The Church and her members: Now and not yet

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Aug 06, 2024

I suppose every Catholic who has ever valued holiness has been both nurtured and frustrated by the Church as we experience it here on earth. Both as a human institution (though not, of course, only human) and as a body of sinners (though not, of course, unredeemed sinners), the Catholic Church is probably at one and the same time the most hopeful, and the most perplexing, and even the most frustrating of institutions. Just when we are fed up with the human element, we realize that we are lost without the Divine element. And just when we are most grateful for the Divine element, we are increasingly frustrated by the human.

Since every Catholic except Christ and Mary has sinned, we ought to be neither surprised nor dismayed by the Church here on earth. And yet we are repeatedly surprised by the human contrasts within the body of the Church, and we are very frequently dismayed. Indeed, our relationship with the Church, just as our relationship with Christ Himself, may too often seem like a game of Hide and Seek, or a dream of constantly glimpsing and constantly failing to find. We should not be surprised, therefore, that the one book in the Bible most devoted to the relationship between Christ and the Church reads very much like an account of this very experience. I refer, of course, to the Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon):

I slept, but my heart was awake.
A sound! My beloved is knocking.
“Open to me, my sister, my love,
 my dove, my perfect one.
For my head is wet with dew,
 my locks with the drops of the night.”
I had put off my garment;
 how could I put it on?
I had bathed my feet;
 how could I soil them?
My beloved put his hand to the latch,
 and my heart was thrilled within me.
I arose to open to my beloved,
 and my hands dripped with myrrh.
My fingers with liquid myrrh,
 on the handles of the bolt.
I opened to my beloved,
 but my beloved had turned and gone.
     Song 5:2-6

An elusive union

Even as we are perfected through the Church, perfected through an ever-greater closeness to God Himself, we are constantly aware that we have not yet attained either perfection or union, and neither has the Church. We find to our consternation that, despite continual striving, neither we nor the Church herself can fully “lay hold of that for which Christ laid hold of me” (Phil 3:12-14). Indeed, the Church’s life in Christ, just like our own life in Christ, remains both now and not yet. It is in part a life of expectation: “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,” writes St. Paul, “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet” (1 Cor 15: 51-2).

It is for this very reason, perhaps, that in his vision in the Book of Revelation, St. John sees the heavenly Jerusalem coming down from heaven, fully illuminated by Divine glory, and its lamp is the Lamb of God (Rev 21:23). In this same sense, St. Peter exhorted the elders to “tend the flock of God that is your charge, not by constraint but willingly, not for shameful gain but eagerly, not as domineering over those in your charge but being examples to the flock” so that “when the chief Shepherd is manifested you will obtain the unfading crown of glory.” For Peter described himself as he would describe us: “a witness of the sufferings of Christ as well as a partaker in the glory that is to be revealed” (1 Pet 5:1-7; emphasis added).

It should be no surprise, then, that our life in Christ and in the Church here on earth is (in some ways) a constant recovery from disappointment—though hopefully an increasingly serene recovery—for even if our glory is assured, it is most decidedly “not yet”. And it seems to me that the Song of Songs captures this disturbing period of prolonged expectation. Both we and the Church know that our Beloved is very near; and yet both we and the Church suffer His elusiveness as an absence—or, perhaps better, as a Real Presence that is yet to be made manifest.

Again, the Song of Songs captures this Divine elusiveness more effectively than any other part of Sacred Scripture. Restricted in use at times to the spiritually mature, to guard against a carnal understanding of the love celebrated in its verses, it is perhaps the perfect book to express our frustrated longing for the fulfillment of all Our Lord has promised—and all He has won for us through His passion, death and Resurrection.

But have we too fallen into a spiritual rut? Are we no longer uncomfortable with the plight of the Church and with our own plight? Have we settled for the “best we can expect”, forgetting at times either the Law in our weakness or the Promises in our cynicism? Or both in our preoccupation with worldly cares and concerns?

A human lifetime can seem like a long time to simply “make do”. There is, after all, a bit of spiritual technique or even what we might call a “trick” to living in the now but not yet: It is so often a matter of the right perspective. For us, here and now, all is not light, yet even if the light shines in the darkness, the darkness has not overcome it (Jn 1:5). And so our yearning really is captured very accurately in the Song of Songs, even in the very last verse:

Make haste, my beloved,
 and be like a gazelle
Or a young stag
 on the mountains of spices.
      [ Song 8:14 ]

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If you would like to read a little more about the Song of Songs, I wrote another piece on that book in my Scripture series back in 2018: The Song of Songs: Yearning for fulfillment. This also includes a link to the four volumes of sermons on the Song by St. Bernard of Clairvaux.