In Razing the Bastions, Hans urs von Balthasar uses the illustration of fruit to describe how the working of God in a soul is not primarily for the flourishing of that particular soul, but for feeding another. So too, the Church exists not for herself, or of herself, but for the Other, and through Another. Christ, our Head, is the Vine; we are the branches. Apart from Him, we can bear no fruit. But a vine does not produce fruit by some intense effort of will; it merely does what it was created to do: fruit is a natural by-product of its ongoing life. So too the fruit we bear as Christians is not solely of our human effort, but a natural result of our sustained communion with Christ, which is itself a God-given grace. Yet unlike a vine, we have free will, and can choose to remain or not to remain ‘in the vine’; therefore bearing fruit, in our case, must be a cooperation between grace and nature, between effort and yielding, between persistence and submission.
The Church must constantly return to her source, and remain in constant contact with Him, in order to bring life to the world. She is perpetually nourished by Him; consequently, through her, He nourishes the whole world. In his book What is the Church, Dr. Regis Martin reminds us that “…all salvation, all the happiness of heaven, comes by and through Him… we are not swashbuckling sources of anything save our own miserable sins.” Whatever good fruit we might bear comes through us; in submission and obedience we are privileged, with Mary, to become the conduits of grace as well as the recipients.
Our parochial vicar, Fr. Leonardo Pestaño, said in a homily that we should strive to live as Christ lived, as the Bread of Heaven, giving Himself to nourish the world. Our goal, he said, is to live in such a way that when we die, we have given ourselves away to feed others until there is nothing left of us to give: to be thus entirely consumed. But what is left of us when that is done will not be nothing; it will be rather the truest version of ourselves, ourselves fully unveiled and actualized.
“To work out our own identity in God, which the Bible calls “working out our salvation,” is a labor that requires sacrifice and anguish, risk, and many tears. … We do not know clearly beforehand what the result of this work will be. The secret of my full identity is hidden in Him. He alone can make me who I am, or rather who I will be when at last I fully begin to be.”
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
This bread then, we must “cast upon the waters” if it is to bring life to anyone. The Beatitudes illustrate this upside-down order of God’s Kingdom: strength in weakness, gain in giving, joy in suffering, kingship in servitude, life in death. If we want something, we must give it away to truly gain it. All human endeavor is a search for beatitude, blessedness, eudaimonia, but too often we reach for a lesser good and find our hands too full of it to accept the highest good. We must release this lesser good to have room in our hands for the perfect gift the Father wants to give us: Himself.
In the Mass, we bring our gifts to the altar to be offered to God. What are these gifts but an offering back of what has been given to us? The Lord gives us wild grapes and wheat; we cultivate and domesticate them to perfect their sweetness and delicacy. We plant, and the Lord gives us rain and sun to make them grow; we labor to tend and harvest them. We pluck them, crush and destroy them, and through an almost mystical process, a collaboration of natural processes—fermentation, fire—and the application of human labor, grain is elevated into bread, and grape into wine. These new, elevated forms—the product of our labors united with His gifts—we then present back to Him at the altar. There, the priest offers them to God, and they are elevated yet again; God gives them back to us, now as His very own Body and Blood. We consume them, and again, in a process both physical and mystical, we are now elevated by them; by eating His flesh and drinking His blood, He makes us part of His Body. The cycle continues: we then go out into the world, thus nourished, and feed others, that they too may join in the infinitely elevating dance of Gift and Giver.
When we look at the world, we must learn to see Christ “hidden in the stranger’s guise”; it is only when this is accomplished that the world will be able to see Christ when it looks at the Church. Anyone who is willing to concede that God could exist will naturally choke on the concept that God could become a man. The scandal of the Incarnation was a stumbling block for the Jews, and foolishness to the Greeks. But “[i]f a purification and transformation of vision is necessary to look on Christ without being scandalized, how much more is it necessary when we are looking at the Church!” (from Henri de Lubac’s The Splendor of the Church) The idea that men could become God through Christ is an even greater scandal; but the idea that we must die in order to live might be the greatest scandal of all—contrary to our natural man, to every natural urge to self-preservation. But it is only through death to self that we can be reunited to God. The first Adam rejected God to grasp after his own idea of blessedness; the second Adam said to God, “Thy will be done.” Unless we likewise die with Him, we cannot be raised with Him. “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” (Jn. 12:24, KJV)
When Jesus summed up all the Law and the Prophets as to ‘love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself,’ He was not giving two commands, but one with two faces which cannot be accomplished apart from each other. But to these He added a new commandment: love one another as He has loved us. Balthasar writes: “…God does not wish to become visible to us other than in the context of His creatures…” Jesus loved us by laying down His life for us; we love Him by laying down our life for others as He did for us. In so doing, we are laying down our lives for Him.
If we, as the Church, are to bring to bear in the world the eternal Word of God, we must remain in Him and bear good fruit. That fruit can be recognized as holiness. Balthasar underlines this: “[H]oliness is the best proof that the Church still has something to say to the present and the coming time, despite her age and her wisdom of old age.” All the Church’s traditions, teachings, doctrines, and dogmas will fall on deaf ears if they are not vivified by the electric zeal of a life lived on fire for love of God. Love is the wellspring we tap into through communion with Christ; it is the gift given and the Giver Himself. But the world has no fondness for believers “so heavenly minded they’re no earthly good.” The world however, does sit up and take notice when Christians love the unlovable, those who cannot or will not reciprocate. The Church has always been distinguishable by her self-giving love for “the least of these”. Those outside may think it folly, a waste, a scandal; or they may think it supernatural; either way, they will notice. This “sign of contradiction” has always been the mark of Divine Love.
This mysterious interplay is how the Church can be called ever ancient yet ever new. But this dying and rebirth is not a cycle, like reincarnation. It is simultaneous: it is Incarnational. This continuous and simultaneous process of dying and growing maintains the Church’s relevance in a world that stays the same no matter how much it changes. Balthasar reminds us that “the truth of the Christian life is like manna: it is not possible to hoard it for it is fresh today and spoiled tomorrow.” When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we ask God for daily bread. Just as we need bread each day to sustain our physical life, we need the Bread of Life daily to sustain our spiritual life. This bread must be baked fresh each day, but in order to remain bread, must always be baked according to the recipe. We cannot simply decide one day that we should like to bake our bread using only sand. So also the Church cannot change her message, for the truth she bears and safeguards is Christ’s message, the Word of God spoken since the beginning, and not her own truth. If bread does not nourish, it does not serve its purpose; if the Church does not feed souls, she cannot rightly be called the Church. As the Body of Christ, she and her Bridegroom are truly one flesh. He gives His flesh for the life of the world (Jn. 6:51), and in this way, it is also His Bride which He offers the world as the Bread of Life, united to His life, hidden with Christ in God (Col. 3:3). Like the fruit of the vine, like the grains of wheat, in offering ourselves to Him, we are elevated, transubstantiated, and united with Him, to become bread for the world.
