The Frailty of Church

We become so intent upon defining Church, focused primarily on its mission or role.  We see it as system and society, as component, participant and embodiment of both God's plan and our own.  It is all part of whatever else we would see and for all of its divinity we delight most in the frailty of its being human.  It is what we seem to love and despair of in nearly equal measure.  It is always so essential and at the same time so lacking.  We draw it close and feel driven back.  It never meets our expectation yet it sometimes will exceed itself, going beyond where it is mired and find in practice all of the promise it has always had.

We are critical of Church, bound so inexorably to it and enraged by its failure as much as we are delighted by its ability to be what nothing else might ever become.  Church will never meet our needs, exhaust our speculation or fail to awaken within us the fierce loyalty and intense pain that only family can engender.