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Medieval philosophy had a dictum that said: Every choice is a renunciation.
To choose one thing is to turn one’s back on many others.
Put more simply, we can look at how they handled their spiritual and erotic energies and consider them legalistic and uptight, but their families and communities held together better than do our own and they were less restless and slept more peacefully than we do because all those high symbols and restrictions, whatever their dysfunctions, taught them that they were immortal beings, created in God’s image, whose every action, however private, was important.
The opposite of depression is delight, being spontaneously surprised by the goodness and beauty of living.
Ernst Kaseman, the renowned Scripture scholar, once commented that what is wrong in the world and in the churches is that the pious aren’t liberal and the liberals aren’t pious.
I write, not as a neutral analyst, but as someone within a confessing, worshiping, Christian, Catholic community.
As Christians we find ourselves standing in a rich, but confusing, spiritual pluralism with quite different backgrounds in spirituality. We have not always agreed on what is essential within the spiritual life and we have lived out our faith lives somewhat differently.
On the basis of that distinction, between substance and accident, we can ask ourselves: In all the rich spiritual pluralism of today what is essential? What are the higher truths? What is universally prescribed for Christian discipleship? What are the nonnegotiables of the spiritual life?
Looking at this, we see that Jesus was prescribing four things as an essential praxis for a healthy spiritual life: a) Private prayer and private morality; b) social justice; c) mellowness of heart and spirit; and d) community as a constitutive element of true worship.
“The last temptation that’s the greatest treason is to do the right thing for the wrong reason.”
In the Gospels, fidelity in keeping the commandments is the only real criterion to tell real prayer from illusion. One of the anchors of the spiritual life is private prayer and private morality.
but it is also true, and Jesus teaches this very clearly, that we cannot pretend to be loving if we are not keeping the commandments.
If we refuse to take seriously this first pillar of the spiritual life, we will continue to go through the motions, perhaps even with some passion, but we will be unable to inspire our own children or pass on our faith to them. Moreover, we will eventually find ourselves both empty and angry, feeling cheated, and struggling with the temptation of either becoming ever more bitter or of chucking it all.
Only one kind of person transforms the world spiritually, someone with a grateful heart.
Jesus too is clear on this: In the parable of the Prodigal Son, he teaches that we can be away from the father’s house equally through infidelity and weakness (“the younger brother”) or through bitterness and anger (“the older brother”), whereas what God is really asking of us is to have the compassion of the father (an empathy that can issue forth only from a very grateful heart).15 In the Gospels, the call to have a mellow, grateful heart is just as nonnegotiable as are the demands to keep the commandments and practice social justice.
Asceticism is as much about disciplining the emotions as it is about disciplining the body.
Bernard Lonergan once tried to set out criteria to judge what constitutes a true religious conversion. He suggests that an authentic religious conversion has within it six dimensions: It is religious, theistic, Christological, ecclesial, moral, and intellectual.19
4 Christ as the Basis for Christian Spirituality
This chapter reminds me of E.Stanley Jones' book, The Word Become Flesh, that I am reading at the same time.
For those of us who are Christians, time obviously should be measured by when Jesus was born. For us, he is the center of everything: our meaning, our hope, our self-understanding, our church lives, our theologies, and our spiritualities. He is also the guide for
Jesus, and the discipleship he asks of us, can best be understood within a single phrase: The word was made flesh and it dwells among us.
2. Binding and Loosing …
This is a very interesting and provocative perspective on how Christian parents can "bond" their unbelieving children to Christ. There are aspects of the view that seem credible. One might certainly hope such a perspective is correct.
In Roman Catholicism we have a ritual called the sacrament of the sick. It is an anointing with oil that is meant to fulfill what scripture calls for when it says: “If one of you is ill, he should send for the elders of the church, and they must anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord and pray over him.
God does not speak to us through séances, and the most important things that God wants to say to us are not given in extraordinary mystical visions. The God of the incarnation has real flesh on earth and speaks to us in the bread and butter of our lives, through things that have skin—historical circumstance, our families, our neighbors, our churches, and that borderline-psychotic friend who painfully reminds us that we are not God. When we look for God’s guidance these voices on earth must complement the voice from heaven.
In essence, Jesus is saying: You cannot deal with a perfect, all-loving, all-forgiving, all-understanding God in heaven, if you cannot deal with a less-than-perfect, less-than-forgiving, and less-than-understanding community here on earth.
The God of the incarnation is more domestic than monastic.
The God of the incarnation lives in a family, a trinity, a community of shared existence. Hence, to say that God is love is to say that God is community, family, shared existence, and whoever shares his or her existence inside of family and community experiences God and has the very life of God flow through her or him.
If God is incarnate in ordinary life then we should seek God, first of all, within ordinary life.
The idea is that they should digest the word and turn it into their own flesh so that people will be able to see the word of God in a living body rather than on a dead parchment.
6 A Spirituality of Ecclesiology
This chapter on the church is quite helpful. I especially like his list of reasons to go to church -- though I'm surprised he does not mention more clearly that we worship to honor and glorify God.
Anger and hard theoretical questions about the church are not the biggest problem; indifference and a culture of individualism are.
All of this points to many things: the church’s faults, the church’s dark history, a certain tiredness within Western Christianity, our culture’s pathological individualism, the religious indifference of millions, and a perception problem as regards the Christian churches.
An analogy can be helpful here: Imagine a woman, whom we shall call Betzy, who has a heart the size of the Grand Canyon. She is gracious, loving, devoid of prejudice, and with an understanding and empathy wide enough to encompass everything and everybody. Because she is so loving, she has a very wide variety of friends and one night she decides to have a party and invite them all. She rents a hall to hold everyone. And her guests begin to arrive. Men, women, and children show up, of every description, ideology, background, temperament, taste, social standing, and religion. A curious mixture of
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This is a very effective illustration of the church and its unity around and made possible only by the spirit and presence of Jesus.
are there, you would soon enough get a combination of fireworks and dissipation that would empty the room. This particular mix of persons can be brought together and kept together only around one person, Betzy. Everything depends upon her presence and upon those present having her wide empathy while they are in that presence, that is, upon being in her spirit. That is an image of the Christian church around Jesus Christ. Outside of a focus on his person and what we are drawn to spontaneously live when we sense his presence, we have angry fireworks and constant dissipation, as the state of our
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The spirit of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, is defined in scripture as charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, fidelity, mildness, and chastity.7 Living in these virtues is what binds us into community in such a way that we are immune from separation by distance, temperament, race, color, gender, ideology, social status, history, creed, or even death. All
The church is always God hung between two thieves.
Some of Christianity’s harshest critics have suggested that what is wrong with it is that it sets itself the absurd task of teaching happy people to be unhappy so that it can minister to their unhappiness.
When we fail to mourn properly our incomplete lives then this incompleteness becomes a gnawing restlessness, a bitter center, that robs our lives of all delight.
It is necessary to let our roots bless us. This is true not only if those roots were healthy but even if they were negative or positively abusive. One of the great anthropological imperatives, innate in human nature, is that we eventually must make peace with the family.
In the world’s schema of things, survival of the fittest is the rule. In God’s schema, survival of the weakest is the rule. God always stands on the side of the weak and it is there, among the weak, that we find God. Given the truth of that, we might occasionally pray the Lord’s Prayer in this way: Our Father … who always stands with the weak, the powerless, the poor, the abandoned, the sick, the aged, the very young, the unborn, and those who, by victim of circumstance, bear the heat of the day. Who art in heaven … where everything will be reversed, where the first will be last and the last
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This adaptation of the Lord's Prayer, relating it to issues of social justice, is quite good.
“Our life is a short time in expectation, a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment. There is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our life. It seems that there is no such thing as a clear-cut pure joy, but that even in the most happy moments of our existence we sense a tinge of sadness. In every satisfaction, there is an awareness of limitations. In every success, there is the fear of jealousy. Behind every smile, there is a tear. In every embrace, there is loneliness. In every friendship, distance. And in all forms of light, there is the knowledge of
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We are not gods and parts of us will always remain untouched, inconsummate, bursting with secrets kept silent for far too long.
To pray, I think, does not mean to think about God in contrast to thinking about other things, or to spend time with God instead of spending time with other people. Rather, it means to think and live in the presence of God.
Generally, the following practices formed the core of a healthy Christian spirituality: Regular prayer (both private and communal), the practice of charity and self-sacrifice (both at home and in the wider world), some concrete involvement with the poor, involvement within some church community, and a willingness to be vulnerable for love (as Christ was vulnerable). From the Bible, through the early church fathers, through the medieval theologians, through the great reformers, through the great mystics, through the founders of the various religious orders, down to Henri Nouwen, these are the
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“The time is fast approaching when one will either be a mystic or an unbeliever.”4
Quote from Karl Rahner
even within our churches, it is easier to have faith in Christianity, in a code of ethics, in Jesus’ moral teaching, in God’s call for justice, and in the human value of gathering as community, than it is to have personal faith in a living God. Too often what we have, in fact, is not Christianity but an ideology of Christianity.
Among classical spiritual writers, there is this leitmotif: In order to sustain yourself in faith you must regularly (most would say daily) spend an extended period of time in private prayer.
If you do not pray, you will either be habitually depressed or obsessed with your own ego. This, according to Moore, is true, irrespective of whether you are religious or not.7
What Luther and Burrows point out is what the Gospels emphasize continually, that it is not weakness that is problematic within our relationship to God, but rationalization, denial, lying, and the hardening of our hearts in the face of truth.
It is always presumptuous to suggest what Jesus was trying to say, as opposed to what he actually did say, but scripture scholars generally agree that Jesus’ admonition to not blaspheme against the Holy Spirit is a warning against sustained dishonesty and rationalization.
