Soul of the World

“Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water (Jn 7:38)

Last week we said that our purpose as we await the coming of the Spirit is to present our empty vessel to be filled with the oil poured out, and let our vessels overflow to fill other vessels, that Christ may fill all things.  This week, I would like to explore a little more the vocation of the Christian (and no less the monk) as bearer of the Spirit into the world.

The presence of the Spirit of God is attested from the dawn of creation and appears throughout the Scriptures, from Genesis and Exodus to the historical books, from the prophets to the wisdom literature.  If you go looking for the Spirit in the Bible, you will find it everywhere!  This is what makes today’s liturgy so rich.  The Letter to the Hebrews states: “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son” (Hb 1:1).  The Church is careful to specify that the promises of God throughout history are fulfilled but not cancelled by the coming of his Christ.  God is still to be found in all that he has made; his Spirit still hovers over the waters.  He anoints all peoples and cultures; his truth may be discerned in all humanity’s religious yearnings.  God’s choice to make his people Israel into a priestly kingdom, a holy nation, a people set apart to manifest his goodness, stands; the Jewish people are still the people of the Covenant.  Pentecost is in continuity with all these manifestations of God’s Spirit.  And yet it is not simply a restatement of what already was: don’t you remember that God is present in all creation? or: don’t you know that God’s choice of Israel was always intended to extend to everyone?  Pentecost is a new and unprecedented inbreaking of God into the world.  God has poured his Spirit, his own inner life, into the hearts of believers.

The Letter to Diognetus is an important second-century document which gives insight into how Christians saw their vocation in the world.  Christians are not distinct from the cultures in which they live by virtue of dress, diet or way of life, but they form a “spiritual republic,” in that their values and choices place them above the ordinary in discreet but nourishing ways:
“They marry like everyone else.  They have children, but they never abandon them at birth.  They share the same table, but not the same bed.  They are in the world, but they do not live according to the world’s ways.  They spend their time on earth, but they are citizens of heaven.  They obey the established laws but their way of life transcends those laws by far.  They love their fellows, but they are persecuted.  They are misunderstood and condemned.  They are killed, and in this way they win life.  They are poor, and make many rich.  They lack everything, and abound in all things.  They are despised, and in this contempt they find their glory…  In a word, what the soul is in the body, Christians are in the world….  So noble is the post assigned to them by God, that they are not allowed to desert it.” (Letter to Diognetus, 5-6)
To the extent that Christians manifest the gentleness and meekness of God revealed in Christ and are faithful to the message of his resurrection, they nourish and maintain the world.  In this sense they are the “soul of the world”: a life-giving presence which mediates God’s salvation; the salt of the earth, the light of the world, the yeast in the dough.  

We must be careful not to take this in a triumphalist direction, giving the impression we regard ourselves a special, more worthy, holier than the rest of the motley crew of humanity.  Early Christian texts did sometimes stray in this direction, perhaps out of a certain apologetic anxiety.  Christians at the end of the second century were still an oppressed minority within a dominantly pagan society.  They had no status and no expectation of respect from others.  In our day, the Church seems to be returning to that minority status, but with one significant difference: we have a history of power and influence, the abuse of that power and influence, and public failures of integrity which leave many in our culture with very good reasons to think ill of the Church.  To speak of Christians or of the Church as the “soul of the world” in such a context might leave an unpleasant taste in the mouth.  Indeed, one thing we must not succumb to is the temptation to wield our special identity and vocation as a badge of honor in the face of our opponents.  No.  Our life as Christians in contemporary culture can only come from a position of humility.  Humility sometimes born of humiliation.  Humiliation sometimes well-deserved.  Olivier Clement comments that: “It is here that humiliation becomes humus” (Roots of Christian Mysticism, p. 287).

In this moment of history, with all its challenges, and despite all our fears, Christ gives us his Spirit and sends us into the world to save it by his power, not our own.  Like Gideon’s army, we are being whittled down to a number too small to impress anyone, but perfect for God’s purposes.  His power is made perfect in weakness, his wisdom in foolishness.  We are in the right place.  This is our time, and none other.  Here and now, God longs to love the world into life, and we are his chosen instruments.

Von Balthasar speaks of this demanding vocation as the opening of God to the world:
“The ‘few’ who perceive that God’s realm is open to them are only chosen so that they shall announce their insight to the others.  The Church on earth is this opening, this openness of God to the world; she is the place where this opening takes place and becomes a known reality.  If others are to know of it too, however, Christians must step forth from this inner realm as pure and clean as from a bath, their features shining with the sun that has irradiated them, their souls full of the music they have heard in heaven.  They must be this opening of heaven for others.  They must manifest something of that ‘effulgence of glory’ (Hb 1:3) that the Son reflected from the Father.” (Von Balthasar, You Crown the Year with Your Goodness, p. 141)

If we are called to be God’s goodness for the world, to be Christ for the world, we must let the Spirit take over our lives.  The Spirit, the inner life of God, has been poured into our hearts.  That is what those fruits and gifts are all about.  This is what God looks like from the inside: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Gal 5:22-23).  They are not a task, a moralistic demand, a list of what we should be, but a gift.  Nevertheless, we do bear responsibility for our reception of God’s gift.  A comment Fr Michael Casey made at a retreat a few years ago comes to mind: if the people you live with can’t see Christ shining through you, then it’s time to clean the windows!  What is the grime that keeps the life of God from pouring through the panes of my life?  Can I remove some of it?  Some years ago, I made the discovery that our Salve window has a name.  Did you know that?  It is called: “Out of Zion’s perfect beauty he shines” (Ps 49:2).  I think it was Mary who pointed this out to me.  And it is true of each one of us no less than of Mary or of Daughter Zion.

Von Balthasar also explains how the reception of the Spirit for others makes it less a matter of emotional experience as of willingness to give one’s life, what he calls an “ecstasy of service”:
“The essential thing is that the origin of this fecundation is the ineffable embrace between God’s Spirit and man’s, in which the latter experiences, in faith, the real nature of divine wisdom (which is one with love), experiences so strongly the Spirit invading and possessing him that his response and self-giving follow spontaneously.  The response is not ‘ecstasy,’ in the sense of violent enthusiasm…  Rather it is primarily adoration of the infinite holiness of God present in the soul, and this adoration implicitly contains assent to being wholly possessed by God for his purposes; it is ‘ecstasy,’ indeed, but the ecstasy of service, not of enthusiasm.” (Von Balthasar, Prayer, p. 64)

May our welcoming of the Spirit this Pentecost result in such an ecstasy of service, a joyful willingness to allow our lives to be refashioned by God to manifest his inner life to the world.  May we do our part discreetly and humbly, by cleaning those windows to let the light shine through to everyone we meet, beginning with those with whom we live.  And may our adoration of God’s holiness conquer our fear forever.