does not enter the Christian sacramental life by making up their own eucharistic ceremony, but by joining in the communion providentially ordained; a person does not become a bishop merely by declaring himself to be one, but by receiving ordination within the historic communion of the Church.

Belief in the indefectibility of the Church is a related and important feature of the Catholic tradition. This is a belief that under divine guidance, however much the behavior of its office holders fails the standards to which they are called, the Church will not fail to teach the faith and lead the body towards its head. The belief is in some ways parallel to the sacramental principle of ex opere operato, the principle that the effectiveness of a sacrament does not depend on the worthiness of the celebrant. Just as we can be confident that a validly ordained priest in communion with the Church and following the Church’s liturgy may celebrate a true eucharist, whether or not he is also guilty of significant sins, so we may take heart from the fact that however self-defeating the Church may sometimes seem, it will not fail in its purpose.[15]

The authority of and the authority exercised within the Church are thus both gifts that enable the formation of the restored human community, and a tragic necessity because of our wounded nature. And here we begin to turn toward the reality of our possible difficulties with authority. In his discussion of doctrinal development St. John Henry Newman observes that because fallen minds do not yet know the truth through intuition, even when it is presented to them it may not be recognized and thus seem imposed, and discordant with one’s still developing inner sense of the faith.[16] I mention this first difficulty with authority to emphasize that Christians who confess the authority of the Church need also to consider carefully a question of the spiritual life: how should we balance attention to our own intuitions or reasonings, and how should we think ourselves in need of a deeper attention to the Church? But to say more here, we need first to plumb the depths of the Church’s now and not yet.

VI.

We may and should take heart whenever actions within the Church trouble or shock us, knowing that the Church will not fail; but we must also be deeply aware that the Church is (until the end) marked by sin and tragedy. Willingness to confess this reality is actually, I suggest, a virtuous and necessary part of an ecclesial spirituality. Three particular forms of tragedy are, I suggest, persistent. The first is the constant tragedy flowing from the sins of those who are part of the Christian community. One might ask why I use the term tragedy here rather than focusing only on « evil » or « sin. » Frequently those latter two terms are certainly appropriate, but tragedy provides us with something extra. Speaking of tragedy moves us from identifying an other as failing, to recognizing with deep sadness the situation in which we find ourselves, in tragedies that both mark our lives and for which we are often partly culpable.

And thus, one basic example of tragedy in the Church is the real abuse of authority that is depressingly constant. We see this on the part of lay people and priests, we see it at the highest levels of the Church (and in our hierarchical structure we see it often in the attempt simply to avoid recognizing that this is so). Should we be shocked and surprised by this? Shocked, most certainly; surprised, not really. Such evil and tragedy flow from what for some Christian thinkers has always been the most fundamental of sins, the assertion of the individual’s desires, especially desire for power over others. The character of the unity that is being realized among us is forgotten, and the character of Christian authority mistaken.[17]

The second great tragedy of the Church’s life is the division within Christendom—and this in many ways is a particularly tragic outworking of the first. Exactly how we should name those communities not in full visible communion with Rome is a complex question, and no one answer can suffice—there is, to speak perhaps in rather simple terms, a great difference between a community that claims the term « Christian, » but considers belief in the creed of Nicaea optional, and a community in whom Catholics recognize a common faith and sacramental practice. And yet we may also see real Christian devotion in members of that first kind of community and find ourselves challenged by the virtues they exhibit.

In the second case I think especially of the divisions between East and West, between Latin Christians and those of the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox traditions who are not in communion with Rome. The tragedy apparent here has many dimensions. To give one example, such division hides from us all resources of life and symbolism that are a common gift. Believers on both sides of this split generally know little of the liturgical and spiritual traditions sustained by the other, and mutual misunderstanding easily leads both sides to have little sense of how they might learn from the other. The more we confess the common faith that unites these two halves of the Church, the more tragic seems the separation.[18]

The third tragic reality of the Church is iconoclasm. Iconoclasm undermines the visibility of the Church’s symbolic structures which should nurture a new vision of the created order. While we quite naturally envisage iconoclasm as the destruction of images, it is useful to define the phenomenon more broadly as the witting or unwitting destruction or occlusion of the Church’s symbolic order in all its dimensions— and this seems to have become a sadly pervasive feature of western Christian life. Thus one might fairly describe some of the plain quasi-brutalist church buildings of the 1970s and 80s as iconoclastic insofar as their designers seemed little interested in making visible the symbolic world that Christian history has bequeathed us. But we should also characterize liturgical language and hymnody that hides from worshippers the complex symbolic heritage and the rich field of image and metaphor that the Church has built up over the years as iconoclastic, and we may even identify particular patterns of movement and organization of time as similarly iconoclastic.[19]

VII.

Awareness of the Church’s tragic face complements attention to the dogmatic foundations with which I began. I suggest that living consciously within the tensions of the Church’s now and not yet demands of the theologian reflection on the complex forms of attention that the Christian needs to cultivate. And thus I want to end by reflecting for a moment on the complexities of what it means to « think with the Church. » The phrase sentire cum ecclesia, « thinking with the Church, » is often attributed to St. Ignatius of Loyola, but his usage follows a long history of medieval authors using very similar phrases. Generally the phrase is used to emphasize the importance of attending to the Church’s teaching and recognizing its authority. And there is certainly a sense in which these features are important and flow from the nature of the Church. But there is much more that can usefully be said, and here I will mention only one dimension of that « more. » I am well aware that there is a great deal more that should be said; but I do not think I need to fear that my personal neglect of those other dimensions here will somehow blind the wider church! Rather, I hope only that my particular focus may stimulate attention to features that seem easily neglected in the modern context.

First, then: when we feel a discord between our own developing understanding of the faith and what the Church teaches, or when we feel annoyed at some particular administrative decision of the Church, we all too easily take upon ourselves a heroic mantle that mainly serves to hide from us appropriate self-examination. I do not speak here about occasions on which we might be witness to the sort of abuse we should report to the appropriate authorities, ecclesial and secular. I speak about the more common experience of a sense of discord with the Church. It may even be that this flows from exercises of authority that are indeed arbitrary. But what sort of response and discernment flows from our status as members of Christ’s body? Recognition of the Church’s tragic face should drive us not to ignore this sense of discord, but to see it as a whetstone on which to sharpen our own sense of what is involved in attending to the life that is our foundation within a body so marked by sin and tragedy. The greatest lessons of all such experiences are, perhaps, increasing awareness of the complexities of waiting in hope, and the sheer difficulty that we see in ourselves (as well as in so many of our Christian companions) of consistently imagining the world as anything other than an arena for human beings to exercise self-determination and power over others.

My suggestion here is that good waiting in the space of the Church flows particularly well from learning how to pay attention to what I term the deep tradition of Christian thought and practice. In a way that is somehow parallel to the ease with which we moderns find ourselves falling into the clickbait of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, it is all too easy to fall headlong into the terms of this or that current controversy in the Church. It is, of course, a good thing to be informed about what the Church teaches, and there are many occasions on which being ready to explain that teaching (in an appropriate manner) is a good. But if we are to equip ourselves well for the challenges of the modern world, where forgetting of the past is endemic, and traditions rarely valued, one of the most important of tasks is to act as a guardian of the deep tradition, knowing its complexities and details so that those resources remain available today. When Newman talks of development in doctrine it is easy to pass over the fact that he identifies Mary the mother of God as our model in faith. She is so because she bears so much in her heart, and this is the example of attending to and waiting upon faith, considering how unfolding developments may open to reveal continuity.

Alan Jacobs writes of the importance of reading as a means of « breaking bread with the dead » (following W.H. Auden). Such an activity, for Jacobs, helps us to avoid « presentism » and creates « personal density » and « temporal bandwidth » (phrases he takes from Thomas Pynchon): qualities that root us in a « long now » that is not only this moment, but the long history spanning the texts with which we are familiar.[20] From this point Jacobs gradually unfolds a vision of engagement with our literary predecessors in which judgment of their failings is even encouraged—even though this can, if one is obsessed only with our time, result in nothing but condemnation of the past. But such judgment should occur only alongside attention to the ways in which virtue and an inability to step outside one’s own cultural world usually accompany each other, and similarly alongside a cultivated openness to be struck by, addressed directly by the wisdom to be found in classic texts.

Jacobs’ excellent account is intentionally secular, and needs a little adaptation for it fully to serve here. For us the tradition of the Church offers examples both of virtue and vice, but it has a great arc, and it has exemplars and a tradition of teaching that is given by God.[21] The phrase « deep tradition » is intended to point to the great wealth of texts from the prior ages of the Church that speak with power and beauty of the most fundamental themes of Christian faith, the great doctrinal complex concerning Christ and the Trinity from the early centuries, the great texts of our spiritual traditions. These texts are a gift, I suggest, intended for multiple purposes, one of which is precisely to enable the cultivation of personal theological density necessary for our times. It is such density that can best enable us to think with the Church, to love the Church in the face of its constant failure, to call out failure without losing heart, and to better understand the temporary quality and non-necessity of our own times with a sense of irony, without stridency and in charity.[22]

In fact, what Christians should seek is both « personal density » and « symbolic density. » The sort of personal density of which Jacobs speaks is most certainly something that Christians should also desire, insofar as it involves the opening of the individual soul towards awareness of the complex breadth of human life and struggle, teaching both empathy and sympathy, and enabling us to recognize the importance of facing the present in the light of humanity’s long struggle for wisdom. However, an intrinsic dimension of personal density for Christians is what we might call symbolic density, the indwelling of the Christian symbolic universe, a growing understanding of its complex narratives and images, and a growing awareness of how that symbolic universe should shape our imaginations—should shape our growing personal density. Such symbolic density frames for us an understanding of the world’s true history, and draws our attention to the tragedies of humanity’s failure to understand the cosmos through inattention to its status as created. Such symbolic density enables us to receive the eucharist with the eyes of faith as the Lord’s body and blood, and thus is essential for us to inhabit the Church’s now and not yet. But such symbolic density is also that which enables us to recognize head on the inevitability of human failure and not despair, to keep longing for the consummation of the life lived through us in the Church’s communion.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Louis Bouyer, The Church of God, trans. Charles Underhill Quinn (Chicago IL: Franciscan Herald Press, 1982).

Henri De Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, trans. Lancelot C. Sheppard & Sr Elizabeth Englund OCD (San Francisco CA: Ignatius, 1988), chps. 5-9.

Maximus the Confessor, On The Ecclesiastical Mystagogy, trans. Jonathan J. Armstrong (Yonkers NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2019).

Benoît-Dominique de La Soujeole, OP, Introduction to the Mystery of the Church, trans. Michael J. Miller (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2014).

Dumitru Stǎniloae, The Experience of God, vol. 4, The Church: Communion In The Holy Spirit (Brookline MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2022).

Seeking the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary through prayer