“The last thing in the world I want is a personal relationship with God. Our relationship with God is mediated. And that’s the reason why without the Church, we know not God … Our faith is a mediated faith through people reformed by Word and Sacrament. So I would never trust myself to have a personal relationship with God.”
While American theologian Stanley Hauerwas could have more clearly articulated a distinction here between “personal” and “individual”, his basic point is right. We believe as members of the communities – secular and sacred, living and dead – of which we are part. Our faith is formed by their practices, even more so than their explicit doctrines. Only within the communion of saints can God’s call be heard and followed; only insofar as we make ourselves accountable to the judgement of others do we learn who we are. Authentic lives are impossible apart from what others – especially those most unlike us – make of them. This is the glorious burden of authentic discipleship. Perhaps the “modern” trend to avoid knowing oneself in relation to the other is related to that other “modern” trend to avoid knowing oneself in relation to our Other, that is, to God.
So I drag myself out of bed on a Sunday morning not because I feel like it but because my faith in God is literally impossible apart from the community of God’s people. My faith requires testing against that of a community with a baptised memory. My short history thrives on frequent checking against the community’s longer story.
The converse is equally true: the faith of the community too can be tested against the faith of the individual. That’s one reason why “heretics” and “conformists” need each other. Faith involves both risk and doubt, some forms of which are too overwhelming and potentially destructive to be shouldered by the individual alone. Jesus’ community is where the burdens of doubt can be shared safely, where the things too heavy to be borne individually can be borne corporately. This quality of sharing is not to be interpreted as an exposure of weakness but rather as charismatic, that is, as a gift.
Faith can be celebrated and faith’s loves embodied in the practices of community-forming liturgies whereby we dramatise our graced convictions and spur each other on to participate in, and be continually recreated by, the faith we share and which has taken hold of us. At the core of this action, participation and recreation is the Eucharist, that event around which communities gather both to remember and be re-membered. The community called by God and re-membered around generous helpings of broken loaves and poured-out bottles of pinot noir is ever the apostolic community. It is always a people being “sent” out into a strange land in order to invite others to fruitful sharing together.
By Jason Goroncy