Each of us ought to realize this fact: each one of us is also the Church.
The Church belongs to the second Adam, the Christ. From his side dripping blood and water on the hill of the skull, God took the Church, while the eyes of the Crucified were closing for their three days’ sleep.
When on the third day the New Adam awoke, he embraced the Church and made her fruitful with his Spirit.
From then on, the children of the Church are without number. They have overflowed the continents and the centuries.
From the beginning, they were conscious of being God’s new prophets, called to populate the earth and to point the human race towards the ‘last times’.
Their way of life was scandalous. Individualism was banned; their life was communal; private property, in many cases, disappeared; they proclaimed the News of Salvation with a joyful simplicity of witness, rejoicing in the persecutions they underwent for the sake of Jesus, and forgiving their enemies.
The first Christian group was the community in Jerusalem.
That group lived by the teaching of love. Everything was subordinated to love between fellow Christians and their love for everyone.
Listening to the Word, the use of money, the breaking of the Bread, the creation of ministers, visits between Christians and their going out in mission, everything, every decision had love as its paradigm.
It was in this way that Christians began to create the face of the Church. ‘Made’ by the Church they ‘made’ the Church.
‘Our Mother the Church’ was a phrase in use right from the earliest times. But with good reason Adriana Zarri also speaks of ‘Our daughter the Church’. Indeed, Paul himself affirmed the same idea when he asserted that Christians ‘build up’ the Church.
The history of their continual giving birth to or building up of the Church shows us creativity and daring, along with all the sluggishness, the mediocrity and the sinfulness of the human race.
It is a history that is nicely poised on a knife-edge: with the temptation to look for other words than the Word of God, the temptation to listen to other teachers than to Jesus the Teacher, the temptation to assume power of whatever kind.
Rosmini, Dostoevsky and Kirkegaard have given lively descriptions of the thousand traps that the Church has had to avoid in order to survive to our day. Her clothes today are a little tattered, her face, to use the biblical image, is blackened and wrinkled. But she is still today possessed by Christ and by the Spirit. Still today, despite everything, she is guarding the truth.
More than that, she has an immense wealth handed down of prayer, meditation, contemplation, holiness. Millions of people have prayed, meditated, contemplated and reached holiness.
Their spiritual wisdom bas penetrated the Word with a joyful labour in which were united head and heart, thought and actual experience.
They have loved knowledge and known love. ‘In love they have experienced the truth’, Paul would say.
~Thomas Spidlik, Drinking from the Hidden Fountain: A Patristic Breviary, Ancient Wisdom for Today’s World
