Church Life Today

“It is the one peculiarity of the Christian character to be dependent … It is the Christian’s excellence to be diligent and watchful, and yet to be in spirit dependent; to be willing to serve, and to rejoice in the permission to do so; to be content to view himself in a subordinate place.” These are words preached by St. John Henry Newman in a sermon on the “Communion of Saints.” He speaks to and indeed proclaims where the true meaning of Christian life is found: it is in receiving from God and responding in tune, or in the words of Jesus in St. Luke’s Gospel: “to hear the Word of God and act on it.” Newman discerned this fundamental obedience as the inner heart of sanctity, but not only that. It was also and surprisingly the inner heart of history, not just an individual’s history, but the world’s history, salvation history. That is a profound and revolutionary thought, if we grasp it. But for Newman, it was not merely a thought; rather, it was first a life, a person, a model … indeed, a mother. It is Mary—f