Are we designed to go it alone?

SPIRITUAL FORMATION IS NECESSARILY SOCIAL SPIRITUAL FORMATION, GOOD OR bad, is always profoundly social. You cannot keep it to yourself. Anyone who thinks of it as a merely private matter has misunderstood it. Anyone who says, “It’s just between me and God,” or “What I do is my own business,” has misunderstood God as well as “me.” Strictly speaking there is nothing “just between me and God.” For all that is between me and God affects who I am; and that, in turn, modifies my relationship to everyone around me. My relationship to others also modifies me and deeply affects my relationship to God. Hence those relationships must be transformed if I am to be transformed.

Love is not a feeling, or a special way of feeling, but the divine way of relating to others and oneself that moves through every dimension of our being and restructures our world for good.

This “relating” quality reaches into every dimension of human existence. It characterizes the basic nature of all thought and feeling, which is always a thought of or feeling of something other than itself. It pervades the deepest reaches of our body, soul, and world, where our very identity—who we really are—is always intermingled (if sometimes negatively, by reaction) with others who have given us life, sustained us, or walked with us—or perhaps have deeply injured us. The call of “the other” on our lives is a constant for everyone. It is the basic reality of a moral existence, which we retreat from only into a living death of isolation. If we make it our purpose to save our life by withdrawal, we lose it. So Jesus said. But this is not only a revealed truth, it is also a testable fact of life. If you would live, then give—and receive. (Recall chapter 4.)

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language, and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators: some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice. But God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall be open to one another.6

When two people connect, when their beings intersect as closely as two bodies during intercourse, something is poured out of one and into the other that has power to heal the soul of its deepest wounds and restore it to health. The one who receives experiences the joy of being healed. The one who gives knows the even greater joy of being used to heal. Something good is in the heart of each of God’s children that is more powerful than everything bad. It’s there, waiting to be released, to work its magic. Then he adds, “But it rarely happens.”

SPIRITUAL FORMATION IN CHRIST WOULD MAKE IT SO THAT IS SADLY SO. The power of life in Christ is seldom realized, but spiritual formation in him, carried to fulfillment, would mean that what Crabb describes would routinely happen between Christ’s people. That is the meaning of the church as the body of Christ, the members nourishing one another with the transcendent power that raised up Christ from the dead and is now flowing through each member to the others. That is what produces “the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners.”

The spiritual unity of the Church is a primal synthesis willed by God. It is not a relationship that has to be established, but one that is already posited (iustitia passiva), and remains invisible. It is not made possible by concord, similarity or affinity between souls, nor should it be confused with unity of mood. Instead it is real just where seemingly the most intractable outward oppositions prevail, where each man leads his quite individual life, and it is perhaps absent where it seems to prevail most. It can shine more brightly in the conflict between wills than in concord.  pp. 182-186 SOURCE