SO far we have been considering the Mystical Body in so far as it means Christ living in the Church. We may now consider it in so far as it means the Christian living in Christ. All that we have so far learnt about the life of the soul must be re-seen in his new context.
The supernatural life— of faith, hope and charity, the moral virtues, the gifts of the Holy Ghost—is the vital operation of Christ Our Lord in us His members. As St. Thomas says (S.T. iii q. 48) grace was given to Christ not simply for Himself but as Head of the Church, that it might flow from Him to His members.
The life of God flows through the Head to the Body. It really is the life of God, up to the level of our capacity to receive it. It does not make the finite infinite, but it is hard to find any limit short of that to what it can do: if we will let it.
For this life is ours only if, and in so far as, we will take it. In the Mystical Body we are still men, and men have free will. Even in the Body our will remains free. It is solicited by grace, but not stormed by grace. The problem of our development lies not in the destruction of our human will, but in its free union with the Will of God; and that free union is not normally a simple matter, attainable in one swift stride, but a goal to be striven for with great effort. By our re-birth in Baptism, we are cells in Christ's Body and so we are in His life stream. But to what degree that stream flows into us and makes us supernaturally alive depends upon our will. If we will to open our being wholly, then the life flows into it and vivifies it wholly. If we will to open our being, yet not wholly but reserving this or that small element ungiven to God, then the life will still flow to us: but whatever element in ourselves we have kept as our own will remain as our own, un-vivified. We shall be alive but not wholly alive. There is one further possibility. We may set our will firmly against God's by the free choice of serious sin, to the destruction of the love which is the life secret. So doing we close our being to the life flow. We are still in the Body, but as dead cells, living with our natural life, but super-naturally not alive. While we remain in this life upon earth, it is always possible for the dead cell that we have become to be reopened and made alive by true sorrow for sin and the Sacrament of Penance; just as it is always possible for the cell that is alive to grow in life.
That we should grow is the essential thing. And growth means growing in likeness to Christ. Or rather it means growing first into likeness, by growing away from all that is unlike; then growing in likeness, growing in being and in power. The cell must become the image of the Head. So St. Paul tells the Galatians: My little children, I am in travail over you afresh, until I can see Christ's image formed in you. (iv.19.)
We sometimes feel that the saints are overdoing their anguish at their own imperfections: we are so much more imperfect, so much less agonised. Somewhat similarly, we feel that a pianist's misery, over a performance that we should be proud of, cannot be sincere. But it is. The pianist is comparing himself not with us but Rachmaninoff, and he is miserable. The saint is comparing himself not with us but with Christ, for he is consumed—as we all should be—with desire to be remade in His perfect image. For this end above all Christ works upon us, giving us His gifts of Truth and Life through the men whom He has appointed to special functions in the Body.
Some He has appointed to be apostles, others to be prophets, others to be evangelists, or pastors, or teachers. They are to order the lives of the faithful, minister to their needs, build up the frame of Christ's body, until we all realize our common unity through faith in the Son of God, and fuller knowledge of Him. So we shall reach perfect manhood, that maturity which is proportioned to the completed growth of Christ; we are no longer to be children, no longer to be like storm-tossed sailors, driven before the wind of each new doctrine that human subtlety, human skill in fabricating lies, may propound. We are to follow the truth, in a spirit of charity, and so grow up, in everything, into a due proportion with Christ, who is our head. On Him all the body depends; it is organized and unified by each contact with the source which supplies it; and thus, each limb receiving the active power it needs, it achieves its natural growth, building itself up through charity. (Eph.iv.11-16.)
Thus the Body is not simply composed of a Head and an un-differentiated mass of human cells, all alike and all functioning alike.
It is, like any other body, an organism, a structure, with different parts functioning differently for the perfection of the whole. Pope and Bishops and Priests and laymen must each become the image of Christ: so far there is no difference: there is not some greater likeness of Christ reserved to Popes, some lesser likeness kept for the laity. But in the life processes of the Body, different members have different functions, which merely means that Christ uses them in different ways. This Body, like any other body, has an order and a proportion and a complexity of elements working together. We see this again in considering the Sacraments, the principal means by which the energizing of the Holy Ghost flows to us from Christ. Just as in our own bodies the blood does not surge upon us in a tidal wave but flows silently to every part of the body through arteries and veins, so sanctifying grace does not come upon the Mystical Body like a cloud-burst, more likely to drown than to vivify, but flows through a multiplicity of channels made by God for its flow. As in the individual soul, so in the Mystical Body, the Kingdom of God is like a leaven working secretly. Holiness is not best served by chaos.
In our first consideration of the Sacraments, we saw that the Blessed Eucharist differs vitally from the others. We now see the same difference in the new context. By Baptism we enter into the life of the Body: or, to put it another way, the life of the Body enters into us. Either way, we become alive supernaturally. But a living thing needs food, and without food will almost certainly perish. But all life must be fed by food like in nature to itself. Our bodily life is fed by bodies, of animal or vegetable. Our mental life is fed by minds, the minds of those who instruct us. But this new life of sanctifying grace is Christ Himself living in us: the only food that could feed a life which is Christ must itself be Christ. And what we receive in the Eucharist is Christ. Thus Our Lord can say: He who eats My flesh, and drinks My blood, lives continually in Me, and I in him. As I live because of the Father, the living Father who has sent Me, so he who eats Me will live, in his turn, because of Me. (John vi.57-58.)
Receiving Christ Our Lord thus, we are in the profoundest sense one with Him, and this is a great thing; but also we are one with all, in all ages, who by receiving Him have become likewise one with Him. And this is no small thing. The Blessed Eucharist serves the growth of each member of the Body in holiness; but it serves also the unity of the Body as a whole, drawing the whole more profoundly into oneness with Christ. The one bread makes us one body, though we are many in number. (i Cor.x.7).
There is a sense in which the Eucharist is the life-principle of the Church
even more than of the individual soul.
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From God's end the channels of grace are the great means of union between Him and us; from man's end the great means of union is prayer. In its broadest sense prayer is the direction of life to God. In its special sense, it is the converse of the soul with God, the intellect concentrated upon God uttering itself to Him and silently receptive to His utterance, and the will given wholly to Him in love. So much prayer should be in any event, given that God exists and man exists. We know from the experience of the mystics how far this converse can go. With the aid of special graces from God, the prayer of contemplation can bring the soul into an awareness of God as immediately present— not seen face to face by the intellect as the souls in Heaven see Him, but felt, touched, savoured (the words for this experience beyond utterance vary) in a direct contact of love. Some of the saints have told us that in this contact they have had an awareness of the triplicity of Persons in the Godhead.
But even at the highest intensity, this movement of the individual soul to God is not the whole of prayer. Because man is not an isolated unit, each man related only to God and no man to any other, but all related to God and therefore to one another, there must be a social element in prayer as well as an individual. Men may go apart to pray, for each has his own incommunicable self which is only his; but they must come together to pray, too. This again would be true in any event, given that men exist in the solidarity of the human race. But it reaches a new depth in the unity of the Mystical Body. There is a prayer of the whole Body, a prayer which Christ as the Head of the Body makes His own and offers as His own; and it would be an appalling impoverishment of our life in the Body to take no conscious willed part in it. The Christian's private prayer, the conversation of himself as himself with God, is essential, though even in this the Christian remains in the Body and prays from his place in the Body; but liturgical prayer, the prayer of the Body itself, is essential, too. God loves both, and the Christian grows by both.
The highest point of the prayer of the Body is the offering of the Sacrifice of the Mass. We have already seen that there were to be priests in Christ's Kingdom and a Sacrifice. We can now see more closely what this means. If we consider what Our Lord did for men while He was upon earth, we shall find that He is still doing all the same things for men through the Church. Upon earth He taught, forgave sins, vivified, gave men the Holy Ghost; and He does all these things still through His Mystical Body. But, underlying all these actions of His upon earth, was the thing He came to do, to offer Himself as a sacrifice for the redemption of men, and this, too, He continues to do: that is the precise meaning of the Mass.
Consider what the action of the Mass is. The priest, we have seen, consecrates bread and wine so that they are changed into the body and blood of Christ: Christ Himself, slain once upon Calvary but now forever living, is upon the altar. "Panem vinum in salutis consecramus hostiam "— the bread and wine are changed into the Victim of our salvation. And Him who was slain for us the priest offers to the Father, for the application to men's souls of what His Passion and Death made available for us. The key to all this is that the priest gives himself to be used by Christ, so that Christ is the real offerer, the priest only an instrument in His hands. Once more He is acting through men. Thus the Mass is seen aright only if we realize that Christ is not only the Victim offered, but the priest who offers. In the Mass as upon Calvary, Christ is offering Himself to God for the sins of the world: the Mass is a representation of Calvary. There is no new slaying of Christ in the Mass: for in the first place death has no more dominion over Him, and in the second if the priest in any sense slew Him this would be to introduce into the Mass an element that was not in Calvary, for Christ did not slay Himself, but was slain by His enemies. Yet that this is the Christ who was slain upon Calvary is shown sacramentally by the separate consecration of bread to become His body and wine to become His blood. The essence of the Mass is that Christ offers to the Father Himself, who was slain for us upon Calvary.
Thus Our Lord is continuing upon earth what we have already seen that He is doing in heaven. Jesus continues for ever, and His priestly office is unchanging— he lives on still to make intercession on our behalf. (Hebr.vii.24-25.) That intercession is the continuing presentation before the face of God of Himself who was slain for us: He has entered heaven itself, where He now appears in God's sight on our behalf. (Hebr.ix.24.) So the Apocalypse shows Him in heaven, a Lamb standing upright, yet slain (as I thought) in sacrifice. In some way the marks of His victim state are still upon Him, not diminishing His glory but adding to it.
The Mass is the breaking through to earth of the offering of Himself that Christ makes continuously in Heaven simply by His presence there. We can now go one level deeper. Christ makes His offering in Heaven in His own sacred humanity; Christ makes His offering on earth through His Mystical Body. The priest is the organ of His Mystical Body that He uses to consecrate and offer Himself. But we are united with Christ in the act of offering as really as the priest is. So at the Orate Fratres the priest speaks to the congregation of the sacrifice he is offering as "my sacrifice and yours". After the Consecration we—plebs tua sancta, Christ's holy people—are named as offering the pure, the consecrated, the spotless Victim.
But because we are cells in the Body of Christ, we are associated with Him not only as offerer, but as Victim offered. So St. Peter reminds us (l Peter iii.18): Christ died once for our sins, so as to present us in God's sight, or in the Douay Version that He might offer us to God.
So St. Gregory the Great urges us who celebrate the mysteries of the Passion"
to "offer ourselves
as victims. And this is simply a most marvellous elevation to a new power
of the plain truth that if we do not offer our own selves, God will not be
moved by any other offering we may make.
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The Church then is the Body of Christ, His Mystical Body we call it, using the adjective both to emphasize the extreme mysteriousness of this unique body-to-person relationship, and to distinguish this Body from His natural body. The distinction is worth stating explicitly. His natural body is that which He received from His mother, in which He lived His human life in Palestine and died upon the cross. In that same natural body, but now glorified, He rose from the dead, ascended into Heaven and is forever at the right hand of the Father. It is that same body which we receive sacramentally in the Blessed Eucharist. The Mystical Body, His Church, we may think of as the successor to His natural body, or perhaps better to His human nature as a whole, because in it He continues to operate among men as formerly in His human nature. Think of the two as successive instruments by which He works among men.
Thus the Church is in its deepest reality Christ Himself still living and operating on earth. The trouble is that the Church does not always look like it. The Church is in the world, but we sometimes feel that a good deal of the world is in the Church. There is a sense in which the Real Presence of Christ in the Church is as difficult to believe as the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. In the one case we say "It looks like bread", in the other we say "It doesn't look like Christ". Both statements are correct; but neither settles the reality. What looks like bread is in fact the body of Christ; what looks like a very much too human society is in fact the Body of Christ. Upon this second clash of appearance and reality we may get some light from a further comparison between Our Lord's two lives upon earth, the first in His natural body, the second in His Mystical. In each case God chose to take to Himself and operate in a human body. In each case He is faithful to the logic of His choice. His human nature was a real human nature and in accepting it. He accepted the limitations proper to it. He did not take a human body and then act as if He had not. It goes with being a natural body to have limitations, and when it presses against these limitations it is bound to appear deficient. It does not begin mature, but in the helplessness of babyhood. The body God took began so. Anyone looking at Christ in His mother's arms could only have said "It doesn't look like God". So it was when, still following the strict logic of His choice. He bled when He was scourged, fell under the weight of a cross too heavy for His natural powers, and died and was buried. He chose to have a body like ours and these are the deficiencies that go with a body like ours. At those points especially He did not look like God, but He was God.
Just as there are limitations, deficiencies, and weaknesses that go with a material body, so also with that other kind of body, a society of human beings each with his own free will, and among these limitations we find a new element, the possibility of sin. But here again Christ Our Lord is faithful to the logic of His choice. He did not force His natural body; He does not force His Mystical Body. Each follows the laws of the kind of being it is, so that its appearance often serves rather to mask Christ than to reveal Him. Assuredly He did not allow to His natural body a perfection which would have robbed His sacrifice of its meaning; nor does He confer upon the members of His Mystical Body an automatic perfection that would rob their life upon earth of its meaning. But just as His natural body was glorified and its defects ceased, so His Mystical Body, too, will one day be glorified and in all its members sinless.
The upshot of all this is that,
just as in thinking about Christ Our Lord
we distinguish between the human nature and the divine,
so we must distinguish
between the human and the divine element in the Church—
the divine being all
that sphere where Christ Our Lord guarantees that what is done shall be without
defect
because in actual fact He is doing it:
the human being that sphere in
which He leaves it to men to respond to what He offers them,
that is to let
Him operate wholly in them,
or partially,
or not at all.
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