Listen
to this arrangement of the hymn "Come Holy Ghost our Souls Inspire", sing
by the choir of New College, Oxford. Music details HERE.
Ye are fellow-citizens with the saints and of the household of God ...
builded together for a habitation of God in the Spirit.
—St. Paul.Souls—all human souls—are deeply interconnected ...
the Church at its best and deepest is just that—
that interdependence of all the broken and the meek,
all the self-oblivion,
all the reaching-out to God and souls.
—F. von Huge!.
THE old Flemish painters loved to represent the
Church as a vast cathedral,
with many side chapels opening from one great nave.
In the centre of that nave stood the Crucifix.
In the surrounding chapels those Sacraments were dispensed
through which the Incarnate Charity pours itself out to purify, feed, restore,
and at last transform the feeble lives of men;
dependent on that ceaseless self-giving, as branches upon the Vine.
That was a wonderful image of what Christianity really is;
the manifestation in and through men of the self-spending Charity of God,
and the binding together in one Divine Society
of all who have been touched by that supernatural generosity
and depend on its life-giving life.
Thinking of this,
we are no longer surprised that the Creed which once ended by stating its
belief in the Spirit,
should go on to insist on belief in the Body, the Temple, that Spirit indwells;
asserting the social and organic character of real spirituality,
endorsing its authority and repudiating the claims of the religious individualist.
I believe One Catholic and Apostolic Church.
We must believe someone.
We believe, then, the united voice of Christendom;
its statements about Reality,
as given in its Scriptures,
its Liturgy,
its Sacraments,
and by its Saints.
We make its Creeds, its solemn pronouncements regarding the essentials of
Faith, our standard,
trust them, take them seriously':
not as a particular way of dealing with life—
something that happens to appeal to us—
but as the way of dealing with life.
Though the architecture be old-fashioned and the lighting defective,
here God in His humility tabernacles among men.
So, because we believe in that holy and life-giving
Spirit
who becomes articulate in the prophets, telling us their vision of God,
we also believe, which is often far more difficult, the voice of the traditional
Church.
When that voice has a horribly official accent, or makes to our minds impossibly
concrete statements,
we acknowledge that it is possibly our stupidity and not her stuffiness which
makes our sympathy so incomplete.
She does offer to us —
and not to us alone,
but to everyone who will listen—
the supernatural poetry and the supernatural music on a wave-length we can
receive.
She witnesses within the world to the Fact of God.
All her symbolic veils do give us something of the radiance of the uncreated
Light,
and within her ancient phrases we hear the murmur of the one Word.
And more than this,
we acknowledge that the total Christian society, the "Company
of Faithful People"—
even as we experience it here,
in the unfortunate form of a club
which is far too full of mutually exclusive cliques—
has yet a quality, a personality, a power of its own.
Its baptism,
the mutual act in which we enter its ranks and it cleanses and receives us,
does something;
knocks off the fetters of our sub-human past,
admits us to a new level of life,
makes us the citizens of another Patria,
with a real and awful series of privileges and powers
and a real and awful series of responsibilities.
All this seems terribly concrete to the enthusiast
for "pure spirituality":
and when we think of pews and hassocks and the Parish Magazine,
we tend to rebel against the yoke of official religion,
with its suggestion of formalism and even frowstiness.
It seems far too stiff and institutional, too unventilated,
to represent the generous and life-giving dealings of the Divine Charity
with men.
The chorus which exclaimed with awe and delight,
I believe in one God!
thins out a good deal when it comes to saying,
I believe in one Church!
The first lifted us to heaven;
the second brings us down on to the cocoanut matting with a run.
Yet there it is;
the Christian sequence is
God-
Christ-
Spirit-
Church-
Eternal
Life.
No link in this chain can be knocked out,
without breaking the current of love which passes from God through His creatures
back again to God.
The incarnation of the Holy in this world is social.
We are each to contribute our bit to it,
and each to depend on the whole.
It is not the ardent individual devotee,
the supposed recipient of special graces,
ruled by special lights and experiences,
who is the Bride of Christ.
The whole Body is the Bride of Christ:
a Body, as St. Paul says, having many different members,
some of a very odd shape,
some of a very lowly kind.
And it is in this Body,
at once mysterious and homely,
that the individual Christian must consent to sink his life,
in order that he may find true life.
Because of this deep fact of the Living Church,
this interconnection of all surrendered spirits,
the prayer of one unit can avail for all.
We pray as an organism,
not as a mere crowd of souls,
like grains of rice that happen to be part of the same pudding.
I believe in the Holy Catholic Church,
the Communion of Saints,
says the Apostles' Creed,
putting the same truth in a different way.
Here that rich New Testament word "Communion" bears
a double reference.
For on one hand it means
that we believe in the whole fellowship,
the society of saints,
known and unknown, living and dead,
their reality and power, their aliveness,
their authority, their witness to the facts of the spiritual life;
and on the other hand that we believe there is a true communion,
a genuine sharing between all the members of the one Body.
Within its universal prayer
thinker and lover,
sufferer and worker,
Catholic and Quaker,
pool their resources.
When we are confounded by sudden visions of a holiness and self-abandonment
beyond our span,
our share in the Communion of Saints assures us that other souls will suffer
and adore for us,
and make up for our deficiencies by their more abundant life.
For since the life of the saints is the life of charity,
they cannot keep anything for themselves alone.
The Life by which they live is shared, communicated from one to another,
as the sap of the Vine is given through the greater branches to the less.
When the Christian looks at the Crucifix, he
looks at that which is for him the Pattern of all perfection;
the double revelation of God's love towards man and man's love towards God,
the heart of Charity.
But he is also looking at the Church,
that real Church which is a holy and living Sacrifice eternally self-offered
to God;
the Body of Christ, the number of whose members no man knows but God alone,
and which is the living instrument of His creative love within this world.
Wherever Christ is,
said St. Ignatius of Antioch,
there is the Catholic Church.
So, to be a member of the Church means not merely
conformity to an institution,
but incorporation in that living organism which only exists to express the
Thought of God.
It means becoming part of that perpetual sacrifice which continues in space
and time the life of Incarnate Charity.
In the name of all her members,
the Church comes up to the altar with awe and thanksgiving,
and there, on the very frontiers of the unseen world, she gives herself
that she may receive the Food of Eternal Life.
So the inner life of each one of those members must have in it the colour
of sacrifice,
the energy of a redeeming love,
if it is to form part of the living Soul of the Church.
The unceasing liturgic life of the official Church,
her prayer and adoration,
her oblation and communion,
only has meaning as the expression of that soul:
the voice of the Communion of Saints.
But as this, it has a meaning, a splendour and a claim on us,
far transcending those private prayers to which we are apt to give priority.
The whole poetry of man's relation to the unseen Love is hidden in the Liturgy:
with its roots in history, its eyes set upon Eternity,
its mingled outbursts of praise and supplication, penitence and delight,
it encloses and carries forward the devotion of the individual soul,
lost in that mighty melody.
To say, then, that we believe the corporate voice of those who make this
melody,
whose separate lives are lost in it and who are our companions in the Way,
begins to look like common sense.
We are units in their mighty procession;
and they can teach us how to walk.
If, then, we thus believe in the Church as
a living spiritual reality,
we must act in harmony with that belief, as members of the Church.
This means much more than doing our bit in the matter of corporate worship;
though it will certainly' include that expression of our social obligations.
It will mean, says St. Paul,
becoming obedient from the heart
—the very core of personality—
to that form of teaching whereunto ye were delivered.
That is a demand for the complete transformation
of life.
It means that being Members of the Body of Christ is to be the ruling fact
about us.
Crossing over to the divine side with all our powers, we must take a humble
place in the ranks:
become part of the reasonable, holy and living sacrifice.
It means that in work and prayer, suffering and self-conquest,
we are never to forget that we do not act alone or for ourselves.
We act with and for the whole body.
The prayer of the individual Christian is always the prayer of the whole
Church;
and therefore it is infinite in its scope.
In his letter to the Romans, we find St. Paul
asking his converts if they realize what it means to be part of the Church.
It means, he says (and we can imagine their surprise when they heard it),
being received into the death of Christ—
the unconditional sacrifice of the Cross—
in order to walk in newness of life:
transformed through self-loss into a bit of that Body
which is indwelt and ruled by the Spirit of Divine Charity.
No easy application for membership, then, fulfils the demands of real Christianity.
It is a crisis, a radical choice, a deep and costly change.
When we judge our own lives by this standard we realize that full entrance
into the Church's real life must for most of us be a matter of growth.
There are layers of our minds, both personal and corporate, still untransformed;
not indwelt by Charity, resisting the action of God.
There are many things the Spirit could do through us, for the healing and
redeeming of the world,
if it were not for our cowardice, slackness, fastidiousness,
or self-centred concentration on our own jobs.
The individual Christian cannot attain his full stature till he throws in
his hand with the saints and the angels:
more, with the broken, the struggling and the meek.
But most of us are too prudent, too careful to do that.
It will not be to us that the great Angel of the Apocalypse,
emptied of self-interest and ready for all jobs, will say
as he said to St. John,
I am your fellow-slave.
Present yourselves to God as alive from the dead,
says St. Paul;
and your members—all you have,
every bit of you—as instruments, tools, of righteousness.
That is his standard of churchmanship.
That is the kind of life into which he conceives his converts are baptized;
and there is something desperately vigorous and definite about it.
What he seems to envisage in the Church is a vast distributing system of
the Divine Charity.
As we were slaves of "sin"—
that is, held tight in a life which is alien from the real purposes of God,
off the track,
and uses its great energies for its own ends—
so, that taking of a new direction which is involved in becoming a Christian,
means the turning over of all that energy to God's purposes;
using it for Him,
co-operating with the Spirit
working within life for the redemption and hallowing of the whole world.
That is what the Church is for;
and the Sacraments are there to help those who are prepared to pull their
weight.
If, then, we are sufficiently self-emptied
and courageous,
that Spirit who is the Church will act on the world through us.
We have accepted a situation which is infinite in its possibilities.
The Power that desires to fill and use us,
is the Power that filled and used Paul and Augustine,
Benedict, Bruno and Bernard,
Francis of Assisi and Catherine of Siena,
Fox and Wesley;
that went to the ends of the earth with Francis Xavier and Henry Martyn,
or transformed a narrow sphere in Father Wainright and the Cure d'Ars.
All alike are "God-bearers, Christ-bearers, bearers
of holy things."
The Spirit of Christ is the Church,
and the standard of courage, love and self-oblivion the Church asks from
each of its members is His standard.
Until she gets it her true work cannot be done.
We are "called to be Saints"—
self-emptied vessels of the Holy—
not for our own sake but for the sake of the world.
Every Christian has to look squarely at this ideal.
It does not merely mean self-loss in an organized religious society,
which depends on God and believes in Him, and teaches morals and faith.
It means self-loss in the world's workshop,
"tools of righteousness unto God";
every ounce of energy,
all powers and talents, initiative, skill and taste,
used—not for us,
but for Him.
When we contrast this programme with man's average outlook,
it is obvious that real entrance into the Living Church may well be described
as a death.
For some it is a very peaceful death; but for some a desperate struggle.
You are buried in baptism,
says St. Paul to his converts.
There is something terrible,
a genuine crisis demanding real courage and trust, involved
in choosing God.
In the ancient mysteries the cave of initiation
was very dark and forbidding,
and the neophyte had to face that as his first test.
So in the soul's secret experience,
that purification of which Baptism is the outward symbol,
and which admits us to the deep life of the Soul of the Church,
must often seem a death to the easy-going agreeable ways of natural religion.
For then we enter the full communion of a Body whose rhythm of life reproduces
that of its Master.
That which was done at the Annunciation remains the type of the continued
action of the Spirit on the Church;
an action which demands the unconditional self-giving and humble courage
of every Christian soul,
that so the Mystical Body may continue in space and time the Incarnation
and its awful work.
As, then, we believe in the Holy Spirit—Divine
Love,
issuing eternally from the Heart of God—
we believe also in the Church, the Divine Society,
the matrix which receives and gives expression to that love;
and we acknowledge that by entering this Society our whole situation is changed.
We become by this act part of a Body, a Communion, in which the Spirit is
perpetually rebom in poverty and hardness;
and perpetually continues in and through its Saints—
here in one way,
there in another—
its ceaseless oblation of love.
A body in which every living cell is, as St. John Eudes boldly insisted, "part
of Christ Himself";
part of the redeeming life at work within the world.
Part, therefore, of a life which may be called to endure betrayal, mockery,
crucifixion, darkness and apparent defeat,
and give new life through this apparent defeat.
This means that the sufferings of the Body,
all its divisions, struggles, persecutions, imperfections,
deeply concern every member,
and that the mysterious sacrificial action of the Body,
which embraces, sweetens and sanctifies all its activities and turns them
into love,
must also be the secret action of each soul.
For the Eucharist is the characteristic act towards God and towards men of
the whole Church:
a great movement of adoring gratitude,
an offering to Him of natural and to them of supernatural gifts,
a deep participation in the self-given life of the Divine Charity.
And in the Eucharist
the principal and invisible actor, "Priest and Victim" in
the ancient language of the Liturgy,
is Christ, whose members we are.
Thus in the Prayer of Humble Access we are really asking for full participation
in the life of the Church,
with all the mysterious privileges
and the solemn obligations of those
who are, as St. Ambrose says,
made partakers of the Supreme Divinity.
It is true that such a vocation in its wholeness
is far too much for most of us.
It can only be a corporate undertaking.
Not all can contemplate the Eternal Realities, or enter into the awful mystery
of the Cross.
But all—
including the large and endearing class of spiritual tweenies,
ever ready to help with any job—
have some place and task within that economy:
that triumph of balanced energy and eternal peace.
We must be ready for whatever bit falls to our own share—
probably not the bit that we expected or desired—
and in our secret life towards God,
must be so humble, supple, and self-giving,
so austere in our demands,
that we are kept in training for the test,
and wide open to that Spirit
who is both the transformer and the ruler of those to whom He comes in power.
This lays a great responsibility on every Christian;
for it means that our self-discipline, our prayer, our renunciations, our
struggles,
are not undertaken merely for our own sakes.
They are required of us, in order that we may be made more fit for this great
vocation,
and so increase the energy of the Church.
The shallow notion of the life of prayer as a form of spiritual selfishness
wilts before this vision of the destiny of the awakened soul.
In the world of spirit,
that which is done by one is done for all,
since the real actor is always the Charity of God.
A Christian's inner life,
however deeply hidden,
is never private.
So far as it is real,
the Spirit who indwells the Church prays and adores in him,
strives in him and reaches out through him.
Therefore, because of the Church, when we pray
we pray with all the Saints: in whom this is happening too.
Thus the radiation of the humblest prayer affects the whole Body's life,
and when we fail to do our part
its whole spiritual effectiveness is correspondingly diminished.
Our penance is an earnest of its contrite love,
our communions add to its total vitality.
We go into training in Lent,
not as solitary perfectionists interested in our own progress,
but as loyal members of a team.
We cultivate our soul's little garden
not as an allotment,
but as part of the great garden of God;
and therefore do not expect it to grow every kind of flower and vegetable
at once.
We are added to the Church, as Cardinal Mercier said,
not merely for the sake of our own souls,
but "in order to extend the Kingdom of Love."
For the reality of the Church does not abide
in us;
it is not a spiritual Rotary Club.
Its reality abides in the One God, the ever-living One
whose triune Spirit fills it
by filling each one of its members.
We build up the Church best,
not by a mere overhaul of the fabric and the furniture, desirable as this
may sometimes be,
but by opening ourselves more and more
with an entire and humble generosity to that Spirit-God
Who is among us as one that serveth,
and reaches out through His Church towards the souls of men.
Thus the real life of that Church consists in the mutual love and dependence,
the common prayer, adoration and self-offering
of the whole inter-penetrating family of spirits
who have dared to open their souls without condition
to that all-demanding and all-giving Spirit of Charity,
in Whom we live and move and without Whom we should not exist.
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