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.  

Evangelical Catholicism and the Emerging Church

It has been awhile since I did a posting on Evangelical Catholicism.  As you may remember I had been reading George Weigel’s book by that name and was taken by his proposition  

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. Every Catholic has received this invitation in Baptism, the invitation to accept the Great Commission, to act as evangelists and to measure the truth of Catholic life by the way in which Catholics give expression to the human decency and solidarity that flows from friendship with Christ the Lord.

Unfortunately as Weigel fleshes out what this means, I think he betrays his ideal for something that is anything but evangelical, but that is somewhat beside the point I want to make today. 

I was at a wake last week and speaking with a Protestant pastor who was there when someone with little ecumenical sensitivity said to him: “you guys need to have a Vatican II.”  The minister good naturedly replied: “We did, it was Vatican II.”  His point was that the Second Vatican Council has impacted most of the Protestant Churches as much as it has Catholicism.  This is obvious enough in the mainline Churches—the Episcopal Church, the Lutheran Churches, the Methodists and Presbyterians, all of whom have revised various liturgical practices and even some church polity to harmonize better with one another and with us Catholics.  But when one gets to the so-called Evangelicals, it is not always so obvious. 

I say “so-called Evangelicals” as I think a lot of people who refer to themselves as “evangelicals” or call  their denomination “evangelical” are anything but.  Evangelical comes from the Greek word, εὐαγγέλιον, which means “good news” and specifically the news of a victory.  The Greek word for Gospel is εὐαγγέλιον because it is the Good News of God’s Victory in Christ over sin and death.  But so many people who call themselves evangelicals are about bad news of judgment, condemnation, and the defeat of Grace and in reality they are anything but bearers of Good News.  

There is a movement among some evangelicals, however, that shows a remarkable move away from the gloomy Calvinism in which many of the so-called Evangelical denominations were rooted towards a faith that is more in line with the New Testament optimism that God’s Saving Work in Jesus Christ may actually be a victory over sin.  This movement, which is not a Church or a denomination but a loose-knit connection of Churches and individuals who have realigned their theological thought in some dramatic ways, parallels much of the shift that has gone on in Catholicism over the last sixty years and has received a fresh new impetus under the direction of Pope Francis.   It is called the “Emerging Church” and it has drawn a wide range of Christians from Lutherans to Methodists to Baptists to members of the Free Churches and to Christian fellowships who decline to identify with any particular denomination.  The main characteristics of the emerging Church seem—from what I have read—to be:

1.     an emphasis on a personal spirituality that calls the individual to be conformed to Jesus Christ—to live a life in which he or she learns to model himself or herself on Jesus.

2.     A belief that God is vitally concerned about this world and has given us, both as communities and individuals, a mission in this world to infuse the world with Gospel values and thus transform it.

3.     To be an inclusive and welcoming Christian fellowship in which each is called to personal conversion but in which no one is judged.  (Sounds familiar, Pope Francis?)

4.     A model of leadership in the Church that does not involve power or control.

5.     An openness to dialogue that sees the faith of the Church as a progressive appreciation of the truth rather than inflexible and dogmatic axioms that are imposed in the name of an ahistorical and immutable “Tradition.”

6.     An openness to the contributions of the various cultures in which Christians find themselves rather than an Euro-American cultural hegemony. 

7.     An ability to live with ambiguity that helps us realize that God us ultimately a Mystery in whose life we are invited to participate and that defies our ability to define and delineate. 

This type of Christian faith requires a spiritual maturity that permits us to walk in faith through a darkness of the intellect that was described by Saint John of the Cross: to come to the knowledge you have not, you must go by a way in which you do not know.  In other words, to come to know God we must give up whatever knowledge we think we have.  When we are confident in our “knowledge” of “God,” the god we think we know is invariably a god of our own imagination.  To come to know God, we must let the slate of our knowledge be wiped clean and be willing to start over with an “unknowing,” the term that many of our Catholic mystics have used to talk about the direct encounter with God in which the human faculties, including the intellect, fall silent. 

What is particularly interesting about the Emerging Church movement is that it does not show the fear of spirituality and mystical experience that has characterized much of historical Protestantism. This is one of the tensions in Christianity—in Catholicism as well as Protestantism—the need for an orthodoxy that is rooted in doctrinal objectivity and the need for a personal encounter with God that transcends (though does not contradict) that doctrine.  Paul Tillich spoke of this tension, or at least one aspect of it, with the Protestant Principle and the Catholic Substance.  For too long perhaps we Christians, in our desire for doctrinal objectivity have substituted an embalmed deity for the Living God.  The Emerging Church movement is a call for us all to go again on the search for the Living God.  This is not a new call.  Read the Documents of the Second Vatican Council and you will hear the same summons.  Pope Francis has made this call a theme of his papacy which has rekindled the light of Vatican II among some and the anger over Vatican II among others.  

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.   

Papal Transitions

I want to bring your attention to an op-ed piece by Timothy Shriver recently printed in the Washington Post.  I would not necessarily agree with the article in its totality but I think it raises an important consideration that needs to be discussed at every level of the Church.    

 The next pope should be a mystic

Timothy Shriver is the chairman of Special Olympics.

There’s no need to rehash the recent disastrous track record of the all-male Roman Catholic hierarchy. The sordid abuse of children by priests, the sinister coverups, the callous treatment of nuns, the deaf ear turned toward Catholics who happen to be gay or divorced — it’s all on the front page. The Catholic Church is hemorrhaging moral authority.

What’s much more devastating is that it is losing believers, too. If you can’t trust the messengers, why trust the message? It is not too much to say that the crisis in the church is contributing to a crisis of faith in the Gospel itself.
This is a crisis not of management nor of theology. This is a crisis of the spirit. But before the church can address its great moral collapse, it will have to recover its spiritual bearings. The next pope should be a mystic.
A mystic? Absolutely! Contrary to popular perception, a mystic is not a magician or a crystal-ball-gazer. A mystic is rather a person who has had an experience of God’s love so unmistakable that it changes him or her forever, imparting a confidence that cannot be shaken, a humility that cannot be doubted, a freedom that exudes love and gentleness and authenticity. A mystic knows from experience, not books, that we are each beautiful beyond our understanding, loved beyond our capacity to love, united beyond our perceptions of difference and division.
Happily, mystics have a rich history in the Catholic tradition. I’d like to see a pope who is a devoted follower of the anonymous 13th-century author of The Cloud of Unknowing, who taught the practice of silent prayer and meditation. Like many contemporary teachers of meditation, this person taught students to enter meditation meekly through a “cloud of forgetting” and discover a state in which “the soul is one with God.” Today’s millions who are disillusioned with metaphysical formulations or religious creeds would love an invitation to that experience.
It would also be wonderful if the new pope led retreats based on the teachings of Saint Teresa of Avila, who wrote that “any real ecstasy is a sign you are moving in the right direction. Don’t let any prude tell you otherwise!” The future of the church depends on its capacity to embrace the healthy and wonderful human longing for love and unity and intimacy. Teresa could be the model who celebrated the love of Christ as a lover would, a pioneer who believed that, through the practice of loving God, we can become better lovers of other human beings.
The new pope could update his iPod with the enchanting sacred music composed by Hildegard of Bingen — a 12th-century hermit who longed to become a “feather on the breath of God.” We live in search of experiences of “flow,” where our identity is swallowed up in a unifying consciousness not all our own. Hildegard would be a wonderful guide in the search for that lightness of being, and her music could illuminate our search.
The new pope might also remind believers of the often painful detachment that comes with the mystical pursuit of the purest love of God. He need only teach the writings of Saint John of the Cross, who found himself “living darkly, with no ray of light.” John is a voice for those who feel the void of meaninglessness, but in that same darkness, he is also given the discovery that often comes with spiritual rigor: “[L]ove gives power to my life . . . . Love can perform a wondrous labor which I have learned internally, and all the good or bad in me takes on a penetrating savor, changing my soul so it can be consumed in a delicious flame.”
Today’s searchers can also look to modern-day mystics. American Franciscan Richard Rohr offers guidance about how to seek a heart at peace with others and infused with purpose. Rohr teaches the mysticism of Saint Francis, mysticism as part of everyday life. Rohr reminds us that the Gospel is like the gay rights movement in one way: It’s an invitation for us to come out of our closets and bask in the reckless love of God.
Can a pope be like Saint Francis or Saint Theresa?
It depends on how much the cardinals are willing to risk. They should risk it all, just like Jesus.
Theirs is a church founded on the audacious premise that “God is love.” Jesus trusted that love to enable him to take the greatest risks possible: to love his enemies, to believe that God’s presence was in all things, to teach poverty and humility and the beauty of children and flowers and meekness and peace. It was that depth of spirit that allowed him to say, “[God] the Father and I are one.”
We need a pope like him, a mystic for our times. Nothing less than a mystic can reveal the depth of the beauty of the church to a new generation of seekers, still hungry to believe, still ready to fall in love with God.

I submit that we need to give thought to an article like this not  because we have any say in who the new pope will be but  because whoever the new pope may  be, I think this gives us some direction for the renewal of the Church at the local level.

I gave a lecture last evening at a Church in the Potrero Hill district of San Francisco.  San Francisco is a vibrant city but the Church in San Francisco is dead.  When on March 28 1776 the Spanish explorers established a military base (the Presidio) and a Mission (Mission Dolores) here, it was intended to be a Catholic stronghold.  Today not only has the Catholic Church, despite its magnificent Cathedral of Saint Mary, become irrelevant to the life of this great city but San Francisco is the bastion of American secularism.  We need a new evangelism but for it to be successful we also need religious leaders who know the difference between evangelism and apologetics.  We don’t’ need more doctrine and rules and rituals to be shoved down our throats.  We need the guidance that can open to us and invite us into the experience of God.  This doesn’t mean rejecting the doctrines of our faith or its ancient rites, but it does mean addressing the hungers of the human soul rather than what has become the business as usual of trying to exert power and control over people’s lives.  We need a Shepherd, not an Inquisitor nor a warden. 

The Politics of Spirituality

Thomas Merton, leading

American Spiritual writer

of the last 100 years.

A friend of mine called me the other evening with a question he is facing on a take-home exam at Catholic U in Washington.  He wanted my advice as it is a field in which I teach.  And the question was “Compare and contrast contemporary spiritual writers with the classical spiritual writers.” 

I suggested several ideas he might want to follow—contemporary spiritual writers draw on other fields such as psychology, anthropology, sociology of religion etc. in their writing, fields not developed at the time of Francis de Sales or Teresa of Avila or Bernard of Clairvaux.  Moreover, contemporary spiritual writers will also draw insights from other world-religion traditions such as Buddhism or Islamic mysticism and they will also find insight in Native American spirituality or in the spiritual
traditions of cultures such as the Australian aborigines.  This would not have been done before Nostra Aetate at Vatican II nor could it have been done in the more culturally narrow worlds of the medieval or even the early modern periods.  At this point my friend interrupted me and said that the contemporary authors they had read for this course on the history of Christian spirituality drew neither on an inter-disciplinary nor a inter-faith tradition.  So whom, I asked, had they been assigned to read.  The answer was Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI), Karl Rahner, and Henri deLubac.  I had been expecting Thomas Merton, Thomas Keating, Joan Chittester, Ronald Rohlheiser, Richard Rohr, Evelyn Underhill, Henri Nouwen, and other contemporary writers.  Ratzinger, Rahner, and deLubac are great writers—but they are systematic theologians not spiritual theologians.  Granted that each of the produced some writings of profound spiritual importance and each has shown through his writings a profound personal spiritual experience but it is interesting that the writers who are influencing contemporary American Catholics are overlooked in favor of these ivory-tower pietists. 

Now I realize that a Ratzinger or a Rahner or a deLubac  bring an academic rigor to their writings that the above mentioned authors do not.  But Teresa of Avila and Thérèse of Lisieux and even Francis de Sales were not academics.  Ignatius and his Spiritual Exercises are not the overflow of scholarly reflection. Thomas à Kempis did not write from a theological perspective.  Eckhardt was a theologian of course—but clearly distinguished between his mystical works (which were usually in the vernacular being in the way of sermons for enclosed nus) and his speculative theology which was written in Latin.   So too Bernard—while his work is theologically sound—wrote from inner spiritual experience not from rational constructions.  I am not questioning why a fellow professor assigned Rahner and Ratzinger but I do wonder why he passed over Merton, Underhill, and others?  But then, it is Catholic University and the ecclesiology of some professors is rather narrow to suit the purposes of the University’s governors and their own advancement.   Such is how the academic world plays its politics. 

It is, I am afraid, another symptom of the widening gap between the Church of the hierarchy and the Church of the Faithful.  Those who buy into the hierarchical model of Church dismiss the work of the Holy Spirit among the ordinary rank and file Christians.  It is tragic that this dichotomy has opened up at all but it is dangerous that the gap is widening.  There is so much spiritual vitality among the everyday Catholics that can be harnessed for a true New Evangelization if only those leading the hierarchical Church could look beyond their narrow vision and see it.      

 

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.