Where No One Is Any More Than The Direct Experience Of Christ, Or Less

There will always be contemplative Christians on mountains and on the shores of lakes and in the deserts and hidden away in the forests of the world. These are people of peace and of simplicity and of prayer and of love who think nothing of themselves and who may even use the wickedness of the world, turning these tables to benefit the poor at God’s behest. These men and women will welcome others because they value above all other things the experience of Christ having welcomed them.

This experience stands outside of all churchly structures. You do not have to be a member of any particular congregation in order to have been so touched; the one requirement is that you have to had to radically die to yourself. Their’s is a house of love, welcoming all people, and even loving those who would do them in. However, and here is a caution, neither can it escape recognizing the presence of Christ in the form of a spiritual father or mother. So while it stands outside of formal administration, this is the church...it is the kernel of the church, this acquiescing to authority. Indeed, spiritual authority is itself a charism, and one of the greatest, and you cannot get away from the fact that without living under a human, historically based spiritual authority, you do not know how to live under an eternal spiritual authority. It is categorically impossible to love God who you cannot see if you cannot love people whom you can see. Additionally, this solitude will also will be tied to the deeply hisorical understading of the sacraments, especially the actual presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Bound to priestly authority as found in historical Christianity, it eschews clericalism; the Rule of St. Benedict, for example, allows for no special ranking of clerics at any level, whose service-of-sacraments ranks simply alongside the honour due to manual labour, and from which they are not excluded.