St. Maria on Communion
“THE MYSTICISM OF HUMAN COMMUNION” by St Maria of Paris (From her “Essential Writings”, ed. Jim Forest)
“…During a service, a priest not only censes the icons of the Savior, the mother of God, and the saints. He also censes the icon-people, the image of God in the people who are present. As they leave the church precincts, these people remain as much the images of God, worthy of being censed and venerated. Our relations with people should be an authentic and profound veneration…We like it when the ‘churching’ of life is discussed, but few people understand what it means. Indeed, must we attend all church services in order to ‘church’ our life? Or hang an icon in every room and burn an icon-lamp before it? No, the churching of life is the sense of the whole world as one church, adorned with icons that should be venerated, that should be honored and loved, because these icons are true images of God that have the holiness of the Living God upon them.
“…[At Liturgy the celebrant says:] ‘Your own of Your own we offer to You, on behalf of all and for all’…Those who His and of Him… are indeed ‘all’, that is, all possible encounters on our way, all people sent to us by God. The wall of the church does not separate some small flock from all of them. On the other hand, we believe that the eucharistic sacrament offers up the Lamb of God, the Body of Christ, as a sacrifice for the sins of the world. And being in communion with Christ, with this sacrificial Body, we ourselves become offered in sacrifice – ‘on behalf of all and for all’. In this sense, the liturgy outside the church is our sacrificial ministry in the church of the world - adorned with living icons of God - our common ministry, an all-human sacrificial offering of love, the great act of our God-manly union, the united prayerful breath of our God-manly spirit. In this liturgical communion with people, we partake of communion with God, we become one flock and one Shepherd, one body, of which the inalienable head is Christ….
“Christianity is Paschal joy, Christianity is collaboration with God, Christianity is an obligation newly undertaken by mankind to cultivate the Lord’s Paradise, once rejected in the fall; and in the thicket of this Paradise, overgrown with the weeds of many centuries of sin and the thorns of our dry and loveless life, Christianity commands us to root up, plow, sow, weed, and harvest.
“…Christianity calls us in the Paschal song: ‘Let us embrace one another.’ In the Liturgy, we say: ‘Let us love one another, that with one mind we may confess…’’ Let us love – meaning not only one mind but one activity, meaning a common life.
“It is necessary to build our relations to man and to the world not on human and earthly laws, but with the revelation of the divine commandment. To see in man the image of God, and in the world God’s creation. IT IS NECESSARY TO UNDERSTAND THAT CHRISTIANITY DEMANDS NOT ONLY THE MYSTICISM OF COMMUNION WITH GOD, BUT ALSO THE MYSTICISM OF COMMUNION WITH MAN.”
Fr Tom’s note: These words move me to tears. I’ve capitalized the last sentence because it is so often tragically underemphasized in our preaching and teaching. Mother Maria didn’t just write noble words. She lived these words in life and in death. She is a true witness in action of the words she wrote, a martyr of the ‘mysticism of communion with man’ - and with all God’s glorious creation.