Today's reading from the Acts of the Holy Apostles begins with astonishing words: "Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul." Is such a thing possible? Can we even imagine it? Our unanimity, or even simply our like-mindedness, usually lasts for such a short time... More than that, it is often in the church community that we "relax" - and all our "home" problems crawl out into the light. It is well known that it is especially hard to maintain peaceful relationships with those closest to us. The same thing happens in the Church.

But the first Christians, it appears, did not have this problem. What is the point here? A special grace? Of course, without grace nothing is possible, but it seems that first of all the point is people's openness to this grace. The Lord is always the same, He is unchanging, and He not only can but wants to grant the same grace of unity to all of us, to our Church, and to our communities.

Judging by the testimony of the Book of Acts, the early Christian Church was meant to be a community where, among other things, common ownership of property was the norm. Later many Christians, and not only they, tried to follow the early Christian ideal. Some succeeded better, some worse. But what moved all these people? After all, common ownership of property was practiced by representatives of certain religious-philosophical teachings even in pre-Christian times, not to mention Jewish religious brotherhoods like the Essenes. What prompted these very different people to give up their property in favor of the community?

Very often the main motive turned out to be the striving for ascetic life, which moved not only Christian monks of the Middle Ages and the modern period, but also, for example, the followers of Pythagoras, in whose communities common ownership of property was also, if not obligatory, then apparently quite widespread. Here a person was moved first of all by the desire to simplify his life as much as possible, including its economic and social ties. By renouncing property, the person thereby also renounced society, as well as what bound him to society.

Another case is the renunciation of property in the context of an approaching eschatological and apocalyptic perspective, as happened, for example, among the Qumran Essenes. Here the conviction played its role that the world was doomed to destruction because of its impurity, and that only those belonging to the community of the "pure," by whom the Qumranites of course meant themselves, could be saved. Here the donation of property to the community was equivalent to a contribution to the construction of the only saving ark on earth, for which nothing should be spared.

But could the early Christian Church have been guided by ascetic or apocalyptic motives? Probably not, after all. The matter was not abstinence and not the coming end, but the life of the Kingdom. Here there was another, no less powerful stimulus: the experience itself of life in the Kingdom. For the Kingdom is possible only as giving, as the renunciation of one's separateness, as readiness to share everything one has in order to receive everything in return for the small part one gives. Here to give means not to renounce or lose, but to acquire and receive. This is precisely the case where sharing means multiplying. And common ownership of property turns out here not to be the embodiment of an idea, ascetic or eschatological, but the natural continuation in the untransformed world of that life of the Kingdom which someday, after transformation, will become natural and organic for it.

Brief but weighty lines reveal to us how the Church lived at its earliest dawn. We have no grounds to doubt the reliability of this account, but one can ask: why did this prove impossible later, when the Church spread to every continent? Was it only because its size increased and its structure became more complex, since later, in small communities, it did in fact prove possible to come closer to the early ideal to one degree or another?

The way the early Church lived is explained not by human efforts and good intentions on the part of the newly converted, but by the action of the Holy Spirit. The unity of the first believers was first of all unity in the Spirit, from which followed unity of hearts and thoughts; therefore life together was as natural as breathing. Later, over the centuries, there would be many attempts to overcome people's separation by making their property common, and the overwhelming majority of such attempts would collapse. The reasons for this would vary, but not the least of them would be that the new advocates of common ownership would deny the reality and importance of the spiritual principle, and would put their trust in force and the mechanical redistribution of material property. They would call this the "base," while everything else, which they could not touch, they would call the "superstructure over the base."

But the experience of the first Jerusalem community shows the opposite. What still seems to many to be the "superstructure" is in fact the Foundation.