As you may be aware, Father Daniel and I have been offering monthly presentations on the documents of the Second Vatican Council during this Jubilee Year of Hope. When we presented on the Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, I shared that one of the key concepts not just in that document, but indeed throughout the Council, was communion. Communion is basically the sharing of goods with another. In the case of our Catholic faith, it is sharing the good of divine life with God, and sharing in the life of charity with one another. In other words, there are two dimensions of communion – vertical with God, and horizontal with others. Both are essential to living an authentically Christian life.
This is the basic premise behind the next paragraph in Spe salvi where Pope Benedict returns to the question of whether our understanding of Christian hope leans toward an individualistic understanding of salvation, or “hope for myself alone.” (Spe salvi, 28) He answers that question in the negative, as he reminds us of a necessary truth about our relationship with God:
Our relationship with God is established through communion with Jesus—we cannot achieve it alone or from our own resources alone. The relationship with Jesus, however, is a relationship with the one who gave himself as a ransom for all (cf. 1 Tim 2:6). Being in communion with Jesus Christ draws us into his “being for all”; it makes it our own way of being. (ibid.)
But the Holy Father is quick to anticipate a possible misunderstanding of our call to live for others, as though service, or love of neighbor, take precedence over worship and love for God. The pope writes: “He commits us to live for others, but only through communion with him does it become possible truly to be there for others, for the whole.” (ibid.) To use the language of the two dimensions of communion, the vertical communion with God comes first before true horizontal communion with others. An image that I find helpful to demonstrate this is that of a cross. There are two beams, one that is vertical, and one that is horizontal. Without the vertical being in place, the horizontal is left by itself on the ground. But through union with the vertical, it is raised up to its proper place. Service to others is possible without others, no doubt, and there are many such examples in our world of that. But by loving God, our love for others is elevated and infused with the love of God working in us and through us. Living both dimensions allows us to live the cruciform life of which St. Paul writes – that is a life shaped by the Cross of Christ which all Christians should strive to live.
At the end of this paragraph, Pope Benedict uses the example of St. Augustine As he became a Christian, he was drawn by the idea of living a contemplative life dedicated to prayer and study, “choosing in this way the ‘better part’ (cf. Lk 10:42)” (ibid.) That phrase should sound very familiar as we heard it in this last Sunday’s Gospel about Martha and Mary. Though Mary, and thus contemplation and love of God may be the “better part”, Martha’s service to Jesus, and by extension our service to others, is also necessary. It is not an either/or, but a both/and. St. Augustine was “forced” into becoming a priest, and later a bishop, and though he may have been attracted to flee to the wilderness to simply be with God, he was consoled by the words of St. Paul: “Christ died for all, that those who live might live no longer for themselves but for him who for their sake died.” (cf.2 Cor5:15)
May we too see that living for the Lord, and living in the hope of the reward of sharing in His life more fully in Heaven, means to allow ourselves “to be drawn into his being for others.” (SS, 28)