Lifting the Lines of the Map: Synodality and a Sense of Place by Michael Centore

Something I have noticed over the past several years is an uptick in the use of the word community in public discourse. In some senses it seems to be replacing the classic terms of political geography, terms like towns or states or counties, when people speak of the ways by which they form associations. We are more apt to hear politicians talk about “serving their communities,” or the particular struggles of “frontline communities,” than we are the staid municipal terminology of even a generation ago.

Language, as Gabriel Moran reminds us, is what structures an institution, and I hear in this shift, subtle as it is, a signal change in consciousness. Community connotes a human aspect that is lacking in the standard vocabulary of administrative division; it feels less compulsory, more a voluntary form of social organization. This is why I was particularly inspired by paragraph 46 of the Instrumentum Laboris for the second session of the Synod in October:  

The local Churches express a desire for an exchange of spiritual, liturgical and theological gifts and also for a greater shared witness on social issues of global importance, such as the care of the common home and migratory movements. In this regard, a synodal Church will be able to testify to the importance of solutions to common problems being worked out based on listening to the voices of all, especially those groups, communities and countries that usually remain on the margins of major global processes. Today, large supranational geographical areas, such as the Amazon, the Congo Basin, the Mediterranean, or similar regions, are particularly promising areas in which to implement forms of exchange of gifts and coordinate efforts.

What I find so promising here is the reference to “supranational geographical areas,” which, like the term community on a local level, points to an evolution in social self-understanding on the global. Rather than conceive of our place on the earth in terms of nations or states, it opens the way to begin to think in bioregions, watersheds, and other natural geographical and geological features that bound and bind our lives in more organic ways. As an aside, this may be one way of listening to and learning from the wisdom of indigenous peoples that the Synod has, to its credit, consistently encouraged. The document continues:

In particular, a synodal Church is invited to approach the reality of human mobility from the perspective of the exchange of gifts. This can be an opportunity for encounters between the Churches in the concreteness of the daily life of cities and neighbourhoods, of Parishes and Dioceses or Eparchies. In this way, the synodal path is rooted in the experience of the communities. Particular attention should be paid to the possibility of encounter and exchange of gifts between the Churches of Latin tradition and the Eastern Catholic Churches in the diaspora.

In light of our thinking about a synodal sense of place, this last line brought to mind the lovely characterization of the Danube in Mathias Enard’s novel Compass as “the river that links Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Islam”—a spiritual limnology explored at length in a travelogue by Claudio Magris. How much greater the possibility for ecumenical and interreligious dialogue when we realize in the concrete that we share one water! It brings us one step closer to “the creedal symbol of the communion of saints” that Elizabeth Johnson says “expresses the understanding that a community of faithful God-seekers exists around the earth and across time itself, through the life-giving communion of Spirit-Sophia who forever weaves links of kinship throughout the world.” Such “links of kinship” come alive for Diarmuid O’Murchu on an even grander scale, as he writes: “Instant by instant the universe creates itself in bonded community.”

In an introduction to the section of the Instrumentum Laboris entitled “Places” (following on “Foundations” and “Pathways”—the circularity and self-referentiality of some of the language makes me agree with Tom Reese that the experience of synodality is a crucial counterpoint to more abstract theological formulations), we read that “in the context of a rapidly changing conception of space, constricting the Church’s action within purely spatial boundaries would imprison it in a fatal immobilism and produce a worrying pastoral redundancy, rendering it incapable of reaching the most dynamic parts of the population, especially the young.” That final qualifier of “especially the young” makes me think the authors are referring to what we’ve come to call the “digital continent”—the placeless, temporally fluid network of online social interaction—though we may be able to prise more out of its meaning. We might begin by realizing that this despatialized, networked self is nothing new: it has an ancient analogue in Paul’s doctrine of the Mystical Body, repurposed a few decades later by the author of the Epistle to Diogentus, an early example of Christian apologetics: “What the soul is in the body, that are Christians in the world. The soul is dispersed through all the members of the body, and Christians are scattered through all the cities of the world.” Closer to our own time is the French poet Paul Claudel, whose vision of a transnational exchange of ideas reads like a precursor to our electrically connected earth:

There is a wind, I mean the Spirit, which is sweeping nations with a broom.
When you have it unchained, it sets all the human landscape a-moving.
Ideas from one end of the world to the other are catching fire like stubble.

The Instrumentum Laboris picks up on this borderless relational dynamism in paragraph 82:

Today, this vision of a Church rooted in concrete contexts encounters the socio-cultural conditions of our times, which have profoundly altered our experience of being rooted in a given territory. A place can no longer be understood in purely geographical and spatial terms; rather, it points to our belonging to a web of relations and a culture that is more dynamic and mobile than in the past. This reality challenges the Church’s organisational forms, which are structured based on a different concept of place. This also requires adopting differentiated criteria appropriate to different contexts, which do not contradict each other, in order to incarnate the one truth in people’s lives.

The key, it seems to me, is to retain a sense of rootedness while developing this “web of relations” across space and time. I like what Robert Pogue Harrison says about the way Henry David Thoreau both anticipated and lived into this emergent global consciousness through his particular local context:

By “public” Thoreau meant many things: the human community of Concord where he spent most of his life, rooted like a tree; the surrounding woods, waters, and wildlife that community shared in common; and the country at large. In everything he did and wrote, Thoreau identified himself first and foremost as a citizen, not only of his hometown and the American republic, but of the whole natural world that provided them with their natural foundations.

To transpose this to the notion of the synodal church requires a leap of imagination. It means to reconceive of what, exactly, we are entering into when we step inside a church for Mass, to see its sacramental but also its symbolic character as a place where “all are welcome” and we can commune with others not as political subjects but in the freedom of the eyes of the Lord that “run to and fro throughout the earth” (2 Chron 16:9). It means sensing the synodal connection with those outside our line of sight yet still visible with the “eyes of Christ”: our departed loved ones, the communion of saints, the faithful gathered halfway around the world, the members of the mystical church who heed the call of divine providence in ways known only to God. In the next installment of this essay, we will look at some prayer practices that can help us deepen our feeling for this synodal sense of place. ♦

Michael Centore is the editor of Today’s American Catholic.