Acquiescence

Note: this is a very long post, a meditation in draft form.  I've revised it a little bit since I first posted it.

I was sitting quietly the other day, reflecting on things to do with our faith, conversations I’ve had in recent days, as a Catholic, with Evangelical/Emergent Christians, thinking about the nature of authority in the Catholic Church and how different it is from authority in the Protestant world, when suddenly I heard a word, spoken very clearly in my mind:

Acquiescence.

Since coming into the Catholic world, I’ve read and thought a lot about the quality, or virtue, of obedience, and about its necessity as a virtue to develop if one hopes to grow in holiness: obedience to the Church on matters of the faith, trusting that the Church has been endowed by God with the charism of infallible interpretation of Scripture and all matters of the faith, through the office of the Pope and the Magisterium in union with the Pope.

I have also been aware, both in the Protestant world and in the Catholic world, of much bickering about matters of the faith. At times, I’ve done my share of bickering, perhaps more than I should.

As a Catholic, I’ve done my share of struggling with certain of the doctrines hard to understand, or challenging to really accept and live. I’ve struggled with aspects of church life in the Catholic world that are frustrating, or less than fulfilling.

I’ve tried to hold a larger view of the faith than just my immediate circumstances, tried to see the faith through the lens of the entire Body all over the earth and in history. I’ve begun to pay more attention to the growing faith in the Southern Hemisphere, and taken up an interest in Orthodox Christianity, about which until recently I was very ignorant.

I’ve done all this while still remaining planted in what, for me, is the core, the root, and the trunk of the Christian tree, not a branch but the center and the root of the Tree itself, what has grown to be the Roman Catholic Church today, and those in union with her, not because it is in Rome or Latin, but because that is where Peter is, and I want to be under his authority, because he is the one chosen by Christ. I have struggled to be truly obedient to Peter, because I believe that to obey Peter is to obey Christ.

Acquiescence

Acquiescence is a slightly different word than obedience. Much has been written, by many of the great spiritual writers in the history of the Church, about the virtue of obedience. This virtue, especially when fully developed, is a beautiful and very deep spiritual condition, and a manifestation of spiritual maturity.

But in today’s world, obedience has unpleasant connotations. Blind obedience. An unfulfilled, less than fully developed self, stunted, kept in an unhealthy, childish state. Unable to exercise ones full faculties, or mind, or heart, unable to fully develop oneself and so remaining less than a full person. How we do, especially in this Western, individualistic world, prize our freedom, our ability to decide for ourselves what is right and true and good, and do what we like.

In the Catholic world, in spiritual writings on the subject and, I believe, in the lived experience of the people, there is in obedience a sense of “going against my own will, to go with God’s will,” which sets up a kind of struggle in the self. There is truth to that, a necessity for that.

Acquiescence

Christianity makes a claim to know the truth about existence. Roman Catholic Christianity makes a claim to not only know the truth, but to be able to authoritatively and absolutely define that truth, and excise what is untruth, as our understanding of it develops over the centuries.

That truth is the revelation that there is a God, He created us, we turned away from Him, and He has been working ever since to turn us back to Him, because He is the reason for our existence and He created us for Himself. We find our fulfillment in Him.

But there is more to revelation than just these simple truths, or only the words used to describe them in scripture. “I have more to teach you, but you cannot bear it now.” Jesus said this on his last night on earth. The gospels are not the end of the story.

I believe that the doctrines of the Church, including the difficult ones for those outside the Church, like the Papacy or Mary or contraception, actually are describing not just a set of intellectual ideas, but describe how the Body, which is growing and multiplying in time, works. How it is structured, how it is ordered, how the grace of God, which is Life, flows from the head through the parts out into all the limbs. Kind of like how biology describes the workings of our physical bodies. Doctrine describes the life of the Body, and the life of God. And as the Body grows, and experiences, in history, so the doctrines grow, to describe and help the Body understand the experiences.

We can debate these ideas, and explain them, and proof-text them, and argue them from now until kingdom come. We can get to know them as well as we know the backs of our own hands. But at some point, we have to step out and start living them. We have to get past ideas, and into living.

Which, for someone contemplating converting, and even for some already in the Body, takes some daring. Like how on a summer day you want to go for a swim to cool off, but you know how cold that first plunge feels, so hold back for a few moments on the edge of the pool, working up your nerve, and then finally plunge in with a shriek. And it’s cold.

But once your body gets used to the temperature, it feels wonderful.

Catholicism is a lot like that. At some point, we have to make up our minds, work up our nerve, and take the plunge. Some of the doctrines of the Church, we just can’t really know if they work, or how they work, until we experience them. We can describe the chemical composition of water, but we don’t know how it feels until we get in.  When walking down a street, we may come across a lawn sprinkler set too wide, sprinkling the sidewalk. Do we walk around it or dash through it – or step into it, and let the droplets fall on us, and soak us?

Acquiescence

In the process of turning back to God, we have to be regenerated. This is because relationship with God is not the same as relationship with you or I, where we see each other, have a conversation with each other, and then move on.

God is Life, the source of life, the giver of life – and the very life that courses in us now. God gives us the breath of life, and keeps giving it to us, from moment to moment. The only reason why we live right now is because God is willing us to, and is giving us constantly the life by which we live, the very life of our bodies, and, if you believe, the very life of our souls. God is very much right now actively involved in keeping us alive.

But there is more to life than our physical life, or our emotional or mental life, or even the kind of spiritual life that can be gained through, forgive me for saying it, non-Christian forms of spirituality (though God can work in some way through those things, though they are always incomplete, and may be misleading – but that is a discussion for another day). There is more to life than the ordinary, natural kind of life most people are experiencing.

This is because we are supposed to be living not only our own life, but God’s life, which is supernatural. God is supposed to be living in us. Our destiny is not only to know God, but to become partakers of the Divine Nature. Our relationship with God is not a relationship of distance, relating from the place where I am to the place where God is, but a relationship of union, oneness, entering in. We are to turn to God not only to know God, but so we may partake of God, so God may enter us - now, not later, though the fullness of it will only be had, and known, later.

We lost that relationship of life with God at the beginning of creation. Without realizing it, we have been living in a kind of spiritual death which has resulted in interior disorder. Lacking the life for which they were created and intended to be filled, and to which they were intended to be directed, our passions are like the wheels that break off a car in an accident, bouncing off in different directions and falling down, or a spilled bag of marbles on the way to a game, rolling every which way and coming to rest in all the wrong places. Put another way, we are like Olympic swimmers destined for the great games, but after a boat wreck in the middle of the ocean, unable to see the shore, uncertain in which direction to swim, pulled by currents that may take us deeper into the middle of the sea.

God has given us a bridge, a hand, a rescue rope, whereby we may swim in the right direction, and return to Him. That help He has given us is Jesus, God Himself come to earth to lift us up and restore us to life with Him. All Christians agree on this.

But that life, we Catholics believe (and also the Orthodox), is not only spiritual. It is physical, real, interior. We are destined not only to believe in and know God, but to have God living in us, in our bodies. Our bodies are members of Christ, and are destined for resurrection and glorification. And so God, to help us prepare, not only offers us His own life, His own body, on the cross, for our sins; but also offers His flesh and blood in the Holy Eucharist, his resurrected, glorified flesh, for our life, to feed us with His own Life, which does not pass away.  And then we become one flesh, one Living Body, with the Resurrected and Living God, through the Holy Eucharist, Christ in us.

There is only one way to receive Christ this way, in the fullest sense. Faith gives us a spiritual relationship with Christ and His Body which is real and effective, regardless of what church we are in. But there is a charism that is passed only through the Apostolic Succession, through the laying on of hands in unbroken succession from the original apostles, which cannot be duplicated anywhere else. I don’t care what the Apostolic Church looks like to you from the outside, or even to some of us on the inside. There is a grace here, a real grace that cannot be found anyplace else.

It resides in the hands of the priest, and in the Real Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist, who through the hands of the priest changes the bread and wine into His own flesh and blood, his glorified flesh and blood, for us to partake of.

The hands of the priest, raised in absolution during confession, act as a channel of grace from Christ that cleanses us interiorly of the sins that have just been forgiven. Then we are not just, as Luther thought, a dung heap covered with snow. We are truly clean, inside. And then Christ can truly come to live in us, when we receive the Holy Eucharist.  Receiving the Holy Eucharist in a state of interior grace, free from sin, we truly become, here on earth, partakers of the Divine Nature. “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.”

Christ is the face of the Infinite God, and no part is divisible from Himself. The Holy Eucharist, consecrated through the hands of a priest ordained in an unbroken succession of laying on of hands that goes back to Christ Himself, and through whom Christ Himself works, we believe is not just a bit of flesh, or of bread, but is Christ whole and entire; and through Christ brings us into, and brings into us, the indwelling of the Holy Trinity, from whom Christ also cannot be divided.  "I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. . . . not these only, but [all] who believe in me . . . that they may all be one . . . that they also may be in us."  Being made one flesh with Christ's body, we are made one flesh with His whole Body, the Church, everyone in it, and everyone who believes.

Acquiescence

At some point, if we really want to live the full life of grace in all its fullness, we need to acquiesce to the Church. Catholicism is a shower of grace, and we need to learn to step into it, all the way into it, and stand still – and let the Church begin to water our souls with the grace of Christ, in ways we have never experienced before. We need to get over the idea that this or that doctrine is bad, something in the Church is bad, or something is going to mislead us.

We need to trust that God knows what He is doing in His Church, and stop trying to control it ourselves, or pick and choose what we will or will not do or believe ourselves. We need to give ourselves up to God. We need to acquiesce.

Acquiescence derives from the word “quiet,” a Latin term meaning repose, calm, peace, rest. Combined with the prefix, according to my etymological dictionary, it takes on the sense “to give oneself to rest.”

We must give ourselves to rest, give up, and rest in God in His Church, and let Him care for us and nourish us. “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” We must stop fighting, stop resisting, and give ourselves over to calm and peace in the Heart of God, Who is the heart of the Church. “Be still, and know that I am God.” We must learn to trust, and when we do, God will feed us with His own Life.

This is different from blind obedience, or any kind of obedience that stunts the self. This is obedience that relaxes the self, and allows it to become clay in the Potter’s hand.

This is obedience that allows one to be fully in the Church, not one foot in the door and one foot out.

This is obedience that allows one to become fully immersed in the doctrines, and fully changed by them – transfigured, if you will.

This is obedience that allows us to become full partakers of the Divine Nature, because there is nothing in us holding us back anymore - and thus obedience allows us to become something so much more than we ever were before, so much more than we ever could be by ourselves.

Acquiescence

I came to a point in my own Christian life where I realized that I needed to come into the Church. I had studied enough. I needed to start living it.

And I have found that the doctrines do not hurt me. They do not lessen my faith, or lead me astray. Instead they vastly enrich my understanding of the faith, its fullness and depth and beauty and history. Most of all, they feed me, especially the Holy Eucharist, Body and Blood of Christ.

And I need to acquiesce even more deeply, for I am becoming convinced that: Acquiescence to the Church is the key to the freedom of the children of God. Deep acquiescence to every point, every doctrine, every practice, every teaching, leads to freedom, for there we are remade, deeply, into what God would have us be, not what we would have ourselves be.  Obedience allows us to become fully human, and fully ourselves, in the way God envisioned us from the beginning, before we ever came to be: human selves filled with and radiating God, which is something so much more than we, or the world, could ever imagine or conceive.

We must trust God, come fully into the Church, and embrace all of her, hold nothing back from her, make a complete gift of ourselves to her, so that God can show us just how much there is to life in His Body, the Church, and just how much life He has to give us, when we give ourselves up to Him, and enter all the way in.  For what He has to give us is Himself, and it is Himself Who is being given in the Church.  If only we knew the gift of God, the gift that is God.  Then He would become a spring of living water inside of us, welling up to eternal life. (Jn 4:10-14)