Vigils Reading – Memorial of BVM

A COMMUNITY IN

NATURE AND IN GRACE

By Fr Karl Rahner

◊◊◊

Mariology is not merely a piece of the private life-story of Jesus of

Nazareth, of no real ultimate significance for our salvation, but an affirmation of

faith itself concerning a reality of the faith, without which there is no salvation.

We human beings are important for one another. We mean something to

one another, not only in the everyday things of life, not only because (since we

exist) we have parents, not only because, in the biological sphere, in the external

life of the civil community, of art and learning, we are always dependent on a

great human community. That is not the only reason for our importance for one

another. Even in our salvation we are also similarly dependent on other human

beings. That goes without saying, as a matter of course, yet it is difficult to

grasp. One might think we were only important to one another for this life, for

external things, or at most in the domain of the spirit here on earth.

Or one might think that when it is a question of how God stands to me and

I to God, of the ultimate decision about my eternity, of how I shall fare one day,

when through the inexorable loneliness of my death, I stand utterly alone before

the face of God, that then, in all that, I am absolutely alone and isolated. Then,

surely, there is only the one God, and myself, his love and mercy, and my

irreplaceable freedom in guilt and grace. Yet it is not so, for all that. All that has

been said is true, but it is not the whole truth. For we still belong to one another,

even then.

6 The Practice of Faith, Cp.32, Devotion to Mary. Crossroads 1983. p.161-215

Each has their own, inalienable, unique freedom, from which they cannot

escape, which they cannot shuffle off on to someone else. But for all that, it is

not a lonely isolated freedom, not even when it is deciding the eternal destiny of

a human being, or making the fundamental choice of a human life. For the

eternal Son, the eternal Word of the Father, was made flesh, born of the Virgin

Mary. In our family, out of our race that stretches from the first human being,

Adam, to the last, the Word of the Father was made flesh.

There is, therefore, a community in nature and in grace which takes effect

in a community of sin and guilt, of the mercy of God and his grace, a community

of origin and goal. But guilt and grace, origin and end, are God’s concerns.

Consequently the community of humanity extends into the domain of our

eternal salvation with God. It is a community in eternal welfare or loss, a vast

community which acts out as a whole, and not only in individual human beings,

the great drama of history before the eyes of God, and which brings to light what

God’s thought about humanity was.