Wednesday, July 8th, 2020

“Your merciful love, O God, we have received in the midst of your temple.” proclaims today’s Introit. Fallen as we are, having grown up in an atomised post-modern culture, we can miss the import of this sentence. Why need the love of God be received in a temple? The first temple this means is what Jesus meant when he described his own body as the Temple: the universal Church. There is no such thing as a Christian alone. And any such project always ends in failure because it contradicts the very nature of Christianity: a project of loving communion.