Result of the Synod of 2015: Re-starting Christianity with Holiness in Ordinary Life

     The solution to the brouhaha of the moment is the relation of truth and love. Jesus Christ revealed Himself to be the Truth: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”  That is, His very Person as Word is the Truth of the Father. Yet that Truth that He is, is pure Relation to the Father: Love. That Relation is the Love that is the Spirit. The Son, Word-Truth, is totally “for” the Father.  Thus, Truth in person is Love to death “for” the Other, and others. It is only here in Trinitarian Life that the conundrum of what we are dealing with - and why it is largely not  understood - can be understood.

      But we image it. Thus, to be faithful, you must be intransigent with truth even to death, and totally yielding in love to persons, even to death. And this, where death is Life. The Truth speaks: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love than this no one has, that one lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do the things I command you” (Jn. 15, 12-15).

     And so, divine Love and divine Truth are one and the same thing: the Person of the Son in Jesus Christ. We are persons created in the image and likeness of the Son, but, as created, finite and in-development. We become who we are by incremental small steps of  transcendent self-giving on the occasion of immanent contingent, historical, secular occasions of ordinary life. And so, we must not yield on the truth of the person to be self-gift, but serve that person - our own self-gif t - to make the gift.

     In the case of the divorced-remarried, it would ipso facto violate the truth of the first marriage – if valid – to receive communion, since to enter into marriage when one is validly married violates the truth of the bond already in place - the person/spouse already there as gift.  To my mind, the large solution is to consider the present state of matrimony, and whether people are entering it with the animus of the gift, and if not, to confront the entire evangelizing state of the Church. That is, as Vatican II was topsy-turvy from the understanding of the Church as a People of God from a clerical model of sanctity from top-down, this Synod becomes the defining moment for the requisite of sanctity bottom-up from the family. The immensity of this is what I suspect the Spirit is about in the Synod of 2015, and what Pope Francis anticipates. John Paul II and Benedict  XVI gave us the doctrinal semantics of this. Francis is giving us the praxis.

    If this appraisal is correct, then the Church is fundamentally restarting in continuity with the beginnings of religious life in the fifth century. Escriva makes mention of the parenthesis that was opened from that  period to the founding of Opus Dei in the 20^th century.