The Church as Mystical Communion
Ben Edson has been reading Avery Dulles’ classic Models of the Church, and comments on curious ringing of bells as he reads it. The best part of the whole chapter to which he refers is a quotation by Gregory Baum, commenting on the underground community churches experiments of the 1960s. It’s a classic quotation which I’ve used over the years:
Some people involved in the underground are eagerly looking for the perfect human community. They long for a community which fulfills all their needs and in terms of which they are able to define themselves. This search is illusory, especially in our own day when to be human means to participate in several communities and to remain critical in regard to all of them. The longing desire for the warm and understanding total community is the search for the good mother, which is bound to end in heartbreak and disappointment. There are no good mothers and fathers, there is only the divine mystery summoning and freeing us to grow up.
(Avery Dulles, Models of the Church. 2nd Edition. p.61 Gill and MacMillan, 1987.)
It certainly rings bells with me.
Posted on Tuesday, 23 January 2007 by Paul | Posted in uncategorized | 2 comments
Comments
Paul – That’s a great quote and the bit about belonging to several communities rings very true. the line, “They long for a community which fulfills all their needs and in terms of which they are able to define themselves” jumped out at me. I guess the reason for this is that our experiance, perhaps even where God is leading us very often proceeds our ability to articulate or define what’s happening. Thus given many of us belong to several communities of verying levels of disfunctionality there is something healthy in wanting to see some sort of healing, improvement in these communities. I guess the rub is do we stay commected to these communities and be part of the “solution”, or do we go off and try and do an new thing, perhaps with theillusion that it will not have the “problems” of the old?
Ooo, I might have to nick that quote
