Should a spouse expect to know what the other spouse says in confession? Some, whether from anxiety, past hurts or other reasons, feel aggrieved at not being told. “Can I trust him/her?” “Does he really want to stop using porn?” “Is she still discussing our intimate life with her best friend?” Wanting to make sure their spouse is behaving, they end up prying, or hinting.  

We all know how to go on the offensive like this, scouring other people’s consciences to protect ourselves from harm. On the other hand, we also know how to withdraw self-protectively, embracing isolation rather than facing the dangers of showing our true faces to people — whether in marriage, family or community. Sometimes the hardest place to trust is the one where we should feel most cared for.  

This is especially true of parish life. Here we are in communion! Yet it’s here that poisoned darts like backbiting, gossip and slander can be most present, subtly disguised and acutely damaging. They can make the light shining in others’ faces difficult to see. Satan, as a pastor friend remarked, has whole departments devoted to causing discord in parishes. 

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How can this be? Isn’t it in the parish that we’re welcomed into the Eucharist feast set by the divine Trinity, who (as Rublev’s icon shows) sit around the Table and invite us in? Here especially we can promote a “spirituality of communion” which, Pope John Paul II says “indicates above all the heart’s contemplation of the mystery of the Trinity dwelling in us, and whose light we must also be able to see shining on the face of the brothers and sisters around us” (Novo Millinnio Inieunte #43). 

We go to church to nourish our inner life. It’s an invitation to the feast, not in solitary splendour but elbow-to-elbow with other people, known and unknown to us. The liturgical feast, the intimacy of the sacramental presence, draws us into communion where we can learn to show our true faces. This would be risky even if everybody there were perfectly holy. Among people almost as imperfect and unfinished as ourselves, even when we long to come in, we might prefer to stay out.

Like the two sons in Jesus’ parable (Luke 15:11-31), we find different ways of staying out of the feast. Both the story’s younger, “prodigal” son and his elder brother are outside the father’s house. We see them outside community, outside the banquet, outside the life of the Trinity into which God invites His children.

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The younger son runs away from his father’s table to immerse himself in the well-known pleasures that tempt us all to treat them as ends in themselves. He finds his feasts outside the father’s house, and so ends up being a scandal — while, in reality, starving. Eventually, his empty stomach helps him to see that he is hungry, isolated and miserable. He turns around and, having excluded himself, now becomes a beggar pleading to be allowed in as a servant. Instead, he is invited to the banquet as honoured guest.

Throughout it all, the older son is well-fed, bitter and miserable. His state is marked by the temptations that afflict religious people — the people to whom Jesus addresses the parable. Like the elder brother, we often prefer to do all the correct things, relying on ourselves and our own righteousness. 

Ultimately, we can become self-idolatrous — the original temptation presented by the serpent in the garden. Resenting his brother’s place at the table, the elder son hasn’t been able to have a party with friends; there can be no feast in the father’s house so long as he doesn’t want his brother there. The invitation is to become, like his father, forgiving love. But the elder son is insulted that the younger is invited. He doesn’t realize that his longing for his father’s embrace includes a longing for his brother.  

How can either brother get into the feast, past his own self? Each, like each of us, is given a path of repentance. We’re told the younger brother’s path to the table. But the parable leaves the elder brother with a question, and that question is put to us all.  

Can we accept the loving invitation of the Trinity and enter the feast that’s laid for us? Can we sit at table with the prodigal son, our brother?  

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Neither brother is asked, or required, to be Lord and judge of the other. As Narnia’s Aslan tells the children: “nobody is told anyone’s story except her own.” We’re asked to be godly before each other; we’re not asked to be God.

As John Paul II reminds us, contemplating “the mystery of the Trinity dwelling in us” is the heart’s joyful task, from which comes a spirituality of communion — witnessed by the way we see our sisters and brothers. May we behold and reflect the light shining on the faces of our spouses, neighbours, families and yes, even fellow parishioners.