The importance of communion within this inter”“relationship of communication and community is that it is itself a relationship whose quality transcends both division and negativity. This is the greatest gift of the Spirit throughout history and the hardest to accept in our individualized and competitive culture where celebrity is given an almost ridiculous prominence.
Increasingly, each and every one of us wants the ground in front of us for ourselves. Ever more reluctantly, we make space for others with whom we agree and disagree; it hardly seems to matter; they are where we have decided that we want privacy, freedom, headspace, whatever we like to call it. More and more today people to whom I talk find that others are in their way. Communion not only transcends division and negativity and prejudice; it also binds us into a relationship with one another, with the whole of the Trinity and therefore with the whole of creation.
Communion pulls it all together. It is more than a federation and it is more than a club. It has to do with being part of something and someone larger than ourselves, not controlling this: belonging to God the Father and through God to our neighbour. It has to do with remembering and with forgetting, in a spirit of reconciliation of divisive differences, and with having the wisdom to know the difference between differences that are destructive and differences that are creative: belonging to God the Son and through God to our enemy.
Read it all.
The Archbishop of Dublin's Diocesan Synod Address last evening
The importance of communion within this inter”“relationship of communication and community is that it is itself a relationship whose quality transcends both division and negativity. This is the greatest gift of the Spirit throughout history and the hardest to accept in our individualized and competitive culture where celebrity is given an almost ridiculous prominence.
Increasingly, each and every one of us wants the ground in front of us for ourselves. Ever more reluctantly, we make space for others with whom we agree and disagree; it hardly seems to matter; they are where we have decided that we want privacy, freedom, headspace, whatever we like to call it. More and more today people to whom I talk find that others are in their way. Communion not only transcends division and negativity and prejudice; it also binds us into a relationship with one another, with the whole of the Trinity and therefore with the whole of creation.
Communion pulls it all together. It is more than a federation and it is more than a club. It has to do with being part of something and someone larger than ourselves, not controlling this: belonging to God the Father and through God to our neighbour. It has to do with remembering and with forgetting, in a spirit of reconciliation of divisive differences, and with having the wisdom to know the difference between differences that are destructive and differences that are creative: belonging to God the Son and through God to our enemy.
Read it all.