October 1: The Source of Lost Joy

I confess that I was not much of a Vatican-watcher in my first eight years after being confirmed in the Catholic Church in 2010. I remember with fondness Pope Francis’s visit to the United States in 2015—he arrived to New York, where I was then living, on September 25—and the promulgation of Laudato Si’ earlier that year, but for the most part my relationship with current ecclesial events was confined to scanning The Tablet, the newspaper of the Brooklyn Diocese, along with my local parish bulletin and the odd copy of the Catholic Worker.

Once, speaking with my spiritual father about some now-forgotten dustup over diocesan politics and how it had soured my view of this supposedly celestial, transcendent institution, he looked me square in the eye and said, “Michael, go for Christ.” He didn’t need to say “go to Mass for Christ”: the meaning was clear, even with the elision, just as the meaning of his hand slowly clutching into a fist was meant to evoke holding fast to Christ’s garment. And the two together, word and gesture, were clearer still: pay no mind to the pettiness of clerical maneuvering; focus instead on forging a bond with Christ, effected through the sacrament, and don’t let go.

Many years later, part of me still subscribes to this view. But it begs the question: where does one’s personal relationship with Christ end and collective relationship with “the church” begin? An ecclesiologist could likely give me a succinct answer, but I am not an ecclesiologist—I am a layperson, grappling with the question through images and intuitions, arriving at something like what the Dutch theologian Edward Schillebeekx said: “The living community is the only real reliquary of Christ.”

The church, for me, is a fluid organism; it slips past borders, it whispers itself through cracks in doctrine and dogma to regather itself where we least expect it. I will often use my imagination. I will picture it as a monastery without walls, or listen to Coptic hymns and transport myself to another one of its endless niches aligned in space and time. I have no problem in attending an Orthodox vespers service on Saturday and a Catholic Mass on Sunday—to me, they are complementary perspectives on the one Christ, whose church is the field of action in the formation of his Mystical Body. It is part testing ground, part para-society: society as it might see itself were the bonds of human fellowship founded on their spiritual reality rather than simple expediency.

For the past three years, the Synod on Synodality and the notion of the synodal process it has set forth have given us ample opportunity to expand our view of what the church is and could be. I keep coming back to that invitation in the Vademecum, the handbook for the initial phase of the Synod released in September 2021, for the baptized “to hear the voices of other people in their local context, including people who have left the practice of the faith, people of other faith traditions, people of no religious belief.” This, to me, is the realization of the post–Vatican II ideal of communio, where part of the church’s ministry to the world is listening to and learning from what it has to teach. The image of the church here feathers out like a spot of watercolor, not overtaking or blotting out, but rather blending with others in a permeation of grace. The whole landscape is enriched in a way described by the Nox et Tenebrae, the hymn of the Office of Hours for Wednesday Lauds: “The world appears in colored hue / Bright in the glory of the day”.

For the next two weeks, I will be in Rome under the auspices of Today’s American Catholic to cover the proceedings of the Synod. In addition to these guiding images, I go with a guiding question, or rather a series of interrelated questions: What has fired my interest in the church these past several years? How do I relate to it? How am I a part of it? In thinking about that line—perhaps nonexistent after all—where conformity to Christ within the heart opens to the world, I receive partial instruction from monk and bishop Erik Varden, who describes such a heart as “a tent of meeting.” This carries me back to the continental stage of the Synod in 2022, when the call of the prophet Isaiah to “enlarge the space of your tent” (Is 54:2) echoed through the subsequent round of consultations.

The tent as church as human heart, the church as a kind of societal leaven that lifts and aerates through relationships—these are good ways to begin to conceive of where we’re going, but a line I keep coming back to, a line that I hold within the tabernacle of my own “tent of meeting,” comes from Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest: “The mission of the Church is to discover the source of lost joy.” In a way it’s the simplest and clearest distillation of ecclesiology I’ve yet encountered, and its profound implication—that there is a lost joy, and that it has a source and can be recovered—is the animating principle of this month’s reportage.

Michael Centore
Editor, Today’s American Catholic