There is a dual aspect of Pentecost, individual and collective. It is first of all the “penetration, the impregnation of all our faculties by the ‘mystery of depth.’” As the entrance antiphon from the Roman Rite sings, “the love of God is poured into our hearts (Rom 5:5).” It is also the birth of a new community. Fr Bede wrote:

When the Holy Spirit descended on the disciples at Pentecost, the power of the Spirit which had transformed the body and soul of Christ at the resurrection was communicated to his disciples. A new consciousness dawned, a consciousness beyond the ordinary rational consciousness, which set the apostles free from the limitations of our present mode of existence and consciousness and opened them to the new world of the Resurrection.

During the days around the feast of Pentecost, especially when it fell as it did this year so close to the election of the new pope, it is appropriate to reflect on the meaning of Church, and perhaps to expand our notions of what the Church is. These reflections of mine are based on my reading of Fr Bede, especially his remarks in The Marriage of East and West. To Fr Bede, first and foremost, in the broadest terms, the Church is simply humanity––human beings becoming conscious of their destiny as children of God.

In the language of the Hebrew Scriptures, Adam and Eve are the symbols of humanity created in the image and likeness of God. Our foundational myth of the Fall is trying to convey that something happened in the development of the human race: when they sin they turn away from the Spirit and fall back on time-bound nature. As a result of this, the “upward movement” of nature itself, the “evolution of matter through life and consciousness to eternal life in the Spirit” is stymied somehow, blocked, stunted. “But at the same time the mystery of redemption [also] begins.” At the same moment, the Spirit begins drawing humanity back into right relationship, into life in the Spirit. Now Bede says this is the beginning of the Church––humanity being drawn out of sin by the power of the Spirit by responding to the Word of God. So in this sense, “the Church is present in humanity from the very beginning of history.” Whenever a human being wakes to consciousness and discovers an open-ness to the “transcendent mystery of existence” in his or her basic intuitive consciousness, that is the power of the Spirit drawing him or her to eternal life. This is why we can say that the presence of the Spirit can be traced in all the religions of humankind. “Everywhere, in ritual and sacrifice, in doctrine and sacrament, in prayer and worship, there is the presence of the Spirit drawing [humankind] to himself: in other words, the presence of the Church.” Particularly in our day and age when we have such a tendency toward “identitarianism” and defining boundaries, it would be marvelous to grasp this understanding of the Universal Church.

We who belong to the visible Church by faith and baptism are not an exclusive group of the ‘saved’; we are a sign of salvation; we manifest God’s saving purpose for all humankind and for all creation. But Abhishiktananda wrote adds that God also preserves non-Catholics and non-Christians alongside the Church “until the Church becomes ready to integrate the values they represent.” In addition to the visible Church, wherever, however, a person encounters God or truth or reality or beauty or goodness or love––any of what the philosophers call the transcendentals; no matter what name a person may give to the Transcendent Mystery of existence; even if a person is formally an agnostic or an atheist, they are encountering the grace of God in Christ. They are so first of all because all forms of beauty, truth and goodness are manifestations of the Word, and it is that Word that became flesh in Jesus, who became the Christ. The Word, John’s Gospel teaches, enlightens everyone coming into the world. Everyone is brought into contact with the Word in some way or another, be it through art, science or human relationship; and anyone who responds to that Word is in some way responding to Christ, and so by virtue of that is in some way already a member of the Body of Christ, the body of redeemed humanity which is the Church. This is my understanding of Karl Rahner’s term the “anonymous Christian,” the transcendental freedom and openness that characterize truly being human, what Nathan Mitchell calls “the ability to reach out endlessly after others and the Other,” “the eradicable human potential for self-transcendence and change,” and a “’transcendental eroticism’ that drives all human knowing, willing and loving.” The Church recognizes that Church is already being born in the hearts of all who experience and respond to the Word, however it may be manifested. This is also why the Church could write in Nostra Aetate, which it seems appropriate to quote once again, that She

… rejects nothing of what is true and holy in [other] religions. She has a high regard for the manner of life and conduct, the precepts and the doctrines which, although differing in many ways from her own teaching, nevertheless often reflect a ray of that truth which enlightens all people. (…)

This is why the Church therefore

…urges her children to enter with prudence and charity into discussion and collaboration with members of other religions. Let Christians, while witnessing to their own faith and way of life, acknowledge, preserve and encourage the spiritual and moral truths found among non-Christians, also their social life and culture.

It was marvelous to hear Pope Benedict echo these themes as well in his first homily, saying that he was addressing himself to everyone, “even to those who follow other religions or who are simply seeking an answer to the fundamental questions of life and have not yet found it … to assure them that the Church wants to continue to build an open and sincere dialogue with them, in a search for the true good of [humankind] and of society.”

Further, and this may be the subtlest aspect of the Church, Fr Bede says that “it is not only the whole of humanity but the whole creation which constitutes the body of the Church,” because matter itself was created from the beginning with an innate tendency toward life and consciousness. Here, of course, we hear echoes of St Paul––that “all creation groans and is in agony even until now as we await the redemption of our bodies.” We human beings, as the late Pope John Paul loved to say, are the priests of creation, because we believe that human consciousness was created from the beginning “with an innate tendency towards the final and perfect consciousness of the Spirit.” All of creation is in some mysterious way dependent on our accomplishing our redemption, which is none other than our re-establishing this right relationship with God in the Spirit. It is the same Spirit present in matter, present in all of life, and present in human beings. In Jesus, who we might say is the high point of spiritual evolution, “this movement of matter and consciousness towards the life of the Spirit reached its culmination.” In Jesus, the divine consciousness took possession of human consciousness and, through that process, both his body and his soul, matter and consciousness, were transformed. This is what awaits us, who have been grafted onto the vine; this is Jesus’ glory that he shares with us.

In the Resurrection, then, as well as in the Ascension, and most decidedly in the descent of the Holy Spirit––the love of God being poured into the hearts of the believers––we see that what was accomplished in Jesus is what is destined to happen in all human beings. That is why we say with St Paul, that the first Adam was a living soul but the New Adam, Jesus, became a life-giving Spirit (1 Cor 15:45). “The Word became flesh” means that the divine Spirit entered into the depths of matter, into life and consciousness. The divine Spirit entered into the midst of human sin and suffering and raised the whole of it up to new life and new consciousness. So in this way, “the Church is present in all creation and in all humanity.” The Church is “the ‘becoming’ of God”; the Church is “the manifestation of the infinite, eternal being in the course of time and change and history.” The Church is “not simply a static presence, but . . . a dynamic power,” like yeast in the dough, “changing the course of history and transforming the world” from within.

I am reminded that there are two marvelous things about the yeast and the dough. First of all the yeast acts by disappearing into the dough! And secondly, it does not change what affects; it merely makes it rise, from the inside. In this line, then-Cardinal Ratzinger, in his book A New Song for the Lord, quotes Romano Guardini being positively Taoist in explaining how to understand our mandate to exercise dominion. “’Dominion … does not mean that humans force their will upon what is given by nature but that they possess, shape and create out of knowledge; this knowledge, however, accepts what each being is in and of itself.’”

From the broadest view of the Church we can return also to a very personalist view of Church. Our great Camaldolese saint Peter-Damian, in his eloquent explanation of eremitical prayer, teaches that the “Church of Christ in all her parts is united by such a bond of love that in each part the entire Church is present.” This is why we meditate, because in some way we each and individually carry the entire Church within us. We individual living stones are “holographic”––we carry the entire Church in our matter. The “yeast in the dough” is the Spirit within us with whom we come into conscious contact by our contemplative practice, and begin this process of allowing that Spirit to transform our bodies and our souls, our flesh and our consciousness. This then is who we the Church are meant to be and become for our world, the same Spirit-bearers, beginning that work of transformation in our very bodies, in our own souls.

As we pray in the Eucharistic Prayer that our sacrifice which makes our peace with God “would bring salvation to the whole world,” so too we pray and meditate for ourselves, and for our whole world, ‘til the yeast in our dough, the indwelling Holy Spirit, allows us to become transforming agents, yeast in the dough of the world.

cyprian 15 may 05