You are probably wondering what this has to do with reconciliation, and the answer is found in our last stop. We had a retreat over the final weekend of Spring Break with the Sisters of Life in Stamford, Connecticut. If you don't know, what the Sisters of Life do is work with women facing the trial of abortion, and those who have suffered its effects, and breathe life back into their hearts and their lives through God's grace and love.
One of the results of this is that the women who are lost, deciding whether to abort their unborn children or trying to figure out why no one told them abortion would hurt so much, are reconciled with their Father. It's a process of healing through love, and that is really what reconciliation is all about. Love.I discovered this week that my vocation is not the religious life, not because I didn't feel drawn to any of the communities; I knew already that would be the case, because I am, at the core of my spirituality, Orthodox. Rather, because I paid attention to the sort of calling they had, where there ministry was rooted, and I could tell that my ministry is too pastoral to allow me to be in an Orthodox convent. At least, not for a very long time. I had already known that I was called to the ecuminical movement-- the reunification of the Church. Which brings me back to the question I asked of God this weekend-- How do you heal the broken Church?
His answer was that, first, you had to heal it within yourself. In order to affect order in the world, you must have it inside your own heart. The trick to that is to love every part of the broken Church. Only through love can reconciliation come about. Love is the root of all reconciliation-- of a woman to herself and her past, of families, of Christians, and of the world. The only thing powerful enough to affect the change that peace amounts to is through love.
Amber, I really liked your emphasis on love in this post. It seems to me like our world at times forgets about the concept of love. It’s easy to talk about diplomacy and ending war and violence but in the end, that’s not going to happen unless it comes out of love. I don’t think we’re ever going to eradicate war from the world or stop abortions from happening or get everyone in the world into one big, happy family. At times, it can be frustrating to try to make a difference and then realize that in a big scale, that difference doesn’t really matter. I know that as a politics major especially, I encounter this frustration a lot. However, your post was a good reminder that at the end of the day, loving one another is what matters. I also liked the fact that you included a picture of Gandhi. I think we need to look to leaders like him and Martin Luther King, Jr for examples of how we can enact real change in a non-violent way.
ReplyDeleteI also liked your emphasis on love when talking about the need to reconcile. Reconciliation is a stage when one experiences a hardship or tragedy. What I think is one of the hardest questions (which you posed), is how to "heal" the broken Church, and what I have a hard time grasping is when you argue we should love every part of the broken Church. In my opinion it seems impossible to love a fault or anything broken in the Church. That doesn't mean I don't love the Church, and I don't blame God or Catholicism for the wrongdoings of certain individuals, but I do think it's necessary to talk about justice when talking about reconciliation. I think reconciliation has to do with first fixing what is broken through just courses of action, accepting that justice that has been served, and then forgiving (wholeheartedly). Healing the broken Church should start first with individuals taking responsibility for their actions, accepting just actions, and forgiving and moving on. Only when we see responsibility being taken and justice being served do I think we can love the healing parts of the Church.
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