Communion In Christ's Body
One of the most marvelous things about the Church is that she considers the whole person and nourishes her people on every level: individual, communal and universal. While it can be easy to slide faith into one of these compartments, we’re called to encounter God in all of these spheres.
Recently, the Lord has been asking me to seek Him in community much more, which is admittedly a challenge for me.
I have somewhat hermitic tendencies; I love seeing and talking with people, but I also cherish my alone time, and I easily become drained when short on solitude. While this quality has never bothered me, I know that I tend to exploit my love of solitude in problematic ways.
Most disturbingly, I let solitude act as a stand-in for sanctity. All too often, I indulge in the erroneous thought that solitude and contemplation are “higher” forms of being, until solitude and holiness become so conflated in my mind that I end up thinking solitude is inherently holier than community; thus, I endow myself with a weird sense of pride for the introversion that surely means I have a supernatural propensity for holiness. (Can you hear God laughing? Me too.)
So, as part of my self-righteous quest to be a superhuman contemplative, I picked up Thomas Merton’s book “New Seeds of Contemplation,” utterly convinced that solitude is the best way to Christ.
Well. As it turns out, my definition of solitude was a far cry from Merton’s own.
In this book, Merton writes: “One of the worst illusions in the life of contemplation would be to try to find God by barricading yourself inside your own soul . . . cutting yourself off from the world, and other men by stuffing yourself inside your own mind and closing the door like a turtle.”
This wasn’t exactly the affirmation I was looking for, but as I read on, it became clear that Merton understands the allure of solitude for mixed purposes. He writes of the world as “the unquiet city of those who live for themselves and are therefore divided against one another in a struggle that cannot end.” In other words, the world is often not a Godly place, that Godlessness fractures the Mystical Body of Christ (a “Body of broken bones,” as Merton puts it), and sometimes a turtle shell sounds darn nice.
Yet, it’s an easy jump from world-weariness to a feeling of moral and spiritual superiority (and thus isolation) that breeds its own kind of sinfulness. Merton points out, “But if you try to escape from this world merely by leaving the city and hiding yourself in solitude, you will only take the city with you into solitude.”
What’s the solution? “I must look for my identity, somehow, not only in God but in other men.”
This will not be easy. The world will not become jolly and unified just because I go forth willing to see it as such. What is more, people will challenge me, reflect my own sinfulness back to me, and force me to come to terms with parts of myself that I prefer to keep hidden. “Resetting a Body of broken bones” is painful.
Thankfully, God gives us a perfect example of communal, giving love in Himself, one Being in Three Persons. He gives us the Eucharist at a shared feast. He gives us the family as the “domestic Church.”
When I understand that God created me for both silence in His presence and communion with His other children, private moments can be spent seeking my true identity in Him, not feeding self-righteous impulses or affirming my own flawed beliefs about myself. I can fully inhabit the moment and see how I’m called to allow the God in me to articulate with the God in others, whether through prayer, fasting, sacrificing alone time to help a friend, or another gift. A line from Frank O’Hara’s poem “Having a Coke With You” comes to mind: “We are drifting back and forth between each other.”
By this movement, I will be my most vibrant self; God will animate my limbs, and those movements will help reset the bones of Christ’s mystical body.
