The Whole Christ

St. Augustine is hailed by both Protestants and Catholics as one of the greatest and most consequential fathers of the early church.  His struggles with sin and eventual conversion to Christ, cited in his great autobiographical work, The Confessions, is as powerful today as it was in the summer of 386.[1]  When reading Augustine, we often find him embroiled in some of the great theological debates of his time – against the Arians, the Donatists, the Manichaeans, the Pelagians. 

When we read his sermons, however, we see an altogether different side of Augustine, more personal, more psychological.  Scholars encourage us to pay close attention to the preaching of Augustine because there “we come to listen to the voice of his soul.”[2]  So if St. Augustine preached a message and reiterated it tirelessly would you listen to it?

In his sermons we find Augustine proclaiming a particular message over and over again – the idea of the “Whole Christ.”

All men are one man in Christ, and the unity of Christians constitutes but one man.  Let us rejoice and give thanks.  Not only are we to become Christians, but we are to become Christ.  My brothers, do you understand the grace of God that is given us?  Wonder, rejoice, for we are Christ!  If He is the Head, and we are the members, then together He and we are the whole man.

When by faith Christ begins to abide in the inner man, and when by prayer He takes possession of the faithful soul, He becomes the whole Christ, Head and body, and of the many He becomes one.[3]

Augustine stresses the point that we together, all baptized followers of Jesus, brought together under one Head, we are the whole Christ.  The whole Christ is not the Savior alone but the Head plus the members, Christ united with the Church, all gathered together in unity – one soul, one man, one person, one Christ.  Thus Augustine built on the foundation of St. Paul (1 Cor 12) and elaborated on the doctrine commonly called the “Mystical Body of Christ.”  And what did Augustine make of the divisions, the biases, and the slander of the early church?

When the Head and the members are despised, then the Whole Christ is despised, for the Whole Christ, Head and body is that just man against whom deceitful lips speak.[4]

Think about it.  Pause for a moment and reflect.  What does this mean for us as Protestants and Catholics today?  What does it mean for Young Life leaders ministering to Protestant kids and Catholic kids?  What does it mean for us to consider the many members of the one body?  What does it mean for us to truly embrace the whole Christ?

Now the body is not made up of one part but of many.

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!”

And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!”

Now you are the body of Christ,

and each one of you is a part of it.[5]

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[1]             The famous account of Augustine’s conversion can be found in The Confessions, Book VIII.

[2]             Emile Mersch, The Whole Christ: The Historical Development of the Doctrine of the Mystical Body in Scripture and Tradition, Eugene, OR: WIPF & Stock Publishers, 2011, 413.

[3]             Augustine of Hippo, In Ps. 39, enarratio 2a, P. L., Vol. 36, 219; In Ps. 127, P. L., Vol. 37, 1686; In Ps. 90, sermo 2, P. L., Vol. 37, 1159.

[4]             Augustine of Hippo, In Joh., 21, P. L., Vol. 35, 1568.

[5]             1 Cor 12: 14, 21, 27.

"What do you want me to do, Lord?"

I’ll never forget my first calling into ministry.  I was in India at the time, sowing some last adventurous oats before returning to the states.  I had spent the last two years in Africa, serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in a small mountainous village.  It was there that I gave my life to Christ and began a life-long process of letting go of my own plans and letting God direct my path.

The Lord had started “rewriting my script” almost immediately.  My college years had been spent on two primary vocations: partying and getting into medical school.  I was in Africa when I got the letter of acceptance.  I should have been the happiest man alive.  Yet as my Muslim friends were preparing for a magnanimous party, I held the letter in my hands, that key to my gloried future, and felt nothing but emptiness.  It was my first introduction to the process of discernment, the art of figuring out what God really wants us to do in life.

Fast-forward now to India.  After saying no to med school, I had spent nearly every waking moment with God asking him one primary question: “What do you want me to do, Lord?”  Of course I was thinking big things, consequential things, things that would redeem my decision to sacrifice a career in medicine.  Thoughts of scaling mountains and dangerous missions into forgotten jungles danced through my head.  Surely the Lord had “big” plans for me and I was ready for any challenge, anything to share the glorious story of Christ, a story that had changed my life.

And then the moment came.  It was about 10:40am in Jaipur (NW India) and I was praying.  “Lord, what do you want me to do?  You know I’ll do anything.”  The Lord spoke these simple words to me: “Go home and love your mother.”  I thought I had misheard, or perhaps God didn’t quite understand my question.  I rallied, “No God, I’m giving my entire life and my future to you.  I’ll do whatever you want.  I’ll go to the farthest lands and endure the most challenging circumstances – BIG things, Lord.  Just tell me what to do!”  Yet the message was unchanging: “Go home and love your mother.”

Somewhat deflated but nonetheless obedient, I returned home.  It has taken me years to understand the power and import of that first calling.  Though I didn’t know it at the time, it was indeed my first calling into ministry.  I have come to understand that as Christians ours is a call to reconciliation.  The apostle Paul reminds us that after we are renewed in Christ, when the old has gone and the new has come, Jesus gives us the very “ministry of reconciliation”(2 cor 5:18).  And so it was with me.

God didn’t need me in sweeping programs and global movements.  He wanted me to focus on people.  And not strangers in exotic and faraway places but people right here at home, people quite close to me, people who need to understand reconciliation with God through the tangible reality of reconciliation with me.  More than anything else in the world, it was the relationship with my own mother that needed mending.  Before I could move on to any "bigger" reconciliation project, I would have reconcile things much closer to home.

In this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity[1], we are tempted to think about ecumenism in terms of grandiose movements and official declarations between church leaders.  Yet I think God would guide us to something more personal, something closer to the beating heart of Young Life.  Not programs, but people.  Spend a moment to pause and reflect.  What does God's call mean for you, “Go home and love your mother, your father, your brother, your friend, your neighbor”? "Go home and love the Catholic, the Evangelical, the conservative, the liberal, the fundamentalist."  We are one body, called to love and reconciliation in Christ Jesus.  God is calling, each and every one of us, “home.”

This picture taken in Calcutta (Dec 1998), just before coming home.

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[1]             I encourage you to explore the beautiful richness of this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity by visiting the World Council of Churches webpage at: http://www.oikoumene.org/en/programmes/unity-mission-evangelism-and-spirituality/spirituality-and-worship/week-of-prayer-for-christian-unity.html.  Grounded in the prayerful question of the prophet Micah, “What does God require of us?”, the 2013 resource guide (or “brochure”) reminds us that Christian unity can never be separated from humility, kindness and a commitment to justice.

"Come, Holy Spirit": NST 2013

“I am a person first.  I am a Christian second.  I am a Catholic third.”  Those were some of the opening words I shared on stage at NST 2013 before two hundred and fifty staff associates recently hired by the mission of Young Life.  For many, so I thought, having a Catholic on stage would be uncomfortable.  I figured that some might even object.  But I soon came to realize that the young people responding to God’s call to serve the lost and build the kingdom today resonated deeply with the vision of unity and mission, together, as one body in Christ.  I was profoundly touched.

Those words were not my own, truth be told.  I borrowed them from a dear friend of mine, a Catholic priest, who is in the midst of a painful trial.  His own commitment to unity and reconciliation had put him at odds with some who would rather dwell in the divisions of the past than to embrace a common future together.  Standing valiantly in the face of persecution, even at the hands of the church that he loves so dearly, he stated, “I am a person first.  I am a Christian second.  I am a Catholic priest third.”

What he was saying is that all of us as human beings are bound by a deep unity that begins in our personhood.  We are bound, each of us from every country and creed, by our common identity as children of God, image-bearers of the One who breathed life into our very souls.  This is the unity that allows us to see the face of God in a glorious diversity of humanity: in a Muslim who gave his coat to an impoverished stranger without counting the cost, in Young Life staff (Evangelical, mainline, Catholic or otherwise) who sacrifice their lives daily so that teenagers might know the love of God, in the kind gestures of the woman who served me breakfast this morning. 

What postmoderns can see, what postmoderns are yearning for, is a universal church, a church that is truly “catholic” (small ‘c’), that can lift up and glorify the face of Jesus Christ wherever He is found.  What postmoderns are waiting for is a love that transcends the divisions and heals the wounds of our past.  What postmoderns are beginning to see within Young Life and the Catholic Church is the power of the Holy Spirit to inspire a new Pentecost where people gather from every nation to speak, in their own cultures and languages, about the “wonderful things God has done”(Acts 2:11). 

As the liturgical season of Christmas draws to a close today, the united chorus of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” anticipates the next movement in God’s redemptive symphony – Resurrection, Renewal and the irresistible Revolution of Pentecost - "Come, Holy Spirit."

Come Holy Spirit,

Fill the hearts of your faithful

And kindle in them the fire of your love.

Send forth your Spirit

And they shall be created.

And You shall renew the face of the earth.

O, God,

Who by the light of the Holy Spirit,

Did instruct the hearts of the faithful,

Grant that by the same Holy Spirit

We may be truly wise and ever enjoy His consolations,

Through Christ Our Lord,

Amen.

~ Catholic prayer drawn from Psalm 104 and the Gregorian Sacramentary of the ninth century.

By the Better Angels of Our Nature

When Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States in 1861, it marked the beginning of a painful series of divisions.  South Carolina seceded from the Union only six weeks later, to be followed by Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama and Texas.  Lincoln’s inaugural address was a somber yet eloquent overture to unity, one graced with the language of “the Almighty Ruler of nations” and “a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land.”[1] 

The last lines of this famous speech ring powerfully today. 

We are not enemies, but friends.

We must not be enemies.

Though passion may have strained

 it must not break our bonds of affection.

And in a final stirring crescendo, Lincoln rang the “mystic chords of memory” and heralded the swelling chorus of unity across the land. . .

 . . .when [we] are again touched by the better angels of our nature.

These poetic words ring with a truth that resonates in the deepest part of us.

By the better angels of our nature,

                                    we know that God designed us for relationship.

By the better angels of our nature,

                                    we know that unity is the distinctive mark of God’s reign.

By the better angels of our nature,

                                    we know that truth is more than a belief but a living commitment to love, forgiveness and humility.

By the better angels of our nature,

                                    we know that God is hidden in the stranger, the wanderer, the outsider.

As we ring in a new year, may we choose to live into understanding, reconciliation and unity befit the kingdom of God alive within us (Lk 17:21).  May we live, all of us as members of the one body of Christ, by the better angels of our nature.

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[1]             Stephen Mansfield, Lincoln’s Battle with God: A President’s Struggle With Faith and What It Meant for America, Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2012, p.111.

At the Corner of Fourth and Walnut

It’s a famous address.  Do you recognize it?  It was that place that a young Catholic monk named Thomas Merton realized that he and the world were not strangers but part of the same family, the same body.  In the middle of a busy shopping district in downtown Louisville, Merton had a mystical insight which changed the rest of his life:

I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.[1]

In so many ways, the story of Thomas Merton is a classic tale of conversion – not just one conversion but many.  He was converted as a brilliant yet rebellious young man who lost his scholarship at Cambridge due to an intemperate combination of bad grades, drinking and general carousing.  Later as a graduate student at Columbia he was converted when he discovered a curious yet unrelenting attraction to Catholicism.  He was converted when he realized his “true self” was found as a Trappist monk, living out the rest of his life in the relative obscurity of a Kentucky monastery.  And finally, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, Thomas Merton was converted by the penetrating insight that he and the whole of humanity were truly one.

Yet late in his life, Thomas Merton experienced a consummate conversion when he realized his distinct vocation to unity.  His life was to be about fulfilling the prayer of Jesus recounted in John 17.  “We are already one,” Merton said.  “But we imagine that we are not.  And what we have to recover is our original unity.  What we have to be is what we are.”[2] 

During a moment in our country’s history when all of us are trying to understand the unimaginable cruelty unleashed in a sleepy town in southwest Connecticut, Merton’s insights may be particularly poignant.  For Merton, the importance of unity was not just a sublime platitude but a matter of life and death.  In a 1961 letter written to his dear friend Dorothy Day, Merton wrestled, “I don’t feel that I can in conscience, at a time like this, go on writing just about things like meditation. I think I have to face the big issues, the life-and-death issues.”[3]

The violence of Newtown is situated in a much larger arc of human division that started with Cain and Able.  While the creation narratives of Genesis make it clear that God created humanity as one family, the primordial presence of sin is always there to tear at the fabric of God’s handiwork.  Deception leads to division leads to violence.  Yet Merton reminds us that the madness of violence begins with an illusion which prompts the human tendency to divide:

Violence rests on the assumption that the enemy and I are entirely different: the enemy is evil and I am good.  The enemy must be destroyed but I must be saved.  But love sees things differently.  It sees that even the enemy suffers from the same sorrows and limitations that I do.  That we both have the same hopes, the same needs, the same aspiration for a peaceful and harmless human life. . . There must be a new force, the power of love, the power of understanding and human compassion, the strength of selflessness and cooperation, and the creative dynamism of the will to live and to build, and the will to forgive.  The will for reconciliation.[4]

The road to peace is peace.  The journey of reconciliation begins with the same epiphany that stopped Merton in his tracks on the corner of Fourth and Walnut – that we are all united, we are one body, willed by God from the beginning of time for a fraternity of love.  “The kingdom of God is within you,” Jesus said.  It is only a matter of becoming who we really are.  

Let us not give into the temptation of division in this time of trial.  We stand at a crossroad.  In a certain sense, all of us find ourselves at the corner of Fourth and Walnut.  Let us choose unity and let us choose life.

Life is on our side.

The silence and the Cross of which we know

are forces that cannot be defeated.

In silence and suffering,

in the heartbreaking effort to be honest

in the midst of dishonesty (most of all our own dishonesty),

in all these is victory.

It is Christ in us who drives us through darkness

to a light of which we have no conception

and which can only be found

by passing through apparent despair.

Everything has to be tested.

All relationships have to be tried.

All loyalties have to pass through the fire.

Much has to be lost.

Much in us has to be killed,

Even much that is best in us.

But Victory is certain.

The Resurrection is the only light,

and with that light there is no error.[5]

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[1]             Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, NY: Doubleday, 1966.

[2]             Thomas Merton, The Asian Journey, 308.

[3]             Thomas Merton, “Letter to Dorothy Day, August 23, 1961,” The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns, ed. William H. Shannon, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985, 140.

[4]             Thomas Merton, “Preface to the Vietnamese edition of No Man Is an Island” taken from “Honorable Reader”: Reflections on My Work, ed. Robert E. Daggy, NY: Crossroad, 1989, 124.

[5]             Thomas Merton, “Letter to Czeslaw Milosz, February 28, 1959,” The Courage for Truth: Letters to Writers, ed. Christine M. Bochen, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993, 57-58.

Shall We Stop This Bleeding?

My wife and I were moved to tears on several occasions through the two and a half hour showing of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. Yet it was one line that stopped me in my tracks – “Shall we stop this bleeding?”  Abraham Lincoln presided over the United States during a period of immense struggle and loss.  New research estimates that up to 850,000 American lives were lost in the Civil War, more than in any other armed conflict in U.S. history.[1]  We were literally shredding ourselves to pieces.  Lincoln’s soft-spoken principles and longsuffering patience not only brought the country out of war but sealed the fate of millions for freedom.

“Shall we stop this bleeding?”  The line drew my attention to a situation in a Young Life area I had recently been called on for consultation.  A member of the local Young Life committee refused to work with Catholics in the oversight and support of the ministry.  Citing biblical references and centuries-old Catholic resources, this individual pronounced that Catholicism’s works righteousness blatantly contradicted the clear biblical witness of salvation by grace.  Accordingly, the church (and Young Life) needed to be purged of such doctrinal profanation brought about by the slippery slope of ecumenical partnership.

“Shall we stop this bleeding?”  What this individual would not accept, after repeated attempts by the local Young Life staff, is that this issue has already been settled.  Justification, the crux of all the disputes of the Reformation, “the article upon which the church stands or falls,” has achieved a common understanding.  The 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification pronounced an official agreement between the Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church: “Together we confess: By grace alone, in faith in Christ’s saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good works”(JD, 15).

“Shall we stop this bleeding?”  The wound has been mended, the sutures in place.  We are, in this most central issue, already one.  Yet one careless word or one belligerent insistence on the past can easily reopen the injury and render the church powerless to do its work of making disciples of all nations.  I am proud to be a part of the “big tent” approach of both Young Life and the Catholic Church who, despite our remaining differences, have chosen to stand side by side in the fight to rescue young people. 

“Shall we stop this bleeding?”  It is up to you.    

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[1]             Guy Gugliotta, “New Estimates Raises Civil War Death Toll,” The New York Times (April 2, 2012), http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/science/civil-war-toll-up-by-20-percent-in-new-estimate.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (accessed December 12, 2012).

Bridges, Not Bombs

Last week I attended the National Conference on Catholic Youth Ministry in Orlando, Florida along with thousands of other youth ministers, priests, publishers, deacons, missionaries and religious educators.  I spoke to many people, from Texas to Alaska, Seattle to DC. 

Invariably, I got two different reactions when I was introduced as a representative of Young Life.  One reaction involved a spontaneous smile, a flicker in the eyes and some variation of, “Oh, I love Young Life!”  I met Catholics who were Young Life kids, Young Life leaders, even a few former Young Life staff.  Those who had been on the “inside” of Young Life’s ministry were deeply touched by the dynamic and palpable presence of Christ in the YL community.  Without exception, each one of them carried the vision and passion of Young Life’s incarnational model of evangelization into their current Catholic ministries.

The second type of reaction was quite different.  I could see it in their eyes the moment they heard the word, “Young Life.”  They were clearly caught off guard, trying to remain pleasant while cautiously sharing their negative experiences of Young Life.  I encouraged them to be honest and a few shared with me that Young Life staff in their areas were particularly unfriendly to Catholics.  Some, particularly in the South, noted a consistent anti-Catholic tone from Young Life.  None of the Catholics working in youth ministry ever had a Young Life staff come to them and say, “Hey, I’ve got a Catholic kid I’ve been working with and I wanted to try to connect him/her with what you’re doing.”

This tells me two things:

1)     We need to open the doors of Young Life wide and invite our Catholic brothers and sisters to experience what we’ve experienced in this mission.  Not to convert them, not to show off our incredible camps, but to welcome them into the unique Young Life spirituality that is neither Protestant or Catholic, but simply and passionately Christian.  We have an enormous opportunity to bless our Catholic friends and encourage them in their ministry.

2)    We must be exceedingly intentional about building bridges with local Catholic parishes and youth ministers.  If it is true that “we are not the church,” if our ultimate goal is to set kids on fire for Christ and integrate them into a local church community where they can continue to grow in their faith, then we need to establish real relationships with Catholic churches and let them know that we are serious about collaborating with them in the great work of evangelization.  It is not enough to say, “Oh I don’t have anything against the Catholic Church.”  We must, as St. Francis of Assisi is believed to have said, “Preach the gospel to all people and if necessary, use words.”[1]

Bridges, not bombs.  Our God is calling us together to lift up the name of Jesus, to bring comfort to the afflicted and hope to the downtrodden.  Start building today.  We are one body.

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[1]             As a matter of intellectual integrity, there is no scholarly evidence to suggest that Francis of Assisi ever said those words.  Another exceedingly overlooked point is that St. Francis was a man of many words and he unabashedly proclaimed the gospel, both in word and deed, at every turn.