BUILDING MY OWN CHURCH, THE AUTHENTIC WAY

All of us have assumptions about what we mean by the words we use. For example, if I use the word “Church,” some will think of a structure, such as their local parish Church. In contrast, others see it as a gathering of people centered around Christ in the Eucharist, together offering up praise and glory to God the Father through the power of the Holy Spirit.

As I reflect on it in my latest Lectio Divina Meditation on Philippians 2:5, buildings limit my thinking and physical presence to local space, not bad in and of itself, but for the purpose of being present to Christ with others. Each of us is a Church, self-contained, proscribed by the assumptions we have accumulated throughout a lifetime of seeking what is good in life and discerning what is bad for us and what leads us to become less human. Humanity itself advances along a path of intelligent development, growing together in each age to engage with what it means to be fully human. If the Church might be compared to a pilgrim walking along the road of the centuries picking up what is good and cherishing it but also being bruised and battered by those human behaviors that lead to the death of being fully human, like a roller that collect lint, hairs, dust, and pet hairs, it picks up our accomplishments and failures to be authentic. Each generation has those successes and failures from which to gain knowledge and become authentically human. Because of original sin, a great swath of us choose what is bad for us even though it feels good and seems to fortify our humanity.

Christ came with the message of the cross to tell us and show us that to solve the Divine Equation, humans must die in what they consider the world to take that inhuman step of entering a universe (spiritual universe) where down is up and up is down. The cross is the key to solving the enigma of Faith. Because it is so unknowable, Christ became human to tell us, ” I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; if you follow me, you will live forever.” This movement from mortality to immortality, from the corruption of mind and matter to incorruptibility, from darkness to light, from No to Yes, from living in the world of visible reality to dying to self to living in the world of visible and invisible contraction to what reason tells us, is so shocking to the paradigm of human experience, that God became one of us to say to us not only what to do to become fully human, but how to do it. Jesus gave us the Holy Spirit in each person’s lifetime, in each age, to become what our nature intended in the Garden of Eden before the Fall. The Covenant is restored by Christ, who is the Messiah. We have an accounting from sources of a map of sorts to avoid the minefields of humanistic relativism (everyone is correct, so no one is correct), or secularism (what is real is only what you can see, hear, touch, smell, or taste)

I have had to abandon my humanity and its assumptions, what Christ calls dying to rise to a new life (the greatest level of evolution a human can attain). This is an active choice of the will (Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven). It is no coincidence that the cross is the sign made on each forehead at Baptism. The cross is the way. The cross demands I abandon all logic and experiences from the point of view of reality as I experience it, to choose almost the opposite of what reason tells me to do. This is the abandonment of which St. Charles de Foucauld speaks, and St. Paul makes a condition to enter the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. From that moment, I have developed a worldview that now includes what Christ taught, as handed down by the Catholic Church’s authority and tradition. My limitations are my own capability and capacity to keep that fire of Christ’s love alive for me and not let it go out, lest I die from the cold (sin). It takes constant care to keep this flame alive, work to cut down the wood to feed the flame, and no one can do it but me. Christ is the wood, Christ gave me the flame, but unless fire is stoked constantly without regard for any contingency, it goes out. This is the mindset of “Have in you the mind of Christ Jesus,” (Phil. 2:5-12). And it is not as though I am left without a book of instructions to follow, and the same Jesus before me in the Eucharist and Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament to save me from the natural human inclination to give in to boredom and repetition as being irrelevant. Christ keeps me alive if I do my part and have a way of life that includes, not excludes, what He taught. And what He taught is passed down through a Church run by sinners, all of them, some who will make bad choices. Still, throughout it all, the Holy Spirit will shepherd the Body of Christ forward, keeping the living members of Christ from going too far over the edge, where it is impossible to return to our originally intended base.

My task in this life is to keep Christ as present to me as my humanity, with all its tendencies to follow the pleasure/pain tendencies of our animality (apologies to B. F. Skinner), to keep that eternal flame from going out due to poor choices (Seven Deadly Sins), to carry our cup full of water without spilling it when we trip or fall. I use not only the Catholic Church Universal as a lighthouse of the way, but also the truths contained in its depository that I may not even be aware of.

The constant pull of my humanity demands that I apply an equal force to counteract and counter an equal pull from my former self (Before Baptism) to revert to mere animality and mere humanity.This force is my personal application of Lay Cistcercian spiritual practices and charisms to allow me to more effectively stay tuned to what Jesus is telling me in that upper room of my inner self, the place no humans wants to go, the inner sanctum where God waits me on the couch to sit down and wait for what silence whispers to me in the stillness of my mind and heart. Like a fire that may go out, it needs to convert me daily to being more like Christ and less like me (capacitas dei). It is not easy, and I don’t always succeed, but I have the help of the Lay Cistercian community worldwide to bring me back to a place where the Holy Spirit can talk sense to this restless spirit. (conversio morae)

I must build my own Catholic Church, not by tearing down the old one, but rather by taking the time to make all things new. Another way I see it is to daily make new wineskins to hold the precious wine and blood of Christ, which is the cup of my humanity. This is actually one of the purposes of the Catholic Church: to provide me with the authentic building materials to create new wine skins. I must continually transform myself to become more and more like Jesus as I experience Him through the Sacraments and Lay Cistercian practices.

The lives of the Saints are placed for us as a Hall of Fame of those who, though sinful, had Christ as their center, in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, until they could fulfill in Heaven what they attempted on earth.

My struggle is marked with the cross, one that Christ made a symbol of our redemption from mere humanity to reach that level of evolution that matter alone and mind alone could not raise us up to be what our nature intended.

Praise be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and forever; the God who is, who was, and who is to come at the end of the ages. —Cistercian doxology.