The Church is Alive

After Pope Benedict died Hallow had an 8-day series of remembrances about him, which included excerpts from his writings.

The first excerpt was from his papal homily on April 24, 2005:

“All of us belong to the communion of Saints, we who have been baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, we who draw life from the gift of Christ’s Body and Blood, through which he transforms us and makes us like himself. Yes, the Church is alive — this is the wonderful experience of these days. During those sad days of the Pope’s illness and death, it became wonderfully evident to us that the Church is alive. And the Church is young. She holds within herself the future of the world and therefore shows each of us the way towards the future. The Church is alive and we are seeing it; we are experiencing the joy that the Risen Lord promised his followers. The Church is alive — she is alive because Christ is alive, because he is truly risen....”

This was followed by the Litany of the Saints, and during the litany I was powerfully aware of being surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, that these saints who lived in this world in past centuries are alive now before the throne of God. I recently heard a friend say that Christians are not supposed to speak to people who are dead; but these saints are not dead. They died in this world, but they are alive now in God’s presence. 

The Church is alive and the Church is young, and when we enter the Church, whether we’re aware of it or not, we become part of this great company gathered before God’s throne. GK Chesterton said something that reminds me of the description of the new Narnia in The Last Battle: “At the last moment of all, the convert often feels as if he were looking through a leper’s window. He is looking through a little crack or crooked hole that seems to grow smaller as he stares at it; but it is an opening that looks towards the Altar. Only when he has entered the Church, he finds that the Church is much larger inside than it is outside” (The Catholic Church and Conversion). In The Last Battle, the characters enter a dark shed, but when they walk through the door they find themselves in a large, spacious country; and as they begin their exploration, the unicorn says, “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this. Bree-hee-hee! Come further up, come further in!”

Part of what it means when we say that the Church is larger from the inside than from the outside is that when we enter we find that we are surrounded by this great company of those who went before us and are now worshiping before the throne of God. Being part of the Church is more than going to sing songs and be instructed about the Bible; it involves entering into something larger than we can imagine, where we can begin the life of eternity, going “further up and further in” forever and ever.