Some Lenten Thoughts On the Church In the Present Millennium

Sorry, things have gotten away from this past week and I have neglected to post any entries.  I hope I can make it up over the next week or two—though the schedule gets incredibly busy at this time of year.  But it doesn’t stop the Krazies, so if they can find the time for all their manic ravings and bizarre pseudo-religiosity, I, in my little self-appointed hermitage, should be able to as well.  It is just that this time of year is so rich in the readings and prayers and liturgies of this season that it is hard to tear oneself away from Lent’s austere beauty and sit at the keyboard.  In the early morning, I just want to take my coffee and sit on the glassed-in verandah and watch the sun come up over the barren late-winter landscape and ponder how these inner and outer worlds coalesce into some sort of harmonious unity. 

This year we celebrate the centenary of the birth of Thomas Merton and the fifth centenary of the birth of Saint Teresa of Avila.  They are two of my favorite spiritual writers.  They have a huge amount in common.  Both were very much down-to-earth sort of mystics—not the sort of flighty and vague romantics so favored by the sentimental and the pious.  Both had wicked senses of humor and were quick to turn a phrase that was both pithy and mirthful.  Both were deeply sensual and each, according to their particular genders, expressive of a highly sexualized spirituality.  But for me what is most important is that each, despite they themselves being monastics, were determined to open the arcane gateway of contemplative prayer to ordinary folk like you and like me. 

I wonder if it had not been for Merton—I read him before I ever read Teresa though I have over my career done a deeper study of Teresa than of Merton—I wonder if had it had not been for Merton would I ever have found the entry point of that Interior Castle of which Teresa speaks?  Had it not been for Merton, I am not sure that I would ever have realized the potential for prayer that went beyond the devotional.  I still enjoy the devotional, of course, much like I still like Jelly Beans; but I am glad that Merton and others showed me the darker and richer delights of still and silent prayer.

Some years back I was part of a group trying to arrange to bring Father William Menninger, like Merton a Cistercian (Trappist) monk, to our parish in Northern Virginia to give a workshop on contemplative prayer.  It was all set.  At the last minute, the pastor—who up to that time had been too busy to learn much about the program other than to insure that Father William was a priest in good standing and of “orthodox” Catholicity, cancelled the program.  “I didn’t realize it was about contemplative prayer,” he protested.  “That is something for monks and nuns, not for mere (his words) lay people like yourselves.  Why, if it isn’t part of our life as priests, would it ever be part of your lives as lay people?”  I had been reading Merton for over forty years at the time—and Teresa for about twenty-five—and I knew that all Christians are called to contemplative prayer.  It is not for “the elect.”  Indeed I have come to realize that all human persons are called to contemplative prayer as Saint Augustine pointed out in his famous lines:

You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

A source, while far less credible than my beloved aforementioned Doctor Gratiae but still infinitely more insightful than any contemporary writer (including Merton), the Jesuit Karl Rahner wrote:   

“The devout Christian of the future will be a ‘mystic’, one who has experienced something, or he will cease to be anything at all.  For devout Christian living as practiced in the future will no longer be sustained and helped by the unanimous, manifest and public convictions and religious customs of all, summoning each one form the outset to a persona experience and a personal decision.

We live, in this country and throughout “the West,” in what has fast devolved into a post-Christian era.  The “Christian Culture” of Europe and Anglophone North America has been for the most part nothing more than an ever-thinning veneer since “The Enlightenment” and its Rosemary’s Baby, the French Revolution.  The days when one’s Christian worldview and consequent values could be widely shared with one’s family, neighbors, colleagues, and friends are gone.  This is not to say that there isn’t a sort of human goodness or moral framework to be found anymore, but it is at best the habitual remnants of an earlier era and more often a natural—and inconsistently fickle—sort of natural sense of decency or integrity.  One doesn’t need to be a Christian—or even a believer—for such natural sense of fairplay, but as I said it is often a very fickle system.  I have written in some previous posts about how the lack of philosophy in the curriculum required for a college education has led to the inability of so many in our society to make any sort of a moral judgment beyond the rule that “works for me” is good and “doesn’t work for me” is bad.   What Rahner is saying in the above quote is that if Christians are to find a moral compass in this “culture” of soulless modernity—or actually post-modernity—they must have some sort of direct experience of God.  The key word here is direct.  God’s presence can be mediated by sacred things, sacred people, sacred actions, sacred gatherings, sacred institutions.  We call these physical manifestations of the Divine “sacraments.”  (I am not speaking narrowly here of the Seven Sacraments as defined by the Fourth Lateran Council but of the entire realm of the sacramental: the visible channels or manifestations of invisible grace.)  Used correctly these sacraments/sacramentals are genuine channels of grace, but as Colm Luibheid points out in the preface to his John Cassian, Conferences (Paulist, 1985), the human heart longs for a direct and unmediated encounter with God.  Our hearts are restless until they rest in God—not in rituals and ceremonies (as helpful as they may be to some), not in icons and candles (as good as they too can be), nor even in the Bread which has become Christ’s Body and the Wine which has become Christ’s Blood—but all this only ignites a hunger for the Creator that transcends the created.  In no way does the Christian ever dispense with the mediated channels of grace—we are incarnate beings and we need the tangible, the edible, the visible, but we are also Spirit and as such we long for that which is beyond the creaturely.  

This eros for God has always been in the human soul.  It doesn’t come with baptism or with some sort of mid-life conversion or being “born again.”  As Saint Augustine points out, we are created with this hunger for God.  It is us; it is who we are.  It has always been there, though not all have let an awareness of the hunger surface.  It was there for the psalmist when he wrote “Like the deer that yearns for running streams, so my soul is longing for you, my God.”  It was there for Jesus when he said: Seek first the Kingdom of God and all these things will be given to you.”  It was there for Saint Augustine when he wrote the line I quoted earlier.  Pseudo-Dionysius, Saint Bernard, Saint Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, Meister Eckhardt, Saint John of the Cross, Francis de Sales, Archbishop Fenelon, and countless mystics in between wrote or spoke of it.  It drove the desert fathers out to lives in the barren wilderness.  It provided John Cassian with the major theme of his conferences.  It populated Mount Athos and Subiaco.  Ignatius experienced it in the cave of Manressa.  Teresa of Avila was obsessed with it.  Elizabeth of the Trinity wrote to her sister Guite about it.  And to come back full circle, it is the core of all of Merton’s writings. 

And it is shaping the Church for its third millennium.  I am somewhat racing a deadline as this evening we have Taizé prayer in our parish.  People still come out for Stations of the Cross and Benediction on Friday evenings, but more and more are coming for the monastic quiet of this simple contemplative prayer around the Cross.  When we have a speaker on contemplative prayer we fill the parish center; when we have a speaker about the Catechism of the Catholic Church a dozen donuts will do.  When I sit in church during the day and see people come in, one less and less sees rosaries come out or prayerbooks opened, but people just sitting silently in God’s presence for 20, 30, even 40 minutes and more.

We need to find ways to encourage people to deeper prayer.  Merton’s books are still to be found in bookshops and on Amazon.  I think the biggest challenge, however, is to convince our priests that there is more to prayer than them parading around in a cope and carrying a monstrance or mumbling away in Latin jingo as they versus apsidem and mistakenly call it versus Deum.  Rahner has not only spoken truly that the Christian of the future will be a mystic or cease to be anything at all, but also that we, as the Church itself, will either be contemplative or cease to be.  

A Saint Whose Own Holiness Began Reform of the Church

The Basilica of San Appolinaire in Classe, the one

time monastic church where Saint Romuald began

his journey of holiness that contributed to the

Gregorian Reform

  One of earliest contributors to the “Gregorian Reformation” was Saint Romuald of Ravenna, a monk of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries.   Romuald is actually a bridge figure between the Ottonian and Gregorian Reformations.  As a young man, just out of his teens, he was appalled at the violence he saw around him, including in his own family—having seen his father kill a man in a duel—and he embraced the monastic life at the Monastery of Saint Appolinaire in Classe, a monastery just outside Ravenna that followed the Cluniac Reformation.  Desiring a more austere life, Romuald left Sain Appolinaire and  became a hermit with his spiritual master, a monk named Marinus whose vision was rooted in the austere eremitical life of the Irish monks who had Christianized much of what is today Switzerland and the Alpine areas of France, Italy, and the Austrian Tyrol.  This style of monasticism was much closer to the ideals of the desert abbas and ammas than the more cehobitic Benedictine monasticism.   
      Romuald’s fame spread and the Emperor Otto III asked him to reform several monasteries in his realm.  The monks in these monasteries were not anxious to be reformed however and Romuald quit in disgust, hurling his abbatial crosier at the Emperor in a fit of pique.  He retired to a hermitage at Fonte Avellana in Tuscany and then, as a monastic community grew up there, established a second hermitage at Camaldoli—also in Tuscany—and then a third, Val di Castro.  The hermits at Camaldoli eventually formed their own distinct branch of the Benedictine Family, the Camaldolese monks.  Romuald died in 1027.      
         Romuald’s monasticism was highly disciplinary but never rigid.  Like such later saints as Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Francis de Sales—Romuald understood that holiness, not austerity, was the virtue to which monks are called and what he really wanted his monks to learn was the path of contemplative prayer.   In this he veered somewhat slightly from the Cluniac ideal for Romuald did not short-change the liturgical services but neither did he let them take over and dominate the monastic life.  To the contrary—silence and solitude, not ceremony and ritual were the heart of the life that he envisioned for monks.  Drawing on the ancient monastic practices he taught his monks how to sit in silence, leaving their hearts empty for God to fill.  This principle of monastic spirituality is called vacare deo—to empty (oneself) for God.   “Sing the psalms in your heart and understand them with your soul” was his advice.  Today such spiritual masters as Abbot Thomas Keating, Father William Menninger, and the late Dom John Main draw on these same spiritual techniques, referred to as “Centering Prayer,” or “Christian meditation.”                       
      Romuald’s focus was not the Reform of the Church, but reform as spiritual renewal of the individual monk but his communities, especially Fonte Avellana, would become centers of spiritual renewal that would not only engender a monastic reform but reform of the Church.  In our next posting we are going to look at Peter Damian, a monk of FonteAvellana who will have tremendous impact on the Church and its reform in the 11^th century, more impact than any other individual including Pope Gregory himself.   When we speak of the need for Reform in the Church, we must remember that it begins with individuals who have a quest for holiness.  The reform of structures comes after the change of heart.  Holiness is neither moral righteousness--though there is always a need to mature in integrity if the holiness is to be real and not merely superficial--nor is it mere piety.  Indeed, as we mature in holiness piety becomes almost an impediment to genuine prayer; it gets in the way of the deep and silent prayer--the cor ad cor loquitor (heart speaks to heart) with which God is anxious to fill us.  You don't have to be a monk or a nun to mature in contemplative prayer.  Indeed the monk or the nun is nothing other than an ordinary woman or man who trusts God enough to open the deeper recesses of his or her being to the profound grace, the fullness of Grace, of the Indwelling Trinity.  This requires not the fuss and bother of busy prayer, but the stillness, solitude, and silence of deep prayer.   There are those who fear contemplative prayer, who discourage people from practicing it, who claim that it is only for the clergy or the monks. They only betray their lack of knowledge of our Catholic mystical tradition.  Any renewal of our Catholic faith must be rooted in a spiritual renewal of the Catholic faithful. 
Romuald's Sayings:

Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put the whole world behind you and forget it. Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watching for fish. The path you must follow is in the Psalms — never leave it. 
If you have just come to the monastery, and in spite of your good will you cannot accomplish what you want, take every opportunity you can to sing the Psalms in your heart and to understand them with your mind.
And if your mind wanders as you read, do not give up; hurry back and apply your mind to the words once more.
Realize above all that you are in God's presence, and stand there with the attitude of one who stands before the emperor.
Empty yourself completely and sit waiting, content with the grace of God, like the chick who tastes nothing and eats nothing but what his mother brings him.
 

 

Roots of the Reformation VI: The Spiritual Renewal of the Laity

illumination from a Reformation Era choirbook
in Krakow  Poland

Much of the groundwork of the Protestant Reformations was laid in the centuries immediately preceding.  Luther did not materialize out of thin air and he—and the other reformers—were the heirs of a rich and complex theological heritage that manifested itself in the the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.  Catholics tend to see the Reformers as innovators who scotched their Catholic roots for something new, but in fact most of the Reformers—and Luther in particular—were actually conservatives who were trying to salvage what was best, or what they estimated as best, in the ancient and medieval Church and pass it on to future generations and one of the characteristics of the medieval Church that they—and again Luther in particular—wanted to pass on was a rich and vibrant life of faith for the individual. 

This is always a problem in Christianity.  What does a life of faithful discipleship mean?  Is a disciple to be a loyal member of the Church, observant of its laws and unquestioning of its authority?  Is a disciple one who has a living and vibrant relationship with Christ, rooted in the scriptures and a life of prayer?  Of course the answer doesn’t require an either/or answer.  But too often a lifeless and formal religion is what people are introduced to and warned not to go beyond by those whose faith is in the Church as an Institution rather than in Christ risen from the dead and present in his Body, the Church, the community of the baptized.  Sometimes the Institutional Church is made into an idol that leads us away from the worship of the Father in Spirit and Truth that Jesus calls us to in the Gospel of John. 

Let me give an example.  Father William Menninger, a Trappist Monk of St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer MA was scheduled to give a program on contemplative prayer at St. Ambrose Parish in Annandale VA last February. Father William is a highly respected and widely known authority on contemplative prayer.  He has worked for years with his fellow Trappist, Abbot Thomas Keating in bringing the wisdom of the monastic tradition to ordinary Christians—Catholics and Protestants alike—teaching a method of contemplative prayer called “Centering Prayer.”  Centering Prayer is a form of “acquired contemplation,” that is, a process of preparing the soul for the gift of contemplation proper, “infused contemplation,” by quieting the senses, the imagination, the intellect, and the will.  There is nothing “new age” about this—the practice can be found in one of the most important medieval spiritual texts: The Cloud of Unknowing as well as the Eastern Christian Philokalia, and can be traced back through Cassian to the monastic Desert Fathers and Mothers. It is also consistent with and echoes the Carmelite Tradition, most notably Saint John of the Cross.  What is the problem?

Frankly I don’t know what the problem is, or at Saint Ambrose, was.  But the pastor got phone calls, did “some research” and cancelled his permission for Father William to speak on the parish campus.  This isn’t unusual.  Many of the clergy today are frightened of their congregants being introduced to advanced levels of spirituality.  As one priest in the Newark Archdiocese told me: “What happens if they (the laity) become holier than the priest? Why will they listen to us?”  He has a good question.  Why indeed?  And in fact, it is a danger, a real danger, to the Institutional Church when the laity outstrip the clergy in wisdom, compassion, and faith—all fruits of a life of unitive prayer.  Indeed, in the centuries after the Protestant Reformations, many in the Institutional Church discouraged or even prohibited the laity—and even prohibited many priests and religious—from being introduced to contemplative prayer because they recognized how prayer, in the hands of the laity, had left the Church vulnerable to the influence of the Reformers.  Some of the Reformers—and I emphasize some—were men of genuine personal holiness and faith.  Luther is one such figure.  Despite what most Catholics have been taught, Luther was a man of great spiritual maturity and orthodox Christian faith.  The Catholic-Lutheran dialogues of the last forty years—study sessions sponsored by the Holy See and consisting of both Catholic and Lutheran scholars that examined key doctrinal issues—have found in their study and conversations that Luther was in substantial agreement with Catholic doctrine on questions like the Real Presence  of Christ in the Eucharist.  We have also discovered that Catholic teaching is in substantial agreement with Luther on such signature Lutheran doctrines as Justification by Faith.  This isn’t to say that there are not very important questions that we do not yet have to resolve before we can restore the unity of the Church, but only to say that Luther was no theological mad man.  It also must be remembered that I am talking about Luther—not Calvin, or Knox, or Thomas Műnster.  Each of the Reformers have to be dealt with separately.     

Martin Luther was highly influenced by a German Dominican writer, Johannes Tauler, who in turn had been influenced by the great medieval mystic, Meister Eckhart.  Luther and Tauler were not contemporaries—far from it, Tauler had lived almost two centuries before Luther.    There exists a 1508 edition of Tauler’s sermons, however, that belonged to Luther and has Luther’s marginal notes.  Tauler’s conviction that mere assent to doctrine does not constitute faith, but that faith requires a personal relationship with God in Jesus Christ was the motivating drive, or one of the motivating energies, in Luther’s understanding of salvation by faith.  This in turn would motivate John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, two centuries later in his impassioned search for a feeling of being saved.  As the English are not known for their sentimentalism, it was a frustrating search which reached a somewhat tepid apogee in his “Aldersgate Experience.”  While Wesley may have never done better to feel his heart “strangely warmed,” it did stamp the Methodist movement with a great emphasis on “feeling” and as Methodism has probably stamped American Religion, including American Catholicism, with its distinctive subjective enthusiasm, it affects us even today.  In fact, in as that circles are always vicious, this desire for emotional satisfaction in religion brings us back to where we started, to those who find the search for that feeling of intimacy with God motivates them to “centering prayer” and other religious experiences, as well to those who fear “centering prayer” and other religious experiences, being satisfied instead with a meatless broth of doctrine and discipline for their spiritual nourishment.   But that should not be a problem in Catholicism where there is room for all.  In the next posting we will look at the medieval spiritual renaissance, the Devotio Moderna, that created this emphasis on personalized relationship with God.