Some people think that what is called the First Epistle of St Peter is not a letter but an address given by the leader of the first Christian bishops to a group of men and women who had just been baptized. Certainly a good deal of it is devoted by St Peter to an explanation of what it means to have become a Christian:

A body is a terrestrial thing. It exists in time. It has a shape and a locus. The Christos is the Lord's anointed. He is a being divinely ordained to realize the divine purpose, whatever that may be. The body of the Christ is, therefore (whatever else it be) a temporal and terrestrial entity with a shape and locus ordained to realise the divine purpose.

It has been clear for a long time, indeed I think it was always obvious that a book, though it be the Bible, was never adequate means to realize the divine purpose. The Torah would not be the Torah without a community to believe and practise it. If the Christos has a body, this body must be not merely a system of utterances, but at least a community of people and things, a community that embodies and is chosen or ordained to embody the divine purpose fulfilled by the Christos. The body of Christ is the economy, the ecclesia of Christ.

The Middle Ages, says Emile Male, glorified what they most admired—the courage of a hero, joined to the abnegation of a monk. As a typical instance of this feeling, he describes a monument which existed in the church of Saint Faron at Meaux until the Revolution the tomb of Ogier and Benedict. These two, who were in fact monks of Saint Faron, were buried in the sanctuary at Meaux where they excited the curiosity of the faithful who came, mainly from Paris, venerate the relics of the patron saint. During the course of the eleven century the custodians of the place tended more and more, for the benefit of their visitors, to embellish the identity of these two, until it was eventually taken for granted that they must be the very Ogier and Benedict of the Song of Roland.

In these days when the part to be played by the laity in the revitalising of the life and apostolate of the Church is becoming increasingly emphasised, it may be of some value to examine lay spirituality in its present form, in order to analyse the extent to which the spiritual life of lay men and women is in fact being formed in the Church, to discover how far defects in this formation exist and how far they are remediable, and to make some suggestions for the leading of at least a section of this vast potential of men and women to a deeper personal contact with God, and consequently to a more fruitful service of their brethren.