By Nicholas Soellner
Connecting Creed and Life
Editor’s note: For 2025, the weekly Connecting Faith and Life column will be renamed Connecting Creed and Life. To celebrate the 2025 Jubilee Year and the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, the columns will consist of reflections on the Nicene Creed, corresponding with related paragraphs in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC).
“I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church” (CCC 787-796).
I can still remember the day I first experienced it. I was standing in the checkout line at the grocery store, a Cermak Fresh Market in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, watching a mother and her young child talking to each other ahead of me. She couldn’t have been much older than me at the time, mid-20s at the most. But when she was done speaking to her son, I noticed a worried expression on her face. It made me wonder, “What is happening this afternoon that’s got her so concerned?” And then it hit me: this woman’s life was just as complex and complicated as mine. She has a story, a past, dreams, ambitions and wounds of her own that I know nothing about. It turns out, there’s a word for this phenomenon, coined by the writer John Koenig in 2012: sonder. Likely, it’s a play on the word “sunder,” which in the 1570s meant “to discover that which has been concealed.” The word “sonder” is defined as “the feeling one has on realizing that every other individual one sees has a life as full and real as one’s own.” What is even more remarkable is that even though we often only have a surface-level understanding of those around us, at Mass, we have a very real connection to them through the mystical body of Christ, that is, the Church.
The Church as Christ’s mystical body is a challenging concept to grasp. It can feel very “pie in the sky,” especially on days when we’re at odds with those in the pews next to us. But this is what the apostles and their successors have handed on to us: anyone who is baptized becomes a member of the body of Christ. The Catechism states, “Believers who respond to God’s word and become members of Christ’s Body, become intimately united with him: In that body the life of Christ is communicated to those who believe, and who, through the sacraments, are united in a hidden and real way to Christ in his Passion and Glorification. This is especially true of Baptism, which unites us to Christ’s death and Resurrection, and the Eucharist, by which, really sharing in the body of the Lord … we are taken up into communion with him and with one another” (CCC 790). Or as St. Paul says, “For by one Spirit, we were all baptized into one body — Jews or Greeks, slaves or free — and all were made to drink of one Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:13). This was reaffirmed by the second Vatican Council, which taught, “By communicating His Spirit, Christ made His brothers, called together from all nations, mystically the components of His own Body.” (LG 7) The Holy Spirit is the great unifier of the Church, which Jesus promised to us when he said, “and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself” (John 12:32). It is through the Sacraments that we receive this Holy Spirit and are drawn initially, and then ever more perfectly into the body of Christ.
Just as we might experience sonder when looking at the lives of others, the Mass is so much more than we realize. Through the preparation of the gifts and in the Eucharistic prayers, millions of lives are offered to the Lord at every Mass in the Eucharist, brought forth along with the gifts of bread and wine so that, like these ordinary earthly elements, we too might be divinized into Christ’s divine nature (cf. 2 Peter 1:4). But it is here, as well, that we are supernaturally connected to every member of the Church, both here on Earth and with those in heaven.
I recently wrote a dear friend from college who had joined the Sisters of St. Francis of the Martyr St. George several years ago. She wrote me back a few weeks later, and in her closing, she reminded me of this great mystery of our faith. She wrote, “Meeting you in the Eucharist.” What a blessing it is to know every time I receive the Eucharist, I am once again supernaturally, but also really, together with my dear friend, the saints and all my brothers and sisters in Christ.
Nicholas Soellner serves as associate director for the Diocese of Evansville Office of Catechesis.