Last evening, perusing the library of the guesthouse where I’m staying, I pulled out a book with a title that intrigued me: Meditations on Saint Luke. The opening line of the back cover copy drew me in immediately: “In the topography of the human spirit, there seem to be three major settings: the sea, the mountains, and the desert.” Additional references to Thomas Merton and Charles de Foucauld were enough for me to take the book back up to my room for closer study. On page six, I came across the following: Beauty is the purpose of history; peace, harmony, unity, music are different words that express the same reality. To be religious is to give your life so that the world may be more beautiful, more just, more at peace; it is to prevent egotistical and self-serving ends from disrupting the harmony of the whole.
The author, Arturo Paoli, was a director of Italian Catholic Action, missionary, priest, and member of the Little Brothers of Charles de Foucauld. His words wove themselves into what I’ve heard of the Synod’s activities these past few days as well as its overall tone. It was at the briefing on October 5 that Sheila Pires, Communications Officer for the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference and Secretary of the Information Commission for the Synod, first mentioned the proposal of several Synod delegates “to make an urgent appeal for peace on behalf of the whole Synod.” “We can all be artisans of peace, condemning all fundamentalisms,” Pires said, summarizing comments made by delegates from the Synod floor. She added that the root causes of suffering, such as arms trafficking, are not often mentioned. “We must have the courage to call things by their names,” she said. “We must name those who benefit from wars.” On the evening of October 6, Pope Francis presided over a prayer of the Holy Rosary at the Basilica of Saint Mary Major to invoke the gift of peace for the world. On October 7, the anniversary of the Hamas attack and outbreak of the war in the Holy Land, he called for a day of fasting and prayer for peace. And at the briefing on October 7, Pires confirmed that Pope Francis sent a letter to the Christians of the Middle East expressing his closeness and prayers. Gintaras Grušas, archbishop of Vilnius and president of the Council of the Bishops’ Conferences of Europe, said that the call for prayer and fasting “helps us get into the real meaning, the real purpose of the Synod” at the October 7 briefing. “Today, especially, we sense the closeness and the difficulty of the war,” he said. “As we face the questions of war, we face the rootedness that we are all one family, and that flows from our relationship to God and makes us related to one another.” Grušas underscored the connection between the synodal process and the church’s mission to be a sign of peace to the world. Though the Synod can sometimes appear to be “a very bureaucratic movement,” it ultimately conveys a deeper reality “rooted in God, in prayer,” he said. “We must not disassociate that spirituality that underlies the synodal process, the need for prayer, the need for dialogue, and the mission that we have to bring that to the world,” he elaborated. “We are one family here, working and praying for peace and for the unity within the church.” The close ties between the synodal assembly, its neighboring churches, and the rest of the world implies “a deeper understanding of what it means to be church and what it means to be walking together as the baptized on a mission,” Grušas explained. His words sent me back to Paoli, whose link between beauty, peace, and the religious life in turn sent me back to the Russian Orthodox priest and polymath Pavel Florensky’s concept of “ecclesiality,” or what he defined as “the essence of the church, existing before the institution of the church.” “What is ecclesiality?” Florensky asks in his book-length study of Christian love, The Pillar and the Ground of Love. “Ecclesiality is the beauty of a new life in Absolute Beauty, in the Holy Spirit.” It may be striving to say that the Synod as it currently stands is a representation of such “ecclesiality,” though I can detect in the “Conversation in the Spirit” method practiced around the tables of the Working Groups that process of “going out of oneself” which Florensky understood as the hidden ground of love. I hear something of the metaphysics of synodal listening in Florensky’s description of a how person “voluntarily submits to a new image so as thereby to incorporate its own I in the I of another being.” For Richard F. Gustafson, one of Florensky’s key interpreters in the West, this process of mutual self-offering “transforms the I from a self-enclosed entity into its true state of transcendence and the other from an objective not-I into a person.” Or, as Florensky himself had it, “where I is one and the same as the other I, but also different.” This is precisely that Trinitarian movement of “perichoresis” invoked by Fr. Tomas Halík at a meeting of the European delegates to the second session of the Synod earlier this year: “a mutual interpenetration that does not mean the destruction but the fulfilment of the identity of each of the participants in the process.” Halík’s words strike the right tone for the Synod’s current focus, the opening section of the Instrumentum Laboris, “Relations”: “By cultivating relationships with one another, by overcoming mental boundaries, we contribute—whether we are aware of it or not—to deepening all our relationships to a common ground: to God, who is all in all.” Michael Centore
Editor, Today's American Catholic | 
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