Communion and a sense of belonging

Fergal Mac Eoinín

Communion is the strongest of human desires. Its sense of belonging drives our actions and creativity as we strive to make our mark, create our legacy or express our love. Communion is a passion that we all share equally but experience and other factors affect the level of its expression. Some of us go so far as to excommunicate ourselves completely while others give everything in a self-sacrificing love.

The high ideal of all faith claims nothing more than that God is good and that all that is good is of God. For the Christian, that full goodness of God was pleased to dwell in Jesus of Nazareth. To follow his instruction and share in communion with him is to share in communion with God. The old language of blood sacrifice endures but the sacrifice of Christ is celebrated without need for a kill; offering a communion sacrifice to anybody who wishes good. Experience and other factors often hamper its acceptance.

The ritualised challenge of Christian Communion is a call to repair the glitches in our sense of belonging. The declarations that every transgression is forgivable, that inadequacy can be overlooked and any damage can be repaired inspire and repulse us in different measures. Individually, our levels of acceptance and rejection of these affect our relationship to God and church more than anything else ever does. The demands of mercy and forgiveness are the most difficult to accept. From the very beginning many people walked away from Jesus’s command to forgive from the heart and they still do to this day. Conforming to simple social norms, fashions and opinions can also deliver some level of communion. Trying to live a life of authentic goodness is not a task for the weak-willed. Even those who try to live good lives struggle. Time and time again, many return to the ideal, seeking encouragement and the strength to persevere together.

We call our neighbourhoods communities and our work colleagues teams. Our language and attitude is that of communion but our conversation and practices can be so different. Communion struggles in a world of fault-finding, criticism and gossip. Finding communion in a world of exteriors is also a difficult task. Tolerance cannot properly sate our thirst for communion but it is often all that is on offer. Away from the competitiveness and pressure of trying to remain in social communion there is a simpler tribunal that values us by how we much we tried to love.

The real heroes of our lives are always the people who loved us and we loved them. Their memories make them present to us in a way that transcends death and time. It is a communion based on pure forgiveness, an expression of the absoluteness of true love and a power that inspires and influences. Although we speak more about the bad people, the influence of the good ones has more effect. The church calls this “the communion of saints”. So when the church follows Christ’s instruction to “eat his flesh and drink his blood”, it does so as a communion with him in the communion of saints which transcends death and time. It is a communion with God, Christ and with each other.

Craving this communion is truly human. When a community of faith gathers to celebrate Holy Communion it always asks for forgiveness first. It is not a celebration of perfect people; it is the prayer of ordinary folk doing their best to love. Nor is it an elite that God chose; it is a mob that is trying to choose God.