The Church

 I am someone who has spent most of my life ‘un-churched’. I was raised Roman Catholic, and very involved in my church at university in the late 70’s. I listened to priests who were informed by ressourcement theologians. We were discovering a world of integrity beneath the hierarchies and the aesthetics.  It felt to me like a fresh breeze was blowing through the church. It was no longer something I attended or watched, but something I was engaged in. We chose our prayers with care, we opened our hearts, and we brought our sense of God’s presence into our daily lives. We discussed the Bible during service and baked our own bread for the Eucharist. It was deeply meaningful.

But when Pope John Paul II came to the papacy and pulled back on all that openness, I felt betrayed. I felt particularly that women had been shut out. Not by God – but by the church. I never stopped feeling God’s presence in my life, praying for insight and offering gratitude, but my idea of what ‘church’ was changed.

As I reflect on the lectures we have heard this week, I feel that this is one of the key elements of ecumenism. What is ‘church’? What does church mean to the people who belong to it, or who simply attend it? Is it defined by its structures, or the hearts of its people, or by the love and sacrifice of Christ? How does its history shape it? Is it the Bride of Christ or the Body of Christ? Is it a physical institution or a mystical entity?

As I return to church life in my later years, I am not troubled by choosing a denomination. I attend an Anglican Church, not because it is Anglican, but because the liturgy and community is meaningful to me. Its liturgy is almost identical to a Roman Catholic one in structure, but we sit in a circle to read and reflect on the bible, and then we surround the table to share the Eucharist. We bake our own bread. We are a small enough community that we actually all know each other. This is the kind of church I crave. But I also study with Jesuits at Regis College to rediscover the best of my Roman Catholic heritage, while continuing to question the rigid frameworks of systematic theology and pyramidal hierarchies. Does that make me ecumenical?

As I listen to the lectures at Centro Pro Unione, I come to understand how complex ecumenism is, how challenging and how worthwhile. If unity is not to mean uniformity, then we must ask difficult questions and have sometimes painful conversations about difference. We must acknowledge past wounds and offer both contrition and forgiveness. We must proceed with care and humility, always open to the Holy Spirit.

While I applaud the efforts of the commissions, conferences and organizations that do careful and intentional work, I am also hopeful because I see the Holy Spirit working in simple and hidden ways also. I brought a book called “The Ecumenism of Beauty” with me because I am an artist and feel that art is a very accessible form of spiritual expression that could assist ecumenism. In it, I learned that the dialogue between theology and the arts “is ecumenical per se, that is, without having consciously set out to achieve such aims.” [1]

So, our vocation is not just to pray and work for ecumenism, but to pray for discernment for our personal vocations. The more we do God’s will, the more Ecumenism will happen naturally, because it is God’s will.

Bibliography
Verdon, Timothy, ed. The Ecumenism of Beauty. Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2017

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[1] Timothy Verdun, ed., The Ecumenism of Beauty (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2017), 81