Evangelical Catholicism--The Church's Great Potential III

John Cassian

I never got to post yesterday as we had an internet outage but want to build a bit on the previous day’s post and the importance of contemplative prayer in a genuinely evangelical Catholicism.  Contemplative prayer is deeply rooted in the Word of God: it takes the Word of God and “digests” it our lives in such a way that the Word transforms us, we become living extensions of that Word.  Perhaps better said, we are transformed—very gradually and over the period of our lives—into an embodiment of the Word.  This is why, I believe, Karl Rahner said that the Christian of the future—of evangelical Catholicism—must  be a mystic if he is to be at all faithful to the Gospel of Christ in a post-Christian world.  It is only by this transformation, by allowing the Word of God to transform us into its incarnation, that we can stay on the track of the life of discipleship.

When I say that contemplative prayer takes the Word of God and “digests” it into our lives, I am referring  back again to John Cassian, the late fourth-early fifth century monastic writer to whom we owe so much for the foundations of Christian spirituality.  Cassian compares the role of the Word of God to the cud a cow chews.  The cow chews the cud and swallows it into the first of her four stomachs.  She then regurgitates it and chews it again before swallowing it into the second of her stomachs—and so on until the cud is completely digested.  Cassian says that we should take the Word of God—and, obviously in a “bite-sized” piece which we can digest, not an entire chapter or so—“chew” on it by meditation.  We then swallow it only to bring it up and chew on it for further enlightenment.  We repeat this process with the same morsel of Scripture until we have sucked out all the nourishment it has at that time to give us.  As we move from one “stomach” to the next in the digestive process—we move from hearing the Word to understanding the Word to embracing the Word in our particular situation to letting the Word shape our will to bring it into conformity with God’s Word. 

Do you pray like this—chewing the Word over and over, sucking out its nourishing juices until you not only understand what God expects of you but you develop a passion for it?  It is a long way from a string of “Hail Mary, full of grace,….”   Not that there is anything wrong with the Hail Mary or other fixed prayers—but for so many people they never grow beyond the initial stages of prayer and mature into an adult spirituality.

Most of us begin to pray as small children by learning rote prayers.  “In the Name of the Father….”  Rote prayers are fine, especially for small children.  Even as adults there are times when the best we can do is to go back to them.  We might be upset or worried; we might be exhausted; we might be dispirited.  The rote prayers of our childhood are a good comfort to us and are always still pleasing to God.  But God does want more for us.

Perhaps the next level of learning to pray for most of us is the liturgy.  It is a good step up from the rote prayers.  Our parents bring us to Mass.  We learn the (rote) prayers of the Mass.  We also learn, over time, to listen to the Word in Scripture and to the Prayers which the Priest says on our behalf.  This expands our horizons of prayer.  Learning to pray the liturgy is a life-long process.  If we are attentive in the Liturgy we never tire of it and find in it unlimited and rich sources for our private prayer.   There are those, however, for whom the Liturgy remains always and only text: words to be said and things to be done.  That is not a problem limited to Christianity.  The Dalai Lama speaks of Buddhist monks for whom the depths of prayer are lost in the tasks of polishing of the bowls on the altar and trimming the butter-lamps that burn before the Buddha.  The words of the sacred texts they chant as they go about their liturgies are simply syllables that never pierce their understanding.  Last Sunday’s Gospel spoke to that as well—those who hear but do not listen or understand lest they be converted and be healed.  There are plenty of people who sit in Church Sunday after Sunday, or even day after day, and neither listen nor understand. 

This brings up the whole issue of “checklist prayer.”  I see this level of piety all the time.  I have my packet of novenas and I arrive at Church forty-five minutes before Mass.  I work my way through the novenas, make the Stations of the Cross, join in the rosary before Mass, Mass and Communion, say my thanksgiving and go about my day, work accomplished.  Prayer is something we “do.”  There are a lot of people stuck at this level.

Somewhere along the line, sometimes even as children, we learn, in the words of Teresa of Avila, that prayer is a “conversation between friends.”  And so we learn to talk with God in our own words.  We add this conversational prayer to the rote prayers and to the liturgy and that is appropriate.  We learn to just speak to God as we would speak to the person next to us.  Some people use more formal language, perhaps—“thee” and “thou” and even a “shouldest” or two.  We don’t need to of course, but for some people God is King and for others he is “Father,” or in the case of Jesus, “friend” or “brother.”  Now, my experience is that this is about as far as most people go.  And that is too bad because it brings us to the brink of a spiritual breakthrough if we will only keep going. 

Prayer up to this point is all about what we are doing.  It is “piety.”  The word “piety” comes from the Latin pietas which is a word used to describe the duties one owes ones parents, one’s mentors, elders, and one’s gods.  Piety is a religious experience in which the individual is pro-active, performing deeds directed towards initiating and maintaining a relationship with God and which conform to the individual’s understanding of (Christian) doctrine.   Piety is good, but it is not enough to sustain us in a life of discipleship.  Spirituality, on the other hand, is a relationship with God, at the invitation of God and maintained by grace and the individual’s response to grace, made possible by doctrine but not determined by it, and which sometimes transcends the existing limitations of doctrine.   Piety is something the burden of which falls on us—we “do” it.  It is essentially active prayer.  But when we learn to move into an attentive listening to God with the heart, we move into contemplative prayer.  By attentive listening to God with the heart, I mean this process of Lectio Divina  described by Cassian as nourishing ourselves deeply with God’s Word. 

In piety we perform our duties toward God.  We make our visits to Christ in the Blessed Sacrament.  We say our rosaries. We do our bible studies.  We go and feed the poor for Jesus’ sake.  And we don’t give up piety as we mature into a deeper spirituality.  The forms our piety might take will change perhaps.  We might find ourselves going to prayer meetings when we used to go to Legion of Mary meetings.  We might find that we prefer icons over statutes for our personal devotions or even that we “get more” from the Divine Liturgy in the Byzantine Rite than the Roman Rite Mass.  We might find that a good devotion for First Friday is working the Food Pantry or that helping at a shelter for unwed mothers is a way that helps us honor Our Lady.  The forms it takes might change, but the need for piety always remains.  Avoid extremes.  The person who likes to prostrate on the floor before the Blessed Sacrament, unless the church is empty, needs to remember not to perform deeds for other people to see.  It is more important to bend our hearts than our knees when we come to receive the Eucharist.  Things that call attention to ourselves—eccentricities in dress, in speech, or in action are not indications of genuine piety but almost always a spiritual exhibitionism.  Jesus didn’t have a lot of use for that with the tassels and the front row in the synagogues. 

More important is learning to take that Word of God and make it our spiritual nourishment, listening attentively in silence and solitude to the Word and entering deeply into the Mysteries of God’s Kingdom that it holds.  I don’t find this in Weigel’s book.  I don’t think he is familiar with the spiritual life.  Piety—for sure.  But the Christian of the future must be a mystic if he is to be faithful in the post-Christian world.  

Evangelical Catholicism--the Church's Great Potential II

St. Ignatius Loyla

Weigel says in his book Evangelical Catholicism that we are to meet the Risen Christ in the Scriptures and in the Sacraments and become friends with him.   I think he is “right on” but I suspect that we would mean different things by “friendship” with the Risen Lord.  In Evangelical Catholicism I don’t see the traces of the sort of intimate relationship with Jesus Christ to which the too often overlooked heritage of the Church’s mystics refers, but instead I see a rather heady and in-the-doctrinal-box Christ that is all too prevalent in 20^th and now 21^st century Catholic piety. 
 When we encounter Jesus in the Scriptures and in the Sacraments it is a mediated encounter.  I would like to explore this idea of evangelical Catholicism more deeply over a series of postings.  In yesterday’s post I gave the opinion that a genuinely evangelical Catholicism would draw on the prophets and the Gospels to root within itself a firm commitment to Social Justice.  I want to return to that idea, but first I think there is a need for establish a more explicit foundation for what Evangelical Catholicism demands of—and, at the same time, offers—us in our appreciation of the Scripture.  And to begin, I want to go back to Weigel’s statement:

The Catholic Church is being invited to meet the Risen Lord in the Scriptures, the Sacraments, and Prayer and to make friendship with him the center of Catholic life.

When we encounter Jesus in the Scriptures and in the Sacraments it is a mediated encounter.   Christ comes to us, not directly, but through the Word read or preached, or through the Eucharist or through the Absolution or through the Anointing.  We encounter Christ through the grace of a Sacramental agent.  Christ’s presence is mediated by a third party.   Now, it is Christ we encounter—don’t get me wrong—but the human soul always wants more, wants a direct and unmediated encounter.  The mystics all speak of these direct encounters: Gregory the Great, Bernard, Teresa of Avila, Sister Faustina, Francis de Sales, Ignatius of Loyola, John of the Cross.  While the mystics tell us of such encounters, such experiences are—by God’s grace—not beyond our capacity.   Indeed I think that most of us have, on the somewhat infrequent occasion, had such a direct encounter when we became suddenly aware of our being in the Divine Presence.  The search for this direct encounter is, according to John Cassian, the raison d’etre of the monastic life, but it is by no means the sole prerogative of the monk or nun.   Cassian knew from his own experience that it is possible for the human soul to encounter God directly, however briefly, in this life in anticipation of the unending enjoyment of his Presence in eternity.  We call this direct encounter of God during the span of our life here on earth “contemplative prayer.”  It is always an infused gift—not something that we can manufacture by our efforts at prayer or our moral behavior or our charitable works (though these can prepare us for his presence)—but God’s choosing to bring us, albeit somewhat momentarily, into his Presence. 

The regular commitment to contemplative prayer is an invitation to a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.  In the Christian tradition, contemplative prayer is always rooted in the Scripture, in the Word.  It is usually tied to some form of Lectio Divina—that cogitatio on the scriptural text. (I hesitate to say “meditation” only because some will interpret this too narrowly, so I am using the more medieval word: “cogitatio” which means “thought” or “reflection.”)  
The reason that our prayer stays anchored in the Scriptural text is that one of the dangers of pseudo-spirituality is the tendency for a person to devise a Christ of their particular imagination.  Rousseau said that “God created man in his own image and likeness and man, being a gentleman, returned the compliment.”  For many people the Jesus they “encounter” in their prayer is nothing other than a projection of their own ideas and prejudices.  When we practice contemplative prayer, we stay close to the biblical text because we know that Word is authentic.  Yet entering into the Word in prayer is a different experience that studying the Word or even hearing it read in the Liturgy.  We can read the Bible for inspiration, for learning, for guidance.  All of that is good. In bible reading, we stay in the text.  But contemplative prayer is more passing through the text as one passes from an outer room into an inner where our most beloved Friend is waiting for us.   Our entrance and our retreat from the Divine Presence is in the Word, and the Word taken in its purity and not as “proof texts” to reinforce our pre-conceived ideas and notions.  In fact, Saint John of the Cross says that one of the signs of the authenticity of our prayer experience is that it challenges the ideas and notions which we brought to prayer.  If we don’t leave prayer somehow changed, we were not in the Presence of the Risen Lord. 
Karl Rahner, admittedly no theological hero for George Weigel, wrote that the Christian of the future will be a mystic or will cease to be a Christian at all.  His point is that living in this post-Christian era, only the person with that direct and unmediated experience of God will have the stamina to remain faithful in a faithless culture.  When we talk about an evangelical Catholicism we need first to ask ourselves what priority we will give to laying the groundwork not for  the piety that is so prevalent in certain circles today, but for a genuine spirituality that brings people into the intimate friendship and knowledge of Jesus Christ.  Piety lets us know about Jesus, but it lacks the ability to give us an authentic introduction to Jesus Christ where he can be the sort of friend Weigel speaks of.   

Monkeys in Space and Empty Pews in Church

I went on a road trip today (Sunday) and as I set out from my home to the highway, I drove past five, six, seven churches—United Methodist, Eastern Orthodox, Reformed, United Church of Christ, Presbyterian.  Nine o’clock Sunday morning and there was not one car in any parking lot.  I am sure that by 10 30 or 11 it was a different story but there is no doubt that Church attendance is on the decline.  It would not have been that way twenty years ago.  In our parish, one of the priests said that there are two less masses and about a thousand people a Sunday less than when he was stationed here thirty-five years ago. Sure, demographics play a part. Families are smaller.  The ethnic pool is more varied with more Asians and others from non-Christian cultures.  In fact, we see the occasional mosque opening—something that we didn’t see thirty years ago.  And yes, south of the Mason-Dixon there are new parishes opening up with large churches to hold an expanding Catholic population of transplanted North-easterners and Mid-westerners.  But when the dust settles there are still fewer and fewer people attending Church now than a generation ago.

And as my observations of late-opening parking lots this past Sunday would indicate, this is not just a Catholic problem.  While Bible Churches and fundamentalist groups are growing, the liberal denominations are shrinking.  The Episcopal Church, despite an influx of converts from Catholicism and other denominations, has shrunk from 4 million members a generation ago to 2.5 million today.  What is the problem?  Is it, as some allege, the vapidity of liberal Christianity?  Or is it something else?

Neo-trad Catholics have blamed the decline in Mass attendance on the Second Vatican Council and the move away from the old Latin liturgy, but the even more severed falloff  of mainline Protestant Churches belies any attempt to pin the problem to anything within Catholicism itself.  And the Catholic Church has not drunk the “liberal Kool-Aide” of same-sex marriage, ordination of women, abortion rights, and other causes that have caused dissention and defection among the liberal denominations.   If anything, we have lost more members because of our intransience than of any alleged accommodation to the liberal agenda.

Of course not all those who have stopped going to mass regularly have stopped going to Church. While many Catholics have often found new homes in Episcopalian or Lutheran Churches because of  issues of divorce and remarriage or for reasons of acceptance of same-sex marriage and families,  most ex-Catholics who still go to Church have joined Bible Churches or Pentecostal Congregations on the other end of the social spectrum.  Of course, even more former Mass-goers seem just to prefer having Sunday mornings to themselves to read the paper, do brunch, play golf, or just sleep in.

In all the arguing about the reasons for the fall off in church I think we are failing to acknowledge that our cosmology has taken a serious hit.  Those of us on the shady side of Medicare (how I never dreamed that day would come), still remember a heaven above and a hell below.  God dwelt in that heaven.  The Devil lived in that subterranean hell.  One died and one went up to heaven or down to hell.  It was not quite clear where purgatory was, but as it was only a temporary arrangement we could live with the ambiguity.    Today, of course, without much thought such a tiered universe has completely disappeared from the human immagination.  Long before Sputnik or Alan Shepherd and Freedom-7, we knew the vast infinity of space but it was only when people started to pierce it that the boundless vacuum of the universe began to sink into our consciousness.  And when it did, it left God homeless.   It seems embarrassingly naïve to us now to admit that we bought into the picture of Trito-Isaiah who has God declare: “The Heavens are my throne; the earth is my footstool.”   And indeed we may not have put it quite that way, but we did have a place for God and we don’t anymore.  Five hundred years ago, a helio-centric cosmos threatened Christian orthodoxy but now the situation is far more disturbing.  It was bad enough that Copernicus told us that we were not the center of being, but that we were a planet orbiting the sun; now our earth has been reduced to a mere neutron orbiting an atomic nucleus—one of trillions and trillions in a measureless universe.  Such immensity makes us totally irrelevant to a Deity that could not possibly—in our imagination at least—be any more aware of us than we are aware of whatever subatomic particles comprise that neutron that orbits the atom that is one of the trillions that make up the “h” key on our keyboard. 

On the other hand, there are those for whom God, dispossessed of his home in the heavens, has taken up residence in the human soul.  I am not sure what word to use.  I have chosen soul, but I could equally have chosen psyche or even heart.   I would prefer heart, in fact, but don’t want to confuse that to which I am referring as merely the emotions.  I mean that center of consciousness which has access to the emotions, but also consists of the intellect and of the will.  So let’s say soul.  I am not quite sure exactly what the human soul is.  It is a metaphysical category rather than a subject of the physical sciences, and so I mean it simply as our self-conscious being. 

The idea of God dwelling in the soul (or heart, or psyche) is not anything new.  Long before the space program began shooting monkeys and then humans into space, people like Augustine of Hippo and Teresa of Avila wrote of the human heart (or soul) as God’s dwelling place.  You find it in the psalms.  You find it in the Christian scriptures.  Among my favorite spiritual writers, an early twentieth-century French nun, Elizabeth of the Trinity, wrote eloquently of heaven being within the human heart.  She builds her theology on Saint Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle.

The Mass, as it was celebrated before the Second Vatican Council, reflected the cosmology of a God in Heaven above.  The theology, built on the scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages—Saints Anselm and Thomas Aquinas in particular—saw a priest, who was a sacramental representation of Christ the High Priest, offering the propitiatory sacrifice of the Cross to God the Father above on behalf of the People gathered below.  An anthropologist could explain how the ritual of the Mass reflected this cosmology and theology.  The people knelt silently—hopefully attentively—beyond the railings that marked the sacred space that only the priest and his assistants (all males) could enter, ascending anywhere from three to ten stairs to do so.  At the top of the stairs, the priest standing (others kneeling) and with the faithful gathered behind him, approached the earthly altar which was a sort of “stargate” that opened into a world beyond and there made a sacrifice of Christ mystically (i.e. sacramentally) re-presented (that is, made present again) in his Body and Blood by bread and wine.  It was a making-present-once-again of the one Sacrifice of Calvary and it was done with the aim of winning forgiveness of our sins.  It really is a lovely conception and when carried out with full ceremony (which was quite rare) is an exquisitely beautiful ritual.  But it sacramentally represents a cosmology that has disappeared.  This tiered universe with God looking down from the clouds above has gone the way of Zeus on Mount Olympus or Woden in Valhalla. 

Now to be fair, the old liturgy could also be a contemplative experience.  The operative word here is “could.”  For most it was a quasi-magical ritual.  The right person (the priest) had to say the right words (the prescribed text) in the right way (in Latin)with the right gestures (the rubrics).  If anything was off, the ritual was “invalid.”  Similarly many of the laity had their self-imposed prescribed prayers and rituals.  They said the rosary or worked their way through a stack of novena booklets preparing themselves for Holy Communion.  There was a huge disconnect between what happened at the altar and what the average person in the pews was doing until the moment of intersection when the person approached the communion rail and received the Holy Communion that had been offered on the altar.  Then the individual went back to his prayers and the priest to his ritual.  But for some, the quiet and the aesthetics of the church building, or if the full ritual was used,  the choir and a full set of sacred ministers, could still their souls into an interior quiet of genuine contemplative prayer.  But even this was a bit complicated as some confused an appreciation of the aesthetics of the Liturgy with supernatural prayer.  The aesthetics could, and often did, emotionally sweep a person into a sort of sweetness that was easily confused for some allegedly spiritual grace.     

One of my favorite operas is Puccini’s Tosca, probably because I lived for a good number of years in the area bordered by Sant’Andrea della Valle, the Palazzo Farnese, and the Castel Sant’Angelo: the sites of Acts I, II, and III of the work.  And Act I concludes with a magnificent scene of a religious procession with the Blessed Sacrament carried in a monstrance by a richly vested prelate and assisted by equally gorgeously garbed clergy beneath a tall canopy carried on poles by lace bedecked acolytes.  There are multiple thuribles sending clouds of incense into the air as the stage is filled with scores of singers chanting a melody reminiscent of the Pange Lingua.  It’s wonderful. It’s mystical.  It carries you away.  And the host in the monstrance is, of course, a dud, probably a cardboard cutout.  Supernatural grace and aesthetic appreciation can find themselves in a shared experience, but feelings of religious transport are no sure sign of grace.  The only sure sign of grace is an increase in charity.  I wish I could say that I find that increase in all those who prefer the old rituals.  I wish I could say that I find it in all those who prefer the new liturgy. 

The problem with the new rites is that they side-step the challenge of a collapsed cosmology and never address the issue of where to find God.  Just as the pre-conciliar rites are built on a medieval scholastic idea of the priest offering a propitiatory sacrifice for the forgiveness of the sins of the people, the novus ordo is based on the patristic understanding of Christ, in his Body the Church, announcing the Evangelion of the Kingdom of God and proclaiming the Death and Resurrection of the Lord until he comes again.  The focus is not on the priest alone but on the assembly which is Christ present in his Body the Church. The various members of the assembly have, as members of Christ’s Body, their diverse ministries.  The priest sacramentally represents Christ, the Head of the Body, in the dual ministries of Announcing the Word and Breaking the Bread.  By Breaking the Bread I mean, of course, not simply the distribution of the Eucharist but the entire Eucharistic Action of offering the Great Thanksgiving in which re-present the One Eternal Sacrifice of Christ.  But the emphasis is Christ and Christ in his Body, the Church.  Where is God (the Father) in all this?  That is never really cleared up—at least not in the ritual itself.  And it is hard to make this liturgy a contemplative experience.  In the first place, I am not sure that the Mass is meant to be a contemplative experience, but at least as it is structured now, we are all rather busy being Christ to one another.   There are readings to be read and responsories to be sung and processions to be processed and all within 60 minutes.  I have seen the liturgy prayed, really prayed, but almost exclusively in monastic settings and not always there.  Cistercians tend to do it well, but then they don’t seem to have much else to do.  I envy them for that.  But in the average parish, the Mass tends to be just one thing after another.  Entrance rite.  Penitential Rite. Gloria. Opening Prayer. First reading. And so on.  Maybe we sprinkle a little silence here and there, but it often becomes just as mechanical as the old ritual but without the magic.  Without the bad magic, but also without the good. 

I don’t think the answer is a reform of the ritual.  This isn’t that the ritual doesn’t need some reform, but that all the liturgical tinkering in the world isn’t going to solve the problem.  The problem is where is God?  Ok, we got Jesus in his Word, in his Sacramental Body and Blood, and in his Body the Church.  That is good.  But Jesus is meant to bring us to the Father. 

We Catholics have a very rich tradition of spirituality and it is for the most part untapped.  O we do the piety thing but I am not speaking of piety, but of spirituality.  We have to recover our spiritual heritage and start making it accessible to our people.  Richard Rohr writes

….  Much of the Western world has given up on the church and is going other places for wisdom.  Unfortunately, in these other places they are sometimes “willingly filling their belly with the husks the pigs are eating” (Luke 15:16) But we in the church must ask ourselves if we have not been the parent who sent them away because there was nothing trustworthy or life-giving at home. [i]

Our Catholic faith has long known that God dwells in the human heart.  I think for worship to make sense to people, we need to recover that awareness and provide the introduction to the spiritual life that allows the liturgy to be that “stargate” that opens us to a Mystery that is already at the center of our own souls. 

---

[i] Richard Rohr, Near Occasions of Grace, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993, p. 26

Let's Have a Few More Laughs in Church

Saint to be John XXIII in a light-hearted moment 

I went to hear Father James Martin speak last evening speak last evening on “Between Heaven and Mirth: Who Says Religion Has To Be So Gloomy?”  Father Martin, like Pope Francis, is a Jesuit. He is an editor of America Magazine and a well known columnist in several newspapers, but perhaps is most widely known for his appearances on The Colbert Report where is the “unofficial official chaplain.”   Father Martin’s talk was wonderful—hilarious and thought-provoking at the same time.  Drawing on anecdotes about popes and saints and great figures in our Catholic history as well as with examples from both the Old and New Testaments, Father Martin showed that not only has humor and wit played a central part in our history as Catholics, but it is fundamental to our faith and an indispensible sign of authentic Christian spirituality. Moreover, Father Martin believes—and backed it up with references to various pope-speaks from the current Holy Father—that it is a primary tool for the new evangelization. 

I am so glad to hear this approach from a man with the influence on the Church and clergy as Father Martin.  Frankly I was getting embarrassed, not for being Catholic, but for being part of a Church that was increasingly becoming doom and gloom.  It’s bad enough that Germans aren’t known for their sense of humor, but poor Pope Benedict has spent his entire life in an ivory tower where his chief means of “lightening up” was to play Mozart on his Steinway.   But better Mozart, even played badly, than the sort of dour scoldings that were becoming characteristic of our American bishops—Tobin of Providence, George of Chicago, Finn of Kansas City, Slattery of Tulsa, Sheridan of Colorado Springs, Cordileone of Oakland and now San Fran by the Bay, and of course the inimitable Fabian Bruskewitz, the Daddy of dyspeptic Catholicism.  As I have often noted: everyone knows what the Catholic Church is against; no one remembers what it is for.  Well thanks to Pope Francis and Father Martin that is changing.  God Bless the Society of Jesus. 

When you think of Saints like Teresa of Avila, Francis of Assisi, Philip Neri, John XXIII, Thomas More, Francis de Sales, Jordan of Saxony, Bishop Sheen and Mother Teresa you see that laughter and light-heartedness have their place and like leaven lighten and expand the heart to greater service of God and neighbor.  My favorite description of St. Thérèse of Lisieux was written by her prioress, Mother Marie de Gonzague:

“...tall and robust, with a childlike face, and with a tone of voice and expression that hide a wisdom, a perfection and a perspicacity of a woman of fifty... a little innocent thing to whom you would give communion without confession, but whose head is filled with tricks to be played on anyone she pleases. A mystic, a comedian, she is everything! She can make you shed tears of devotion, and just as easily make you split your sides with laughter during recreation.”  incidentally, St Thérèse and Father Martin share a surname--though Thérèse was from the French Martins and the good Jesuit, the Irish.  

Dour Christianity is a sure and certain sign of the heresy of Jansenism, a heresy that has poisoned the Catholic Church here in America from the days of the émigré priests who came fleeing the French Revolution and which was reinforced by the Catholic Calvinism so characteristic of many of the normally funny Irish who came to this country in the 19^th century. 

The story is told of Groucho Marx who while dining in a restaurant was once approached by a priest who said: “O Mr. Marx, I would like to thank you for bringing so much joy into the world.”  Groucho replied: “and I should thank you, Father, for taking so much joy out.”  It would not be funny if it did not ring true.   Hopefully Catholics like Pope Francis and Cardinal Dolan and Steven Colbert will change that perspective on Catholicism and let us take back our Church from the doom and gloom crowd who suck the joy out of the Gospel.  

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.   

A Fear of Spirituality

Archbishop Fenelon

Sorry for the hiatus—every so often I get swamped with things and the blog falls back in priorities, but I want to return to a topic we were discussing a week and more ago—the tensions about the liturgy in the Church today.  I had written in my entry of August 13^th  of the dearth of spirituality in the Church today.  This is tragic in a faith that has a heritage rooted in the personal encounter with Christ by his disciples, male and female, reflected by its scriptures and flowering in a history of mysticism from the profound experiences of Paul and John the Divine through the Desert Fathers and Cassian, Ephrem the Syrian and Pseudo-Dionysisus and John Damascene, Bernard, Francis, and Julian, a Kempis, Ruyersbroeck and Tauler, Teresa, John and Ignatius, deSales, Marie of the Incarnation, and Brother Lawerence, Thérèse, Elizabeth of the Trinity, and Edith Stein—not to mention Gertrude of Helfta, Beatrice of Nazareth, Richard Rolle, Hadjewich, Dom Augustin Baker, and countless others all the way down to Thomas Merton, Jessica Powers, and Mother Theresa.

Some intellectual historians speak of “the suppression of mysticism” as a reaction to the Quietist heresy of the seventeenth century.  I think there is something to this.  Ever since antiquity the Church has been afraid of “illuminism,” the idea that one should be guided by an “inner light” that trumps the faith of the community.  Several of the heresies that tore apart the ancient Church were driven by this passion for radical subjectivity.  The Montanists—among others—embraced this conviction that it was The Holy Spirit that spoke to the individual believer and that such personal inspiration reflect a sort of ongoing revelation that could overrule even scripture.  It was in reaction to this radical religious individualism that the Church early developed a commitment to the idea that the truth resides not in the individual, even the inspired individual, but in the community’s collective discernment.  Here is found the sensus fidelium—the living faith of the faithful—as the guarantor of orthodoxy.  Along with the scholarship of the theologians and the pronouncements of the magisterium, but even more foundational than the scholarship and the magisterium, the sensus fidelium was the bulwark of orthodoxy. 

Illuminism continued to haunt the Church throughout its history.  It surfaced again at the time of the Cathar heresy in the 12^th and 13^th centuries and it haunted the nightmares of the Spanish Inquisitors in the sixteenth century.  There was a revival of illuminism at the time of the Protestant Reformations and indeed it would seize and shape the Radical Reformation—the Reformation of the Anabaptists in Holland and Germany and the Quakers and Shakers and Diggers and Fifth Monarchy Men in Protestant England and its American colonies.           

Despite the Church’s vigilance against illuminism it would raise its head in the sixteenth century in a particular incarnation referred to as Quietism.  Quietism rejected the more extraverted and extravagant manifestations that illuminism had held before.  Indeed it shadowed Catholic orthodoxy so closely that most Quietists though they were secure within the teaching of the Church.  Moreover, many of its proponents were genuinely holy people, just a bit too holy. Quietism can be compared, perhaps, to a good cell gone rogue in the body that becomes cancerous but which had once been a healthy part of the body. 

Classic 17^th century Quietism was so close to Catholic orthodoxy that much of what some of its writers wrote—Archbishop Fenelon for example—is perfectly orthodox, indeed sound Catholic spiritual reading.  Sometimes perfectly sound Catholic spiritual masters, Brother Lawrence for example, were accused, or at least suspected, of quietism when their doctrine is quite sound. 

Quietism’s best description was given by Innocent X in his condemnation of the heresy.  Referring to two leading spiritual writers among the Quietist faction, Archbishop Fenelon of Cambrai and Bishop Bossuet of Meaux, the pope said: “Cambrai loves God too much, Meaux loves man too little.”  Quietism is the heresy which stresses the love for God to the point where love for neighbor becomes unimportant.   One priest described it, in its contemporary manifestation, as “the heresy of the daily communicant.”  It certainly is alive and well today hiding in the pious life of the Christian Pharisee.  But rather than look at its modern manifestations in this posting, I would suggest that we look at the fear that it caused on the part of many bishops and priests that led to a “suppression of mysticism” in the Church from the 17^th through the 20^th centuries.

The broader heresy, illuminism, had always caused fear on the part of the orthodox in the Church—and not without reason. Attempts to discourage people from a life of deep personal prayer, of contemplative prayer, and to limit themselves to pious practices had long been a common error on the part of some Church authorities.  Both Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross refer to this in their writings.  Teresa tells her readers not to be afraid of contemplative prayer and says that she herself had been dissuaded from it for many years thinking it was for souls more educated, more virtuous, more advanced than hers, but she had eventually understood that Christ calls all of his disciples to the intimacy with him that can be found in such prayer alone.  John of the Cross likewise tells his readers that he is not writing for some select group of spiritual proficients, but to encourage all his readers to undertake contemplative prayer.  The Jesuits have always been anxious to share the profound experience of their founder, Ignatius Loyola, in the cave at Manressa and thus offered the Spiritual Exercises in order to guide others along the path of contemplation marked out by Ignatius’ conversion experience.  Francis de Sales was anxious to bring spirituality to ordinary souls and so we have his Introduction to the Devout Life. Yet at the same time these saints were marking out the path of prayer, there were voices warning people not to go down that road.

While all religious had been ordered to daily periods of “mental prayer” in the sixteenth century by Clement VIII, this time was often filled by one person reading aloud a meditation or at least various points on which all gathered were to meditate.  Sometimes devotions involving meditation such as the rosary or the Stations of the Cross were prescribed for this period.  Mental prayer, for those allowed to practice it, became highly structured with an invocation of the Holy Spirit, an act of contrition to prepare, the formation of specific resolutions drawn from the prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, an act of thanksgiving and other conclusions being prescribed leaving little time for the actual meditation.  What time was left for the individual often turned to more theological reflection than attentive and silent listening to God’s stirrings in the soul.  There was a fear of such stirrings.  One had to report any such stirring to one’s spiritual director for confirmation and directors were aggressively managerial over their subject’s spiritual life. 

Also, and I think under the influence of Jansenism (the other leading heresy of the 17^th century) “spirituality” took an excessive interest, a compulsive interest, in the moral conduct of the individual under direction.  Prayer retreated into the shadows and the spotlight shown on morality, not solely sexual morality but certainly emphasizing that field of behavior.  A relative degree of moral perfection became the sine qua non of the spiritual life so that many people began focusing on sin in their lives rather than the grace being offered in a relationship with God.  The premise was that one could have no relationship with God as long as sin was substantially present.  This false assertion alone locked the doors of the Castle of the Soul against many who otherwise might have advanced far in the spiritual life—and been converted in the process.  More and more, a life of deep prayer was becoming the unique prerogative of the  cloistered nun or monk.  The most the rest of us could do was frequent confession, occasional communion (don’t’ forget daily communion was not allowed until Pius X at the beginning of the 20^th century), and our devotions. 

The suppression of mysticism, the discouraging of people from pursing contemplative prayer, mentioned in my last blog entry, has left a great spiritual shallowness in the contemporary Church.  Moral integrity became a pre-requisite in the minds of many—including clergy—for a relationship with God rather than the fruit of that relationship.  This created an obsessive fascination with sin rather than an emphasis on grace in Christian life and has perverted much spirituality over the last three centuries.  And this, in turn, I think is much the root of what is unhealthy in the life of the American Church today.