In this way, even sitting in our room in silence, by the mystery of God’s grace in us, we become part of the mending of the world. We receive the gift of their happiness, and help them bear the weight of their sorrows. Our joy is there for others, and our pain is not ours alone. We enter into the suffering, and the joy, of the world. In prayer we enter a deeper consciousness, even if it’s beyond our knowing: the reality that we belong, that we are all one living being. Our sadness and gladness mingle together into one joy. Somehow, even without our knowing, when one suffers we all suffer. We have not come to compete with one another.
Only when we keep both these ways of thinking and speaking together can we live in the Church as true followers of Jesus. When we say that the Church is a body, we refer not only to the holy and faultless body made Christ-like through baptism and Eucharist but also to the broken bodies of all the people who are its members.
What can you do to reach out, in mutual ministry, to those most unlike yourself? – Marian Wright Edelman, The Upper Room Disciplines 2010 Insulated from the lives, loves, and losses of those unlike us, unaware of the hopes and dreams, challenges and struggles of others, we miss a multitude of opportunities to be the one body of Christ. – Sam Shoemaker, With the Holy Spirit and With Fire Without this, the body is dead and no dead body, however once alive, can be an extension of the life of Christ in the world. But the Church dare not claim to be the extension of the Incarnation, except as she is infused and indwelt by the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is the real extension of the Incarnation but I also see that he cannot be separated from the life of the Church … He is the Spirit of the continued Incarnation the Church is the body of it. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many members, yet one body. Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many… God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body-Jews or Greeks, slaves or free-and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.
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