A time that cannot end

In the face of certain accusations that are made today against men of the Church, whether true or not, it is impressive to remember what the Church was in the early centuries. The Church is a place to be reborn, it is the mystery of Life, the total Christ, in the head and in the body, says Saint Augustine. Baptism as it was done in ancient times explained it in gestures: triple total immersion in water that closes like a tomb on the initiate, the Spirit invoked and given from above makes him be born again, soaking his whole person with light , heart, intelligence, flesh, senses, talents. It is the real entrance into the mystery: time is torn apart, one is transported into the death and resurrection of Christ and from there one draws life.

Confirmation, the most recent sacrament, accentuates the gift of the Spirit, increases the strength to realize in a unique way the new person born of baptism.
It happened that someone committed one of the sins that mortally wound the Body of Christ: apostasy, idolatry, schisms, sins against faith and the worship of God; adultery, fornication, serious offenses in personal relationships; murders, outrages, ill-treatment, that is, threats to social coexistence. In each of these cases, there is always a death: of faith, of family life, of human life. The sinner was "excommunicated", cut off from the Body. He was out of the church for a long time (from three to twenty years in the case of voluntary murder), during which he would start all over his preparation to become a Christian, if he really wanted to.

At the end of the allotted time, he humbly stood at the door of the church and when the bishop made his entrance, he threw himself at his feet and asked to be readmitted. If the brother who had accompanied him confirmed his repentance, the excommunicated man could approach the Eucharist again, that is, the thanksgiving, the bread broken, shared, the ability to see in each one a brother, a son like him of the only Father.

Spiritual life has its slow times. The awareness of the cosmic revolution that takes place in baptism / confirmation (which in the East is a single rite) is gradual. Thus from the penitential rite we arrived at the "confession", which was not a ten-minute interview suggested by the sense of guilt and the haste to seek relief, but a pilgrimage by stages, slow and gradual like the time of the soul, a deep awareness of evil. It is the penthos, a time that cannot end anymore: a penitent state of heart, a way of being made of incessant prayer, tears, love and participation in all the pain of the world.

Only in this way the Church, caste meretrix, “can function like life and not like a machine”, said the patriarch Athenagoras. Only in this way can we sinners be a little like Christ, capable of generating new life.

Flaminia Morandi
NP February 2020