William James wrote: “I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big success. I am for those tiny, invisible loving human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, which, if given time, will rend the hardest monument of pride.” Fr. Rolheiser writes that this wisdom speaks to the deep, important things that most affect us are usually not big and showy, but tiny, perhaps even imperceptible. Every community or society has a certain visible life that can be seen and whose overt interconnections, to an extent, can be grasped, charted, and written up into textbooks. But, just as with the human body, most of the deep things in a community are under the surface, invisible, silent, available only through another kind of instrument, the intuitive gaze of the mystic, novelist, poet, or artist. And all of this is even more true of the body of Christ, the community of the baptized, the sincere. Most of the important processes there are also invisible. Like any other body, partly this body is visible – physical, historical, something that can be observed from the outside. Historical Christianity, the churches, in their concrete history, are the visible body of Christ – people, institutions, buildings, virtue, and sin enfleshed in history. But the body of Christ is more than meets the physical eye, a billion times more. As in every body, countless, silent, invisible processes are going on beneath. Inside the body of Christ, as in all bodies, there are deadly viruses, an immune system, cancer-cells, and health-carrying enzymes. What’s deepest inside of life is not visible to the naked eye. The union among ourselves in the “communion of saints” is also a presence to each other beyond distance. Inside the body of Christ, we are present to each other and carry each other across the miles. Everything we do, good or bad, affects all the others. To believe this is to be both consoled and challenged. Consoled in knowing that we carry each other in love and union across all distances, even through death. But challenged too in knowing that everything we do, be it ever so private, is either a bad virus or healthy enzyme affecting the overall health of the body of Christ and the family of humanity.