We are "The One and Only Bride of Christ"

Today in my Magnificat the meditation of the day is from Saint Peter Damian, a doctor of the Catholic Church who died in 1072. What he says has some application to what I am saying; I will quote some of it. This selection comes from pages 111-112 of A Word in Season, Readings for the Liturgy of the Hours, volume V.

“The Church of Christ is united by a bond of mutual love so strong that not only is it a single entity subsisting in many members, but in each member it is also mysteriously present in its plenitude. So it is that the entire universal Church is rightly said to be the one and only bride of Christ, and each person, through the mystery of the sacrament, is believed to be the Church in its fullness. One in all and entire in each, holy Church is single in the plurality of its members thanks to the unity of faith, and manifold in each of them thanks to the bond of charity and the diversity of charisms, for they all come from One.”

What I understand Saint Peter Damian to be saying is that the Church is one Body with many members, as Saint Paul says, and the Church is also present in Her fullness in each of Her members. The part that I don’t remember hearing before is that the Church is present in each of Her members; I had thought something like that, but I don’t remember ever reading it. If you and I, as members of the Church, bear within ourselves the plenitude of the Church, could what is said of the Church, in some sense, be said of us?

Since the “entire universal Church is rightly said to be the one and only bride of Christ,” could it not also be said that each of us participates in that one spousal relationship with Him? The highest level of prayer and the spiritual life is called mystical marriage or mystical union with God; in prayer, the endpoint is to become the spouse of Christ, and this we already know, especially from the works of Saint John of the Cross and Saint Theresa of Avila. The Catholic Church also teaches that all are called to be holiness, that there is a universal call to holiness. There is no holiness without a deep communion with God in prayer, so in some sense, it could be said that there is a universal call to contemplation and to its fulfillment: mystical marriage.

One of the pillars of my theory is that God made us to be His spouse. When, in the very first chapter of the Bible in Genesis 1:26, we were made in the image and likeness of God, since every other living creature was made according to its own likeness and kind for reproduction and we were not made according to our own likeness and kind but in the likeness of God, that passage is saying that we were created to be the spouse of God. It is in our mystical union with Him that we bear much good fruit. We see this best lived out in the Blessed Virgin Mary who was so closely united to God and trusted in Him above all else, that she bore the best possible fruit, the very Son of God, and she did so virginally as a pure gift from God Himself.

How great a dignity we have; we are indeed temples of the Holy Spirit; God lives and dwells within us; when we foster that relationship with God and give ourselves to Him more and more each day, our mind, heart and will more closely conform to His; the more we become like Him, the more able we are to receive Him and His life; having removed all attachments to sin and created realities from our souls and desiring to please only Him, we approach the deepest spiritual union with God; it is in this that we become the bride of Christ as an individual, participating in the life and reality of the singular bride of Christ, the Catholic Church.

Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.
All rights reserved.

The Bridegroom Has the Bride

Today I want to take a look at the readings of the Mass. I’ll start with the responsorial psalm, Psalm 149, which is the one that was the inspiration for the poem I posted on January 4. The response is, “The Lord takes delight in his people.” God loves His people, and his people sing, praise, rejoice, and dance for Him. The love is mutual and deep. Remember that Eden means delight and often has a spousal connotation. Here, again, God delights in his people and seeks us as His spouse.

The first reading is the conclusion of Saint John’s first letter. A few sentences before the end, he says, “We know that anyone begotten by God does not sin; but the one begotten by God he protects, and the Evil One cannot touch him. We know that we belong to God, and the whole world is under the power of the Evil One” (1 John 5:18-19). The Evil One has power over the entire world and can touch anyone within his power. The children of God are under the authority of God and are not subject to the Evil One. One is either a child of God and belongs to Him or a child of the Devil who belongs to him.

The children of God belong to God and so do not sin (at least not with mortal sin which he just finished explaining). He is not saying that God’s children never commit a mortal sin; the point is that belonging to God and sinning mortally are mutually exclusive. When a child of God sins mortally, he gets himself quickly to confession and makes everything right once again, or else he ceases to be a child of God (at least as long as he stays away from confession).

Once one is made a child of God in baptism, God protects us. He protects our heart so that we can know, love and serve Him, so that we can be faithful and obedient to His will. The woman in the garden was made from the rib, and as such, was made to protect the man’s heart and lead him to heaven. She did the exact opposite and betrayed her love with a kiss in the garden. Then God sent the angel to guard the way to the tree of life. This guarding by the angel is not to keep man from eating the tree of life; the guarding is the giving of our guardian angel who protects our heart, our tree of life, so that it stays faithful and true. His mission is to help us get to heaven, and there is no way there except via a trusting and obedient heart.

To protect us, we also have the New Eve, the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is the New Rib, Our Rib, who only leads us to her Divine Son and shows us how to love, trust and obey Jesus. There is no greater human protector of our heart than Mary; she is the true port in the storms of life. Her heart was sorely tested on numerous occasions, and it was spiritually crucified during at least two trials of faith. She knows what it takes to have a healthy and fruit-bearing tree of life, and she longs to protect our trees of life so that they can be a true and holy home for God and give birth to Christ in our life.

John’s gospel today has a very powerful sentence: “The one who has the bride is the bridegroom; the best man, who stands and listens for him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice” (John 3:29). John the Baptist is saying that he is the best man and Jesus is the groom. The groom is the one who ends up with the bride, and together they start a family and have children. Jesus’ bride is the Church; He will always remain faithful to her, even when she is not faithful to Him. He will never, nor has He ever, divorced her; He gave up His life for her, and He will remain with her to the end.

As each of us is one of her members, in that manner Jesus takes us on as a bride, too. All followers of Christ, all members of the Church, are thereby also His brides; we are brides in the one bride, the Church. This is the way it was from the very beginning. As God says in Genesis 1:26, “Let us make man in our image.” Being made in God’s image means that God made us to be His spouse. Jesus comes to fulfill, above all else, this reality that was from the very beginning, from the very first words of the very first sentence that has anything to do with man in the Bible. We are made to be God’s spouse, and so now the Divine Bridegroom has come to take us to Himself. All we have to do is give ourselves to Him in return, as a bride gives herself to her bridegroom. If we do and only if we do, will we bear good fruit.

Thanks for reading and your prayers.
Copyright 2007.
All rights reserved.

Overview of Genesis 1

Genesis 1 is a bird's-eye view of creation during the seven days wherein God is making and organizing the earth as a home for man. God creates and separates to make a hospitable environment in which man can live. Although Genesis 1 is written flying high above the scene, there is an extremely strong foreshadowing of chapter two wherein God creates and separates to make man a home for God.
Arguably the most important verse in all of the bible, Genesis 1:26 sets the tone and makes sense of all of chapter two. I am not aware of anyone else who interprets this verse as I see it, but as I see it, it is a much more powerful verse than is commonly realized. In fact, it makes sense of the rest of the bible. It makes sense of life. It is the source of the name of this blog.
Tomorrow I will explain more. Thanks for reading.


Copyright 2007.