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.  

More On The Renewal of Religious Life or It's Not The Veil That Makes The Nun

I am sorry that I haven’t posted in a few days but the combination of an impending Christmas and a wicked winter head cold has conspired to keep me from doing only the bare necessities and then heading for life under the covers.  I do want to tie up this matter of an evangelical renewal of Religious Life and then move onto topics old (Church of England) and new (Pope Francis’ remarks to the Curia and his role in the shift of American policy towards Cuba.) 

Perhaps spending so much time on the renewal of Religious Life strikes readers as an undue amount of time and energy spent on a topic of concern to a small—and increasingly elderly—audience.  But I think that the renewal of Religious Life is crucial for the Renewal of our entire Catholic Church for several reasons. 

1.    Religious Life represents a facet of the Church that is both institutional and charismatic and could well model ways in which the institutional aspects of the Church could be renewed and reformed in radically fresh and innovative ways.

2.    Religious, while having ties to the clerical institution and even having ordained among the members of their communities, are essentially part of a lay movement in the Church and can pioneer paths of spiritual revival for all of us in the Church

3.    The great spiritual traditions of the Catholic Church—Ignatian, Carmelite, Benedictine, Franciscan, Salesian, are in the custody of the Religious and Religious provide the resources for a process of spiritual maturation.  How much is the new energy and vision which Pope Francis brings to the Church rooted in his Jesuit spirituality?

4.    Religious communities have the luxury of being spiritual laboratories where new models of community, prayer, apostolate and evangelical lifestyle can be explored and developed.

  According to the schema we have been working on in looking at what an evangelical renewal of Religious Life looks like, the penultimate key to an evangelical renewal of Religious Life is a friendship with Christ rooted in a life of deep personal prayer.  To a certain extent I have covered this in the two previous postings—the one on an immersion in the scriptures and the other as a life that draws on the riches of our Catholic Sacramental and Liturgical heritage.  But perhaps there is a need to explicitly unpack the idea of personal prayer beyond what was said under those two topics, though I stand firm in my claim that all Christian spirituality is essentially a Scriptural spirituality as one cannot be sure of the authenticity of one’s encounter with God except as we encounter God in his Word. 

I want to go back to my quote from Sister Joan Chittester: “The only reason to come to Religious Life is to find God.”  I agree with her that the search for God is the very Raison d'être for religious life.  Indeed, as I believe that the Religious Life is actually the model or what I earlier referred to as the pace-setter for all Christian life, I believe that as we mature in the faith, the search for God becomes the primary characteristic of human life. 

Now when I talk about prayer, at this state I am referring to contemplative prayer.  Devotional prayers and pieties have their place and even as we mature in the spiritual life they continue to have a place.  But as we mature in the spiritual life we also learn that there is a world of unsurpassable intimacy with God that opens up to us as we learn to let the devotions slide into the background of our prayer and let God take us by the hand and lead us to ever deeper and more secret places in our own soul where God communicates God’s Self to us in a solitary silence. 

Such prayer, if authentic, is not an exercise in spiritual self-pleasuring.  To the contrary, like all maturing, the spiritual journey  requires that we strip ourselves of so much of our religious childishness and come to the maturity that God’s Spirit awakens in us—a transformative maturity in which we wordlessly learn that we are here for purposes great than our own personal agenda.  Like Christ himself we undergo that kenosis, that self-emptying that allows us to be refashioned in Christ, so that Christ may live in us, so that we may participate in his divinity even as he has shared in our human nature. 

This transformation is a life long process.  It can’t be rushed.  For most of us it is years before we come to even see the journey ahead much less to make significant progress on the road.  But it takes long and solitary time with God in Christ and we must make that time a priority.

I am not sure that I see this spirituality in many of the new communities that are emerging in the Church in an attempt to re-invent religious life.  I see devotional prayer.  I see a certain amount of liturgical prayer, or at times a liturgical formulaicism.  (By formulaicism I mean a focusing on precise formulas and rituals that often reduces the actual prayer to somewhat of a minimal amount).  On the other hand, I continue to be saddened by how any focus on genuine contemplative prayer seems to have been bypassed in some of the long-established communities.  I have heard too many Sisters from the various Apostolic Communities told that they should go off to the Carmelites or the Trappistines if they “want to pray.”  

I believe that it is the baptismal call of all Christians to grow in contemplative prayer.  Karl Rahner’s famous dictum that the Christian of the future will be a mystic or will cease to be anything at all is spot on.  Among the ravages of a post-Christian culture, it will only be being rooted in an intense personal friendship with Christ that can give a compass to our existence.  As in so many ways, I believe that Religious need to pioneer the way.  

Beyond Piety: More Reflections On An Evangelical Renewal of Religious Life

Today is the Feast of Saint John of the Cross.  Well, actually yesterday was his feast day but for Discalced Carmelites the Solemnity was transferred until today so as not to interfere with an Advent Sunday.  I say this because I spent a good chunk of the day with a community of Discalced Carmelite Nuns and it lets me pick up on the theme of the need for an evangelical renewal of Religious Life and in particular on where I left off: namely my observation that the pieties of the past are not enough to sustain Religious in a genuinely evangelical life and what is needed is a substantive spirituality.  I mentioned in the my previous posting that many Religious today are either spiritually and psychologically burned out for the lack of a proper formation in the past or, at the other end of the spectrum, are being formed in and for spiritually and psychologically unhealthy systems.  Both the dying communities of the pre-Conciliar Church and the unhealthy communities of what might be called the Conciliar Reaction have this in common: they feed their members spiritual pabulum that is sufficient for beginners in the spiritual life but they have not given them (the old groups) or do not give them (the new groups) the tools of an authentic spiritual life suited for self-realizing (that is to say self-realizing under grace) Christian discipleship. 

Some years ago I had in class a woman who had been a cloistered Dominican Nun for over twenty-five years.  In our conversation she told me that for those twenty-five years her spiritual life consisted in daily Mass, the Divine Office in choir, her participation in the monastery work of a perpetual rosary before the Blessed Sacrament (where she spent approximately 2 hours a day and said about ten rosaries.)  She was told that there was no need for mental prayer beyond that that could be accommodated by her obligatory rosaries and that there was no time for Lectio Divina.   In other words, her entire prayer life was active prayer, either liturgical or devotional.  She had matured more in the spiritual life, she told me, under a Cistercian Spiritual Director in the three years since leaving the monastery than she had in her 25 years inside the cloister.  And “if this is what happens to the green wood, what will happen to the dry?”

For many communities founded in the 19^th century a typical prayer life was Mass, the rosary, and the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary along with assorted litanies and devotional prayers.  Sisters and Brothers and even priests were told that meditation or mental prayer was unnecessary and even that it was dangerous.  Many of the newer communities are little better.  The Little Office has been replaced by parts of the Divine Office but there is still either no training in mental prayer or inadequate time given to it.  People are encouraged in some communities to fill their meditation time with devotional prayers. 

Piety is a good thing but it is not spirituality. “Piety” comes from the Latin word pietas which means the duties that one has towards ones parents, mentors, elders, and God.  In the context of religion, piety is what we do, led by grace, for God. It is our taking responsibility (always by grace) for our relationship with God.  We initiate and sustain the relationship. Spirituality, on the other hand, is the relationship that God, in his grace, works in us.   God takes the initiative and sustains (with our response) the relationship.  In piety, we are the principal active agent; in spirituality God is the initiator.  It is the difference between active and receptive prayer.  For the heart that is bent on searching for God, whether a Religious or a priest or a lay person, piety, in and of itself, is a dead-end path.  Piety can lead one to genuine spirituality and indeed most great spiritual journeys begin in piety.  But they must mature and the soul must yield the reins of the spiritual life to God. 

Today watching the Carmelite nuns prayerfully sitting in their choir or going about their roles in the liturgy, or greeting their guests, or sharing their celebratory dinner with nuns from several other communities, I was struck by the grace—on both the natural and supernatural meanings of that word—with which they live.  There was nothing artificial about how they did things, nothing “nunny.”  A low note of celebration pervaded the prayer and a constant tone of prayer pervaded the celebration.  One could see a certain depth of meaning, an integration of all the diverse facets of life, that is too often missing in both the spiritual fuss-budgeting of some of the newer communities and the tired cynicism of the established groups.  

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.