Of One Heart and Mind

Lasha Kintsurashvili. ‘St. Herman of Alaska and the Ermine’. Contemporary Georgian icon.

I have often thought that disparities in possessions and material goods, along with the power and advantages attached to them, find themselves most brutally and destructively felt not between different classes of society but within the confines of individual families and households. Put a bit more bluntly: those who bring home the bacon and pay most of the bills can often, in overt and more subtle ways, wield power which may seem to the benefit of those who have it, but which can result in the humiliation and silencing of those who don’t. And I think that this is largely what our reading from the Acts of the Apostles is getting at today, when we hear that ‘The community of believers was of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common.’ The early Christians described here formed a family, members of the Body of Christ which is the Church, and any unhealthy exercise of abusive power based upon inequities leading to the degradation of some and consequent seeming exaltation of others would have been out of place in the extreme. All this is just as true for us today. As St. Fulgentius, Bishop of Ruspe in North Africa in the late 5th and early 6th centuries, wrote in one of his letters, ‘The Holy Spirit…produces in those to whom he gives the grace of divine adoption the same effect as he produced among those whom the Acts of the Apostles describes as having received the Holy Spirit…They were “of one heart and soul”, because the one Spirit…had created a single heart and soul in all those who believed.’

We do find ourselves in a world of inequities, however, even inside the Church, even or perhaps especially within individual relationships and families. So we often must find ways for those inequities to be effectively addressed, and this can be hard. One of my favorite examples of this is that of a woman I know who, having borne her children in the 1950’s, found herself by the early 1960’s in a situation of total dependance upon an alcoholic husband who would neither allow her to work outside the home nor contribute himself to a peaceful family life because of his extreme intemperance and unpredictable fits of rage. So she took a long hard look at the situation and decided to convert to Catholicism, something the members of her extended family had opposed vehemently for years, and to share her new faith with her children: those would be the riches she would bring to the household and that would be her contribution. Many decades later, her husband’s alcoholism has long since run its course, a modest inheritance has resulted in her having more resources than he, and she, her husband and her adult children have lives of faith which sustain them in fundamental ways and have a positive affect on others in turn. Her story, to me, has been a joyous triumph and I enjoy reflecting upon it.

Just as the bestowal of the Holy Spirit was the absolute precondition for the early Christians to be ‘of one heart and mind’, so too in today’s Gospel reading (John 3: 7-15) we find that the gift of the Holy Spirit is required before Nicodemus can believe that he must be ‘born from above’. We really should remember this whenever we think we can bring others to lives of faith through words and reasoning alone. Such tactics have never worked because, well-intentioned though they may be, they are devoid of divine life. Guerricus von Igny, a French Cistercian abbot who reposed in the Lord in 1157, put it this way, beginning with a quote from St. Luke: ‘”The women returned from the tomb and reported everything to the eleven and to the other disciples. Yet the apostles considered it mere foolish talk and did not believe them.” Only later did they awake from their profound sleep of disillusionment and despair. Words brought little benefit to the apostles, until they had received the gift of grace bestowed by the Holy Spirit, when Jesus revealed himself to them in his bodily presence. He convinced them not so much through words as through his breathing forth upon them of the gift of grace.’