Joy of Communion

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The most ancient and sacred temple is the human body as it came into existence with the breath of God. Incarnation was all about a man attempting to discover the vestiges of divine characteristically present in human flesh but we interpreted it as God taking flesh, clearly undermining the quest for the divine initiated by a human. Over the years, this interpretation has created a void in the intrinsically indwelling relationship between the humans and the divine. Incarnation in its inception vouched for freedom but our insular hermeneutics has given it the connotation of servitude. Communion of being has been usurped by the subject-object dichotomy. The joy of discovery has been conquered by the burden of intrusion. After all, to acknowledge the fact that the divine and human are inseparable is a discomforting reality.

Freedom necessitates accountability, thus humans chose to remain enslaved by inquisitively creating a different realm for the divine. The attempt then was to lure the people to involve in the foolish pursuit of seeking the divine outside oneself especially in institutions, like the Church, ambiguously elevated to the sphere of sacredness at the expense of desecrating the breath of God permeating the humans. No institution, not even the Church, could offer us the tipsiness of divine ecstasy, more than the communion of humans. The manger is sacred only when Christ lies on it else it is a heap of straws.

The world has turned out to be precariously individualistic. It is considered a matter of pride to be independent. But a careful look at the word independence reveals that stark contrast, “in-dependence.” Humans can never exists as immiscible islands refusing to depend on anyone. Independence is only an illusion until a genuine need arises. One has been so avariciously obsessed with oneself that s/he even demeaned Jesus the Christ as his/her personal saviour. We are taught to have a personal relationship with Jesus when we should be actually taught to have a relationship with the person of Jesus. A selfish spirituality is antithetical to the ethos of Christianity which is essentially communitarian. Chad Bird smartly remarks;

Christianity is not about a personal relationship with Jesus. The phrase is never found in the Bible. And the whole biblical witness runs contrary to it. Our life with Christ is communal, not personal or private or individual. When the Scriptures speak of believers, they are part of a community, a fellowship of other believers…Heaven forbid that I should have a personal relationship with Jesus. For I know what would happen: I would end up, in my mind, reshaping my personal Jesus into a strikingly familiar image: the image of me.[1]
Christ encourages us to envision an extended version of family. “And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life” (Matt. 19:29). This verse does not dictate us to abandon our kith and kin but to envisage a family that transcends blood relations. This becomes all the more evident when Jesus decides to call his disciples “Friends” (John 15:15). In a world where family is validated on the ground of consanguinity; where relationships are recognized by virtue of kinship; friends enlighten us with the fact that there exists a certain relationship which could transcend all these regressive constructs, at times even the burden of an appellation; it's known as Friendship. Friends inspire us to widen are tables of fellowship than heighten our fences of exclusion. Melissa Florer correlates the friendship exhibited between Ruth and Naomi to Jesus and eruditely states;

I hear Jesus’ call to disassociate from family. What if instead of rejection, we are meant to hear a call to the expansiveness of friendship: opening up our lives to others, some of whom we may not have expected, being surprised by friendships that find their way to us? What if friendship opens up a different kind of fertility, one that is non-procreative, one that yields only flowers that never turn to fruit—beauty without production, without possession?[2]
We need to bear in mind the different forms of relationship as well. Every relationship would not yield the same fruit. As is has been said; “We must not expect our closest relationships to give us what we can receive only in solitude. We must not expect solitude to give us what only intimate relationships are capable of giving us, and we must not expect that every relationship can bear the full weight of intimacy.” Yet these contingencies should not impede us from fostering dependable relationship as it is in them faith becomes more comprehensive.  St. John of Cross reckons;

Out of a sense of confusion and loss, here, faith grows in its true meaning. It appears not as system, not as a comprehensive answer to all our problems. It appears quite simply in the form of “dependable relationship”.

One of the crucial problems with us today is that wallowing in the wave of technocracy instead of being more relational we shrink to ourselves. As the words in our facebook and whatsapp chats shrink so do our relationships. This gives rise to behavioural problems especially among youngsters. The art of authentic communication is compromised on the pyre of the pseudo-morality of the society. Fr. Jerry Kurian writes;

Most of the problems we face in society are relationship problems and one among them is the relationship between boys and girls and men and women. We do not allow normal and healthy interaction between boys and girls so that they know how to relate to one another when they sit next to each other in a bus, train, flight, class room or public space. All thoughts of what to say and do are many a time influenced by movies, serials and peer group talks on the other gender.[3]
Lent could be a time to reimagine an extended version of family that is no longer defined on the ground of blood relationships. It is a time to acknowledge the sanctity of all kinds of relationships. May we shy away from the illusion of independence and show the nerve to become neighbours to others refusing to conform to the morality of the heartless society. Emotions are to be expressed and not withheld. In the pursuit of being ‘moral’ individuals may we never forget to express love. Amen

Prayers
Dn. Basil Paul

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