LIFE IN CHRIST: chap. 2, part 3

Lent with Fr Harton

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CHAPTER 2: MEMBERS OF CHRIST (part 3)

As the branches are part of the vine so are we of Christ, as the branches grow out of the stem so do we grow out of Him, as the branches are one with the stem so are we one with Him. Union with Christ is the present possession of every Christian by virtue of Baptism. It is well to linger for a while on this point. We desire, those of us who desire Christ at all, to have a more and more perfect union with Him, and then we look at the very close union which He vouchsafed to S. Teresa or S. John of the Cross or to some other great saints, and it looks as if that union is an exclusive, exalted, and mystical thing reserved to the saints, something which we hardly dare to hope may ever be ours in this life. But union with Christ is not something to be attained, not something future but something present, something which is ours here and now, not because we are saints but because we are members of Christ’s Body. It is true that the mystical union of the saints differs so greatly from outs that it is hard to detect a resemblance, but it is the difference between the rose and the dormant “eye,” a difference of degree and not of kind. In the saints that one essential union is developed to its highest degree by the grace of God and long years of prayer and mortification; in us it is not so developed, but it may be, for we have the root of the matter in us; we are not strangers and pilgrims but fellow citizens with the saints; we and they are equally branches of the vine, though they are better branches.