My thought process in
this: Once you enter material creation, the relationality that
is the ontological architecture of the divine Persons - ["the First Person does not beget the
Son in the sense of the act of begetting coming on top of the finished Person;
it is the act of begetting, of giving oneself, of streaming
forth. It is identical with the act of giving. Only as this act is it person,
and therefore it is not the giver but the act of giving... Therein lies
concealed a revolution in man’s view of the world: the undivided sway of
thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an
equally valid primordial mode of reality. It becomes possible to surmount
what we call today 'objectifying thought;' a new plane of being comes
into view;" J. Ratzinger "Intro..." Ignatius (1990) 132] – becomes
“spousal.” And that "new plane of being" must be experienced on a
distinct epistemological level achieved by the use of a phenomenology of
the experience of going out of self, becomes spousal
as male and female.
Whatever is Christ and pertains to Christ becomes
"prototypical" of whatever is human. Thus the relation of husband to
wife must be understood in the light of the prototypical relation of Christ to
the Church: Ephesians 5, 25 ["Husbands love your wives as Christ loves the
Church"]. So... If the relation of Christ to the Church is to be
understood in "spousal" terms, so the relation of the Church to
Christ must be understood in spousal terms. That is, we are to be "unum"
in Christ:Gal. 2, 20; 3, 16 and 3, 28 which reveals itself as one flesh in the
Eucharist, that is the denouement of Baptism. This is immensely rich since it
takes the "religious" (and "the consecrated life") out of
the equation for the main-stream achievement of holiness and plants it in the baptized
one flesh union of the spousal-conjugal. As Francis is pounding away on,
Baptism is sufficient for the highest holiness since it is what makes us
inchoately “ipse Christus."
The
dismissal of the "spousal" suggests a misunderstanding of the spirit
of the Work, a disregard for the ongoing Magisterium (which is Trinitarilly grounded [including the TOB)
and a superficiality of reacting to "spousal" as canonically
"religious." Bob
P.s. Because
"spousal" does not prototypically mean male/female but Christ/Church
[again, because Christ is the "meaning" of man (GS #22), and
therefore the "meaning" of "spousal," the use of the word
is not analogical but real.
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