The Spirituality Beneath This Synod's Agenda

C.S. Lewis 

The krazies are besides themselves in anxiety over this Synod on the Family and the direction in which it is going.  Michael Voris, the current dean of the self-appointed magisterium since Mother Angelica’s health crises forced her from the scene, has decided to head to Rome and join the various forces from LifeSite News and other neo-trad lobbies that are determined to resist any change in Church discipline.  Voris and others have gone so far as to oppose the baptism of children of same-sex couples or the “welcoming” of those in non-canonical unions in Catholic parishes. 

A theme proposed at the Synod for dealing with people in irregular family situations is “gradualism,” a solution based on what some moral theologians call “The law of graduality.”   This is a different approach than the somewhat clear-cut, right or wrong, black or white, approach with which most of us have long been familiar. 

Perhaps the clearest statement of which I am aware on the Law of Graduality or Gradualism is found in C.S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain.  Lewis (1898-1963) was an Irish born agnostic-turned-Anglican who was successively a Don at Oxford and then at Cambridge.  He was a novelist, an essayist, an academic, a poet, a literary critic, a noted public speaker, a theologian and an apologist. He wrote serious novels for both young and mature audiences, but his theological reflections, and especially The Screwtape Letters, are what has made him most famous.  Perhaps due to his own spiritual journey and its complexities he had an extraordinary understanding of the human soul and its relationship with God.  Let me offer the following quote in which Lewis foreshadows the tone Pope Francis has set for the Synod: 

Some modern theologians have, quite rightly, protested against an excessively moralistic interpretation of Christianity.  The Holiness of God is something more and other than moral perfection.  …God may be more than moral goodness, he is not less.  The road to the promised land runs past Sinai.  The moral law may exist to be transcended, but there is no transcending it for those who have not first admitted its claims upon them, and then tried with all their strength to meet that claim, and fairly and squarely faced the fact of their failure. —C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain.

 This paragraph is rich in ideas.

1.    …rightly protested against an excessively moralistic interpretation of Christianity.

2.    The Holiness of God is something more and other than moral perfection.

3.    God may be more than moral goodness, he is not less.

4.    The moral law may exist to be transcended,

5.    …but there is no transcending it (the moral law) for those who have not first admitted its claims upon them.

6.    … and then tried with all their strength to meet that claim,

7.    … and fairly and square face the fact of their failure.  

Each one of these ideas is worth frequent and long meditation.  Perhaps the final line is the crucial one—that we must fairly and square face the fact of our failure to  meet the claim of God’s moral law.   The sort of rigid moralistic “Christianity” offered by those who imagine themselves to be the truly religious in a world that has abandoned God’s Law is a false road to go down because it invariably leads to a denial of one’s own moral failures.  We may disguise those failures.  We may set up the straw men of lesser sins to distract ourselves from the greater ones.  We may even, like the Pharisee in the Gospel account about himself and the Publican,  design a moral schema which relativizes our particular sins to be less than those of others and thus not as worthy of our condemnation as the sins of our neighbor.  But in the end, if we are to be truthful with God and with ourselves, we must come to see ourselves in such a light that it eclipses any fault of any other person. 

In the end I must acknowledge that my “white lie” is far more grievous than my neighbor’s adultery.  I must acknowledge that my slightly off-color remark is a worse sin than my neighbor’s abortion.  I must acknowledge that my impatience with my spouse is a far more serious sin than my neighbor’s same-sex relationship.  I must do this because it is my sin and that is the only sin for which I am accountable before the Throne of Grace. 

In the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, the priest—immediately before receiving Holy Communion—prays, echoing 1 Timothy 1:15;

I believe and confess, Lord, that You are truly the Christ, the Son of the living God, who came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the first.  This is the attitude we must have as we come before God and we will be far less quick to judge others.  In fact, we might even mature to where we can say with another well-known voice in our Catholic family: “Who am I to judge?”  Then we will know that we have arrived at a certain level of spiritual and moral maturity. 

Ann and Barry Ulanov wrote in The Study of Spirituality (1986, Oxford University Press, edited by Cheslyn Jones, Geoffrey Wainwright, and Edward Yarlold SJ)

For what one brings to prayer is either the true self or the lying self.  One prays, if one prays in all honesty, with as much knowledge of oneself as one can muster for the occasion and with as much charity. … Under every circumstance one must be honest with oneself.  That is the special scourging that is in prayer.

And this is precisely the problem with moral rigorists—they are not honest in their prayer, in their relationship with God.  They may admit their faults, granted, but always putting them in the context their sins are not as serious as the faults of others.  The sort of humility/honesty in prayer of which the Ulanovs wrote, on the other hand, makes us far less worried over who is receiving the Eucharist and what is the state of their soul as we come, through our own acknowledgement of the seriousness of our own sin, to comprehend that “worthiness” has nothing to do with receiving the Sacraments and that the Eucharist in particular is the table of sinners.  We know, from our own spiritual experience, that we are on a journey and that we have yet to arrive; and moreover, that the Eucharist is the food for our journey to the promised land and not the putative feast that awaits us once we are there.  But if one rejects the reality of moral gradualism in one’s own life, one simply cannot comprehend this idea. 

Rethinking God VIII

York Minster

Years back I heard the story of a Catholic priest who was studying at Cambridge under the famous New Testament scholar, Bishop J.A.T. (“Honest to God”) Robinson.  This particular priest was quite an Anglophile (and Anglican-ophile), often affecting Anglican styles in dress and liturgy, and Bishop Robinson allegedly said to him one day: “Joe, why don’t you just become an Anglican.”  The priest’s response was: “Your Lordship, I am not one to jump from a sinking ship into a sinking lifeboat.”  Wise answer.
Last week I heard an Anglican bishop charge that the Church of England had a lot of explaining to do to contemporary society in the refusal to consecrate women as bishops.   The Church was in danger of becoming “outdated.” 
Now I am not opposed to the Church of England—or any religious body—ordaining whomever they please to whatever ministries they are called.  But this particular bishop is delusional if he thinks that the Church of England is outdated because they won’t let women be bishops.  The Church of England is outdated for many other—and I believe more pressing—reasons than an all-male-episcopate.  It has been outdated for a long time now—long before the question of women’s ordination ever came up.
I remember being in York about five years ago for a ceremony at the famous Minster (cathedral)—one of the splendors of medieval Christian faith.  That particular Sunday morning I wandered through the medieval city to see the ancient churches.  But most of the churches were now community centers or museums and only two or three were open for worship.  And those who were open for worship had maybe twenty or thirty worshippers attending Sunday services.  Less than 5% of the Anglican faithful attend Church regularly in England.  Of course that is not much different than the percentage of Catholics attending Mass in Spain or France or Austria or the Czech Republic.  And the number of Lutherans attending Church regularly in the Scandinavian Kingdoms is about the same.  The Church—Catholic and Protestant—has become irrelevant to the lives of many in Europe—and what is frightening, to increasingly more Americans as well.  But we should not be surprised.  The way God is talked about in churchy circles is simply peripheral to the lives of an increasing segment of our population.
When people say: “I’m not religious—I am more, well, ‘spiritual’,” I have to laugh.  Ninety-nine times out of a hundred this translates as “I’m too lazy to get out of bed on Sunday morning  but I do like the occasional warm fuzzy I feel when I think of some cosmic power that beats the heart of the universe for me.”  Not that I don’t think that one can be spiritual without being religious: I do.  I know deeply spiritual people, holy people, who don’t cross the threshold of a church except for the social obligation of an occasional wedding or funeral.   I just meant that most of the people who make this claim have no idea of what it means to be “spiritual.”  What they are is colossal narcissistic ingrates who think everything is for them and about them.  But what is there that does draw emotionally and spiritually healthy people to Church?  It certainly isn’t the preaching in the average Catholic Church.  The god we hear about from too many pulpits is no more than an embalmed dogma dressed up in the rags of old religious pieties and tricked out to rule over the fears of those who have never been taught to think critically and for themselves.    
Liberal Protestantism has its own issues and they have been a long time a-breeding.  A half century and more ago C.S. Lewis described the deity that was to kill Liberal Protestantism by irrelevance:
We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven—a senile benevolence who, as they say, “liked to see the young people enjoying themselves,” and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, “a good time was had by all.”
Who wants to go to Church to be patted on the back and be given the insufferable pabulum of happy-clappy religiosity that makes no demands for critical self-reflection?  The Church of England and other liberal Churches have had their guts sucked out by an insipid moral relativism that is afraid to hold up the mirror of truth for us to look into and see what disfigured creatures we who once were the image and likeness of God have become. 
On the other hand, in so many Catholic churches today a neo-Jansenism has taken over where the Good News of Salvation has been corrupted into the Bad News of judgment.  God is the insufferable parent whom there is no pleasing except for a rigid and unquestioning crushing of the will.  Heavy burdens are tied up and laid upon the shoulders of men and women too fearful to resist by men who arrogantly suppose themselves to be the arbiters of the Divine Will.  The priesthood that once preached the Gospel of setting captives free is being turned into a race of orcs that seek to enslave the minds and souls of the faithful by a petty legalism that would embarrass the Pharisee and stupefy the scribe.  I am not surprised that religion is losing its hold on people who seek spiritual health as too often what we find in church is nothing less than toxic.
And it doesn’t need to be this way.  We Christians—and Catholics in particular—have a rich history of spiritual writers that point the path to a healthy religious practice.  Ignatius Loyola and John of the Cross and Francis de Sales and Teresa of Avila and Thérèse of Lisieux all point the way to spiritual paths that bring people to spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and mental maturity.  But we rarely hear of such in the pulpit because few of the clergy, and the secular clergy in particular, know the spiritual tradition of our own Church.  We need a spiritual revival that begins with recovering not the legalism and pomposity of the pre-conciliar Church but the genuine Tradition that has been handed down as our heritage and birthright.