The Church as God’s Actualized Body of Transformative Love

The Church is the cosmic organ of the world’s transformation. The fuel of this transformation is God’s infinite love which radiates into creation through His body, the Church. Having its source in absolute and infinitely transcendent Person, the love of God is holy beyond imagining and yet, in the world, actively sanctifies particular and imperfect persons. Christians, as her members, are living cells and beacons of the Church—but saints especially so, being those Christians who are to a greater degree actualized humans through repentance and sanctification, and are themselves the fullest beacons of the Church and of God’s love, serving as such both for less actualized Christians to raise them up spiritually and non-Christians to call them into the fold. Saints are pioneers of Christ who consciously work the world’s transformation outward from themselves, drawing power through their spiritual roots in the Church of Christ, and actively fulfilling God’s commandment to Adam to have dominion, to be fruitful, and to multiply. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, saints beget saints, and so the race of Christians and their Kingdom—that of God—spread.

As the world—man and all else through him—is sanctified in and by the Holy Spirit through the Church, the unity and harmony of creation deepens according to the love of God so shed abroad. As humans, we both receive and give this love as active participants in it, being free and creative vessels of its expression. Our appropriation of this love within ourselves is necessarily linked to and simultaneous with the development of our capacity to convey it abroad; this is so because it is fundamentally the self-same trinitarian love which is given and received perfectly without interval between the three Divine Persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit eternally. Thus, receiving and giving are inseparably integral and unified within the trinitarian communion of love, of which all other instances of communion, including those between humans, are derivative. Having emptied themselves for the purpose of conveying more purely the trinitarian love of God, the saints among us are transparent mediators of this love; we Christians who are less spiritually mature have nevertheless and to varying degrees taken initial steps toward emptying ourselves of our sinful passions and thus set out on a trajectory of progressive openness to God’s sanctifying love, which enables us to become, more and more, transparent beacons of spiritual light and love for all of creation, attracting it toward us and bringing it into us so that we might offer it back up as a spiritual sacrifice to the Most High. And it is precisely by our willing, active, and synergistic participation in this holy eucharistic process that God imparts to us increasing degrees of His grace and lifts us upward from within ourselves and beyond ourselves, in tandem with others, to greater degrees of communion with Him. In this way, God is making of all His children a community of saints, a holy nation, a cosmic kingdom of love. The goal and end of all Christians—of the Church as a whole—beginning with the one baptism into Christ in which they share, is to become like Him, to become saints by making themselves collectively a unified sacrifice for the life of the world; this sacrifice is precisely that of Christ on the cross, the center and genesis of the world: God’s creative act of divine-humanization.

St. Dumitru Stăniloae, quoting St. Maximus the Confessor, offers a beautiful description of the saintly state of consciousness—saintly precisely because it is a mirroring of the Trinity’s intersubjectivity and structure of communion:

“[B]y stripping himself willingly of himself because of love through the separation from the thoughts and the attributes arbitrarily considered as his own, and by bringing himself to simplicity and identity, through which he is not at all separated from what is common but everyone belongs to everyone and all to all, and all belong rather to God than to each other, they have all become one, having through them the one reason of existence which is shown as unique in nature and in will.”¹

Seeing all persons in this light, for the saint it becomes natural to lay himself down freely at each moment for the other, finding God both within himself and the other through this loving and sacrificial disposition of will, and fulfilling the reality of God as all in all. Quite far from being an exotic or foreign mode of being (although it is certainly so from a fallen perspective), this is, rather, precisely that for which humanity was made. A saint’s love is not merely the gift of himself to the other externally as we might shallowly understand gift—although it may be perceived that way by some —but is rather a going forth from himself for the purpose of likewise calling the other out from himself so that the other might receive himself back in a greater degree of likeness to the person God truly made him to be. In this way, a saint’s personal striving is thus not in the slightest for his own sake, but for the sake of the other’s humanization; truly, just as in the inseparability of giving and receiving, the saint’s sake and the other’s are inextricably bound. There is no saint in isolation; when considered as a whole, saints in communion thus share such a stability of love that each is affirmed as distinctly himself by all others, and all saints are affirmed as themselves by each one. This allows each saint to give himself fully as himself to the other, since he has first received himself through love as gift. And this communion, grounded in the boundless and infinite Trinity, extends itself through persons always and fervently in selfless openness to all who have not yet come to share in this consciousness of God’s ineffable love. St. Dumitru, as only another saint could, gives a probing description of the personal character of the saint:

In the saint there exists nothing that is trivial, nothing coarse, nothing base, nothing affected, nothing insincere. In him the culmination of delicacy, sensibility, transparency, purity, reverence, attention before the mystery of his fellow men (a characteristic proper to what is human) comes into actual being, for he brings this forth from his communication with supreme Person. The saint grasps the various conditions of the soul in others and avoids all that would upset them, although he does not avoid helping them overcome their weaknesses. He reads the least articulated need of others and fulfills it promptly, just as he reads their impurities too, however skillfully hidden, and, through the delicate power itself of his own purity, exercising upon them a purifying action. From the saint there continually radiates a spirit of self-giving and of sacrifice for the sake of all, with no concern for himself, a spirit that gives warmth to others and assures them that they are not alone. He is the innocent lamb prepared for the conscious sacrifice to f himself, the immovable wall that offers support that does not deceive.²

The saint is, in one person, the doctor’s diagnosis, the skillful surgery, and the perfect course of medicine. When a saint attains the  dynamically holy state of communion with Christ and thence extends himself outward toward others, as one whose roots are always planted deeply in the soil of the Church, he becomes the effective and personal means by which the Church sanctifies the world through sacrament, consecrates all of creation, and unifies its multiplicity toward its highest purpose and meaning. Although the saint is concerned primarily with the wounds of man, the effects of his mediation of the healing in Christ's wings reverberate out from the cleansed human heart through the whole of fallen creation, of which man is the macrocosmic center. As Christ affirms, good trees yield good fruit (Matthew 7:17). As Christians—as saints in the making—let us follow the saints as they follow Christ; our task, together with them, is to recreate the world in Christ, to transform it into the Kingdom and Paradise of God by drawing it up into a holy, harmonious communion in us with God.

To see the dynamics of the creation being so drawn up into God, it is instructive to consider the Church as the organism through which this occurs. The Church is community par excellence; and communities of persons are the fundamental means by which the world is brought up beyond itself and becomes spiritual—a medium for conveying progressively the infinite depths of God’s being, wisdom, and love; and each element of creation has a purpose in the symphonic movement toward this end, a particular mode of conveying God. To illustrate the interplay of sanctification and consecration between the Church and the world, I offer a lengthy quote from St. Dumitru, but one which conveys this connection well:

The elements and objects consecrated in church also receive a holiness of their own through the relation which holy persons have to them in God, but this holiness is not given in an exclusive way for the sake of the objects and elements themselves, a way which would separate them from the other elements of the world, as though from a sphere that was profane. They are consecrated on behalf of all the objects and things in the world, in a way that makes them represent all. Those who bestow them as a gift to God show delicacy in their dealing with them because these elements and objects are the gifts given by God and returned by those persons to him with thanksgiving. But the delicacy of our dealings with them gives us the power to achieve the same kind of behavior towards all things; it opens our eyes to see all things as gifts of God, gifts we must use with reverence, purity, and gratitude. Through the bread, water, wine, oil or wheat blessed in church, all bread, water, or wine used in the lives of men is blessed . . . The eucharistic bread casts an aura of holiness over all bread. Moreover, the priests receive a consecration as ministers of the sanctification of all, as active points through whom all have occasion to enter into sanctifying communion with Christ, the divine-human person, as the focal point of pure relations among all men.³

God has given us the gift of creation, but He has also given us the active role of receiving it in its potentially infinite splendor; integral to our receiving His gift of creation properly is our offering it back to Him as active participants in its transformation. Accordingly, God has given us the gift of His Son and called us to become His body, the Church, in His Spirit, which is precisely the form of community both necessary and sufficient to fulfill our role of creatively transforming creation so that we might offer it back to Him by the power of His Spirit, and thus truly to receive His gift in its fullness. This holy and integrally connected reciprocation of giving and receiving comprise an eternal dialogue between us and God—a living source of wonder and joy in mystery, of infinite love unfolding and always experienced in unfathomable newness of depth. All of creation in and through us will together become, through our taking upon ourselves that easy yoke and light burden of Christ, the perfectly harmonious Church of the Most High: God's actualized Body of transformative love.

1. Stăniloae, The Experience of God, Volume 1, p. 265.

2. Ibid., 232-233.

3. Ibid., 232.