Suffusion
Gathered with a group of friends for a seminar on Ida Görres, I am affirmed in my conviction: hers is a crucial voice for the present moment (see Notebook 1 February, 23 June and 17 September 2023). About the Church she writes: ‘The strangest creation of God, so unique in kind, so large, so contradictory, so colourful that no single person can take stock of her and figure her out, and certainly no outsider can ever take her all in, let alone understand her and judge her. Only she herself can do this, comprehending herself in faith, endlessly considering herself in her faithful theology, looking at herself through her mystics, loving herself in her children. Only the believer as the cell of this body, embedded, suffused with her life-process of knowledge, faith, love, participates also in her consciousness and in the spirit in which she understands herself.’ In terms of a contemporary register of terms, such suffusion would seem to be a sine qua non for synodality.
