Signposts On The Way

I am taken by the concept of communion. Advent’s emphasis on fulfillment of God’s promises of salvation through the miracle of Incarnation is a wonderful time to deepen our understanding of it. We often use the word cavalierly in talking about the Eucharist. “Are you going to communion?” It’s like the difference between Santa Clause magically coming down the chimney with his bag of gifts and God emptying Godself to become human to save us.

With what are we “coming into union” (communing) in the Eucharist? In a word: Divinity! It echoes St. Athanasius’ famous saying: “God became human so that humans might become God.” What does it mean? For us, divinity is threefold at its very foundation—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Genesis reveals to us that from the beginning, wme into being through social processes, but that this fact ties us together by ethical bonds that are radically relational. Furthermore, this is true proportionate to how different from us we percee were created in God’s image, male and female. At the heart of that image is a dynamic relationship of the Three constantly indwelling in one another. Lofty words indicating there is something fundamentally relational about human being. We do not exist apart from our relationships.

The 20^th Century Jewish philosopher Emanuel Levinas describes this in stirring terms. Put simply, he points out that we humans cannot come to know ourselves until we encounter “the Other”. Only in that encounter as we gaze upon another who is not us do we awaken to the fact that we have a distinctive existence and identity. From that point on, he observes, we owe everything to “the Other” because we would not have a conscious existence without them. His point is not only that we coive them to be. It is another way to express the simple African truth called Ubuntu: I am because we are. We are necessarily in communion with one another. By God’s grace, we enter into communion also with the Divine. Today is a good day to give thanks for the many relationships in our lives that make us who we are, including and especially, our communion with God.