While struggling to write this sharing, an inspiration came while I was watching the 3rd Season of the TV Series Fringe. For most of us, this series would not be something which is familiar to us. The series focuses on what the characters call “Fringe events”, science which hovers on the periphery of accepted science e.g. wormholes, ESP, Telekinesis, parallel universes etc.
The scientist in the show found a way to enter into another parallel world, much like ours and brought back someone who did not belong to him. This event started off a chain of events which caused both worlds to experience degradation and eventual destruction. There was hope however. The person whom the scientist brought over was the one to save them by putting himself into a machine.
In the cliffhanger episode of the 3rd season, this so called saviour went 15 years ahead into the future and saw what would happen and so realiaed that he had to go back to the past and make a different choice in order to avoid the end of both worlds. And so he did, he brought the people of the two world together so that they could work hand in hand to fix the degradation that was destroying both worlds.
I am not telling you this because I want you to watch the show. Rather, I was struck by the choice that the so called saviour made; the choice to bring both worlds together, to unite them to fight for survival.
The theme for this month is Mission to Foster Unity. Very often, we become united during the time of crisis, when disaster strikes. Just like the so called saviiour of the Fringe TV Series, it is up to us to make that choice whether to be united or to be separated. But unlike the TV show, we do not have the luxury of reversing our decision.
In the Decree Unitatis Redintegratio, (Decree on Ecumenism), the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council stated that, “The restoration of unity among all Christians is one of the principal concerns of the Second Vatican Council. Christ the Lord founded one Church and one Church only. However, many Christian communions present themselves to men as the true inheritors of Jesus Christ; all indeed profess to be followers of the Lord but differ in mind and go their different ways, as if Christ Himself were divided. Such division openly contradicts the will of Christ, scandalises the world, and damages the holy cause of preaching the Gospel to every creature.”
Unity is essential to the followers of Jesus. It is not just friendliness or togetherness, but perfect oneness: "that they may be one even as we are one"--we, Jesus' followers, are to have the oneness of God! In other words, Christians should give themselves completely to each other just as do the Persons of the Trinity, who are themselves, complete gift of self. As the Church is the body of Christ (cf. I Cor 12:13, Ephesians 1:23), she should reveal the love and unity of God.
The measure of following Jesus is love, a love that will manifest itself as unity:
I pray nor only for these, but also for those who through their teaching will come to believe in me. May they all be one, just as, Father, you are in me and I am in you, so that they also may be in us, sp that the world may believe it was you who sent me. I have given them the glory which you gave to me that they may be one as we are one. With me in them and you in me, may they be so perfected in unity tha the world may recognise that it was you who sent me and that you have loved them as you have loved me. (John 17:20-23)
The love among His disciples reveals their discipleship and finds its model in Christ in the total outpouring of His love on the cross. Unity lies at the heart of his mission; Jesus died for the unity of God's children: "Jesus [would] die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad." (John 11:51-52). The Acts of the Apostles confirms the reality of unity in the early Church when it reports that "the company of those who believed were of one heart and soul..." (4:32).
How is it possible to remain divided, if we have been "buried" through Baptism in the Lord's death, in the very act by which God, through the death of his Son, has broken down the walls of division? Division "openly contradicts the will of Christ, provides a stumbling block to the world, and inflicts damage on the most holy cause of proclaiming the Good News to every creature".
Division among Christians strikes are the heart of the Gospel message and impedes the Church from manifesting Christ's love and therefore his divinity to the world.
Lack of unity is a serious obstacle to the witness of evangelisation. Division contradicts the truth of the Gospel, an essential element of which is the call to unity, so that non-believers who meet missionaries each preaching different versions of the Gospel will think it to be a source of division, despite its presentation as a way of love.
Pope Paul VI, in his Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi [no. 77] put it this way:
As evangelisers, we must offer Christ's faithful not the image of people divided and separated by unedifying quarrels, but the image of people who are mature in faith and capable of finding a meeting-point beyond the real tensions, thanks to a shared, sincere and disinterested search for truth. Yes, the destiny of evangelisation is certainly bound up with the witness of unity given by the Church ... At this point we wish to emphasise the sign of unity among all Christians as the way and instrument of evangelisation. The division among Christians is a serious reality which impedes the very work of Christ.
Since the divisions in the Church so directly contradict the message of Jesus, the cause is that which contradicts Jesus and his message: sin. But who's sin?
There are many contributing causes behind division, but in the end, we must blame the sins of us Christians. No one is innocent of the sins that have led to division; exclusively blaming the "other side" is not only unhelpful, but also false:
If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us." (I John 1:8-10)
We Christians are sinners, called to conversion by the Lord who came to save sinners, not the just. Individual Christians as well as Christian communities must examine their consciences, acknowledge their condition as sinners and ask God for grace to undergo an interior conversion--to be radically (``to the root'') converted to the Truth of Christ. We must ask for the grace to leave useless controversies behind.
But before we can we talk of healing the divisions between churches, I feel that we need to heal the divisions that exists in our own community. We can say that no such division exist but deep down, we know that this is not true. We only need to look at our BECs and ministries to find this.
As I have mentioned during my sharing on “BEC and Mission”, “our mission can only be successful if we work together as one community instead of wanting to hog all glory for ourselves.” If we cannot be united, how can we talk about uniting the other churches? It would be like telling other people to clean up their house when our own house looks like a rubbish dump. Until and unless we clean up after ourselves, we can never tell others to clean up. But how to do this? How to foster unity among ourselves?
The key to this lies in the teaching of the Apostles, which, coincidentally, is our theme for our Jubilee Year celebration; Acts 2:42. “These remained faithful to the teaching of the apostles, to the brotherhood, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers'.
In the passage, we find four characteristics that define the early Christian community as a place of unity and love. In his address for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI says, “that already at the moment of Pentecost the Holy Spirit descended on persons of different language and culture: this means that the Church embraces from the beginning people of different origins and, yet, precisely from these differences the Spirit creates one body. Pentecost, as the beginning of the Church, marks the enlargement of God's Covenant with all creatures, with all peoples at all times, so that the whole of creation will walk towards its true objective: to be a place of unity and love.
Let us then look at the passage. We have listening to the teaching of the Apostles, that is, listening to the testimony that they give of the mission, life, death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus. The community of believers recognises every effort made for the building of unity between Christians passes through the deepening of fidelity to the depositum fidei which the Apostles transmit to us. Firmness in the faith is the basis of Christian unity.
Secondly we have fraternal communion. In the times of the early Christian community, as also in our days, this is the most tangible expression, above all for the outside world, of the unity among the disciples of the Lord. We read in the Acts of the Apostles that the first Christians held everything in common and that those who had properties and goods sold them to distribute to the needy (cf. Acts 2:44-45)
Essential also in the life of the early community was the moment of the breaking of the bread, in which the Lord himself makes himself present with the only sacrifice of the Cross in his giving himself completely for the life of his friends. The Church lives from the Eucharist. This truth does not express only a daily experience of faith, but encloses in synthesis the nucleus of the mystery of the Church". Communion in Christ's sacrifice is the culmination of our union with God and therefore also represents the plenitude of the unity of the disciples of Christ, full communion
Prayer has always been the constant attitude of the disciples of Christ, what supports their daily lives in obedience to the will of God, as attested to us also by the words of the Apostle Paul, who writes to the Thessalonians in his first letter "rejoice always, pray constantly, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you" (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18; Ephesians 6:18). Christian prayer, as attested to us in the words of the Our Father, prayer of the family -- the "we" of the children of God, of the brothers and sisters -- speaks to a common Father. To be in an attitude of prayer, hence, implies being open to fraternity. Only in the "we" can we say the Our Father.
In the words of Pope Benedict XVI, “The path to visible unity among all Christians resides in prayer, because fundamentally we do not "build" unity, but it is "built" by God, it comes from Him, from the Trinitarian Mystery, from the unity of the Father with the Son in the dialogue of love which is the Holy Spirit and our ecumenical effort should be open to divine action, it must be a daily invocation of God's help. The Church is His and not ours.”
To conclude I would to share this quote from Thomas Merton with you, “We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.”
The question for us is this; are willing to make the choice to change and be united amongst ourselves? If we can consciously make that choice, then our path to foster unity would have already begun. Do we dare to take that step?
