Jesus did not come to make bad men good; He came to make dead men live.
Thus God came into our world, becoming one of us, so that by His sharing in our life, we might have a share in His life. In Holy Baptism we are united to Him, and everything else He gives us in the Life of His Church is for the purpose of strengthening, nurturing, and renewing this Life within us. All the sacraments have this as their focus. It is the primary purpose of prayer.
Thus, stated simply, to have communion with God means to have a share in His Divine Life. He lives in me and I in Him. I come to know God even as I know myself. I come to love even as God loves, because it is His love that dwells in 1ne. I come to forgive as God forgives, because it is His mercy that dwells within me.
Without such an understanding of communion, many vitally important parts of the Christian life are reduced to mere moralisms. We are told to love our enemies as though it were a simple moral obligation. Instead, we love our enemies because God loves our enemies, and We want to live in the Life of God. We’re not trying to be good, or to prove anything to God by loving our enemies. It is simply the case that if the Love of God dwells in us, then we will love as God loves.
Of course all this is the free gift of God, though living daily in communion With God is difficult. The disease of broken communion that was so long at work in us is difficult to cure. It takes time, and we must be patient with ourselves and our broken humanity - though never using this as an excuse not to seek the healing that God gives.
We were created for communion with God - it is our very life. Thinking about communion with God is not a substitute for that communion. Theology as abstraction has no life within it. Theology is a life lived in Christ. The ancient Christian writer Evagrius Ponticus famously said, “A theologian is one who prays, and one who prays is a theologian.”
+Fr. Stephen Freeman, from Everywhere Present: Christianity in a One-Storey Universe, chapter 2, Sitting in a Cave in Mar Saba
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