A Spiritual Commonwealth

As a young convert in the Christian faith, one verse among many served to encourage my sensibilities as to the call of devotion and mission I would be accepting: "Bear one another's burden's and, thus, fulfill the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2). This made clear to me the nature of my Lord, one of compassion, and of His Kingdom, a commonwealth of grace. It touched the heart of my natural cravings for community and, with beautiful brushstrokes, portrayed the art of a broken world restored, animated by the dance of relationship breathing and pulsing through the motions of integrity, faith, civility, diligence, and love.

Wendell Berry noted,

The Gospels are overwhelmingly concerned with the conduct of human life, of life in the human commonwealth. In the Sermon on the Mount and in other places Jesus is asking his followers to see that the way to more abundant life is the way of love. We are to love one another, and this love is to be more comprehensive than our love for family and friends and tribe and nation. We are to love our neighbors though they may be strangers to us. We are to love our enemies. And this is to be a practical love; it is to be practiced, here and now. Love evidently is not just a feeling but is indistinguishable from the willingness to help, to be useful to one another. ("The Burden of the Gospels," The Christian Century, September 20, 2005).

And so we are spiritually conscious to the extent that we recognize that the righteous requirements of the law have risen out of the necessities of repentance, reconciliation, and restoration (the restoration of this commonwealth) and spiritually mature to the extent that we laud and practice these three in relationship and vocation to the glory of God. Our burden is to serve the downtrodden: the sick, the lowly, the helpless, the widowed, the poor, the diseased, the hungry, the neurotic, and the sinful...and to call and teach them and the prideful and self-seeking of a new way, dying to the domination of the sinful nature and embracing a spirit of grace which is borne into our souls at the point of repentance.

Those who are absent from the Body of Christ miss out on its antibodies but not necessarily the work of Its hands. The Church is the servant of all and all restoration will come from Christ through the Church. For we are to bear one another's burdens and the Church, the world's. And, in bearing the burden of one who is cut off from the spirit and community of God, the Church is to commune with and enfold the least of these into its fellowship and into the blessing of its grace; yes, into Christ Himself.

In the "Credo of the People of God" crafted by Pope Paul VI on June 30, 1968, the following words give some fullness to this sensibility:

We must fulfill the mandate entrusted to Christ by Peter to confirm our brothers in the faith...[making] a profession of faith [and pronouncing] a creed which, without being strictly speaking a dogmatic definition, repeats in substance, with some developments called for by the spiritual condition of our time, the creed of Nicea, the creed of the immortal tradition of the holy Church of God...[which] is therefore holy, though she has sinners in her bosom, because she herself has no other life but that of grace: it is by living by her life that her members are sanctified; it is by removing themselves from her life that they fall into sins and disorders that prevent the radiation of her sanctity.

Because through the Church's collective profession of faith, a new vision of life, of repentance and reconciliation, is borne into the dim shadow of our fallen world; and through the work of Its hands, salvation is borne into the broken spirits and lost souls of the prodigal children of God. Restoration is the tune of its melody, and, in fact, the entire Piece has been written and played by the Master Himself. We are but the strings on the violin and the keys on the piano. But to be joined as a member of such a Body, to have been a part of the sustaining of a pitch or the blending of a harmony, is to have been a worker in the field, for the Music itself has not just the beauty of healing; it is the very Salve.