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February 1 - February 27, 2021
Spiritually the gifted child is meant to become the gifted adult, the person who, like Jesus, can say: “Nobody takes my life from me, I give it freely.”19
e. THE DIVORCE BY CONTEMPORARY CULTURE OF ITS PATERNALISTIC, CHRISTIAN HERITAGE
And so we are caught up in another divorce. On the one side, we have the Judeo-Christian tradition which taught us the secrets of the woods and which now feels itself betrayed, sees its foundational commandments breached, and senses itself as harshly judged by its own children. On the other side, stands our culture, adolescent in its defiance, accusing that tradition, its parent, of dealing it death not life.
What vision and what disciplines do we need to creatively channel the erotic, spirit fire inside of us so that its end result is creative days and restful nights and an enduring peace with our God, each other, and within ourselves?
We live in a world that is rich in most everything, except clarity in the area of spirituality.
What is essential and nonnegotiable within Christian spirituality? What are the pillars upon which we should build our spiritual lives?
the academic curriculum of a university. Theistic spirituality in general, and Christian spirituality in particular, is, for the secular mind, something highly privatized and esoteric, tolerable at the fringes of society but having nothing important to say at the center.
a strong focus on one thing clearly shapes how everything else is understood.
These are just the salient ingredients of the stew, and it is within this rich, confusing pluralism that each of us must sort out what is essential for ourselves.
Classically, within Christianity,4 we have made a distinction that can be helpful to us as we try to find some order and balance in all of this. Christian theology has always taught that there is a hierarchy of truths, that not all truths are of the same importance, and that we must distinguish between truths that are essential and truths that are accidental.
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.
What church community takes away from us is our false freedom to soar unencumbered, like the birds, believing that we are mature, loving, committed, and not blocking out things that we should be seeing.
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.
They taught that the quality of faith in the people depends upon the character of justice in the land—and the character of justice in the land is to be judged by how we treat the most vulnerable groups in the society, namely, widows, orphans, and strangers. Thus, according to the Jewish prophets, where we stand with God depends not just upon prayer and sincerity of heart but also on where we stand with the poor.
God cannot be related to without continually digesting the uneasiness and pain that are experienced by looking, squarely and honestly, at how the weakest members in our society are faring and how our own lifestyle is contributing to that. This is not something that a few liberation theologians, feminists, and social justice advocates are trying to foist on us. This is not a liberal agenda item. It is something that lies at the very heart of the gospel and which Jesus himself makes the ultimate criterion for our final judgment.
Only one kind of person transforms the world spiritually, someone with a grateful heart.14
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).
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.
For Jesus, the two great commandments, to love God and love one’s neighbor, can never be separated.
Without church, we have more private fantasy than real faith. Like Lonergan, he submits that real conversion demands that eventually its recipient be involved in both the muck and the grace of actual church life.
Spirituality is ultimately communitarian, even within those faiths such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Taoism that are not ecclesial within their essential makeup, as are Christianity and Judaism. Why? Because the search for God is not a private search for what is highest for oneself or even for what is ultimate for oneself. Spirituality is about a communal search for the face of God—and one searches communally only within a historical community.
To Walk on Earth Like Gods Spirituality is partly a question of balance. Attention to the essential pillars can help provide us with that balance. However, balance is not the ultimate goal of spirituality. We want to walk the earth with balance … but we want too to walk it like gods and goddesses. We want, with our Creator, to continue to create; and with our Redeemer, to continue to redeem. We want to help God bring this planet to comple...
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Spirituality, as we saw, is about creatively disciplining the fiery energies that flow through us. Hence a good spirituality requires a certain discipleship. A disciple is someone under a discipline. Jesus laid out a certain discipline to creatively channel our energies. But he did more than this and he was more than this.
What Jesus wants of us is that we undergo his presence so as to enter into a community of life and celebration with him. Jesus, as John Shea says, is not a law to be obeyed or a model to be imitated, but a presence to be seized and acted upon.
history. In this version, God came to earth physically and then, after thirty-three years, went back home. It uses the past tense for the incarnation and that is a dangerous under-understanding.
The incarnation is still going on and it is just as real and as radically physical as when Jesus of Nazareth, in the flesh, walked the dirt roads of Palestine. How can this be so?
We are not angels, without bodies, but sensual creatures in the true sense of the word sensuality. We have five senses and we are present in the world through those senses.
In the incarnation, God became physical because we are creatures of the senses who, at one point, need a God with some skin.
God takes on flesh so that every home becomes a church, every child becomes the Christ-child, and all food and drink become a sacrament. God’s many faces are now everywhere, in flesh, tempered and turned down, so that our human eyes can see him. God, in his many-faced face, has become as accessible, and visible, as the nearest water tap. That is the why of the incarnation.
We are the Body of Christ. This is not an exaggeration, nor a metaphor.7 To say that the body of believers is the Body of Christ is not to say something that scripture does not. Scripture, and Paul in particular, never tells us that the body of believers replaces Christ’s body, nor that it represents Christ’s body, nor even that it is Christ’s mystical body. It says simply: “We are Christ’s body.”8
The word did not just become flesh and dwell among us—it became flesh and continues to dwell among us.
As God once acted through Christ, so he now acts through those who are conformed to the image of his Son and whose behaviour-pattern is in imitation of his. What Christ did in and for the world of his day through his physical presence, the community does in and for its world.… In order to continue to exercise his salvific function the Risen Christ must be effectively represented within the context of real existence by an authenticity which is modelled on his.”11
A theist believes in a God in heaven whereas a Christian believes in a God in heaven who is also physically present on this earth inside of human beings. The theistic God is transcendent and, if not wholly so, present in matter only as some vague ground of being. The Christian God is also transcendent, is also the ground of being, but has a physical body on earth.
As Christians, we pray to God “through Christ,” and in trying to answer that prayer, God respects the incarnation, namely, that God’s power is now partially dependent upon human action.2 What does this mean?
When we pray “through Christ” we are praying through the Body of Christ, which then includes Jesus, the Eucharist, and the body of believers (ourselves) here on earth. We are praying through all of these. Thus, not only God in heaven is being petitioned and asked to act. We are also charging ourselves, as part of the Body of Christ, with some responsibility for answering the prayer. To pray as a Christian demands concrete involvement in trying to bring about what is pleaded for in the prayer.
If I pray for world peace, but do not, inside of myself, forgive those who have hurt me, how can God bring about peace on this planet? Our prayer needs our flesh to back it up.
We have our sins forgiven by being in community with each other, at table with each other.
You can continue to love and forgive them and, insofar as they receive that love and forgiveness from you, they are receiving love and forgiveness from God. You are part of the Body of Christ and they are touching you. Within the incredible mystery of the incarnation, you are doing what Jesus asks of us when he says: “Whatever you bind on earth shall be considered bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth shall be considered loosed in heaven.”8 And “whose sins you forgive they are forgiven; whose sins you retain, they are retained.”9
Your touch is Christ’s touch. When you love someone, unless that someone actively rejects your love and forgiveness, she or he is sustained in salvation. And this is true even beyond death. If someone close to you dies in a state which, externally at least, has her or him at odds ecclesially and morally with the visible church, your love and forgiveness will continue to bind that person to the Body of Christ and continue to forgive that individual, even after death.
Hoo boy. This is going to cause people problems... I can't go so far as beyond death. But I love the idea that my willingness to love and forgive someone keeps them connected to the "hem of his garment..."
Explicit confession is to the sacrament of reconciliation what an explicit apology is to healing. Actions speak louder than words and essential reconciliation happens through an act. But words, at a certain point, become very important. Mature people apologize explicitly and we become mature by apologizing. Moreover, as anyone who has ever been abused will tell you, something is not complete until there has been an explicit confession, an acknowledgment of wrongdoing that is not rationalized. As well, anyone familiar with the healing of addictions, who understands how any twelve-step program
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Paul answers: “Who are you?” The answer comes: “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” Notice how the person of the historical Jesus and the body of believers are identified as a single identity.
when we seek guidance in terms of discernment and decisions we need to look not just to God in heaven, but also to what is being pointed out to us by the Body of Christ on earth, namely, our families, our friends, our churches, and our communities.
John of the Cross once said that the language of God is the experience God writes into our lives.14
the most important things that God wants to say to us are not given in extraordinary mystical visions.
The fact that God has human flesh has some rather hard consequences regarding spirituality and community. Spirituality, at least Christian spirituality, is never something you do alone.
What we are being asked “to eat” is that other part of his body, the community, the flawed body of believers here on earth.
I like the application a lot, but the interpretation (that Jesus was talkinga bout the Body of Christ when He said this and people understood that and that's why they left) is a bit of a stretch...
Part of the very essence of Christianity is to be together in a concrete community, with all the real human faults that are there and the tensions that this will bring us. Spirituality, for a Christian, can never be an individualistic quest, the pursuit of God outside of community, family, and church. The God of the incarnation tells us that anyone who says that he or she loves an invisible God in heaven and is unwilling to deal with a visible neighbor on earth is a liar since no one can love a God who cannot be seen if he or she cannot love a neighbor who can be seen.18
While not disputing the importance of private prayer and meditation (which most of us should do more of), what must be challenged here, if one is a Christian, is the theistic rather than incarnational perspective. The God who has become incarnate in human flesh is found, first and foremost, not in meditation and monasteries, albeit God is found there, but in our homes.
The God of the incarnation is more domestic than monastic.
Reminds me a bit of Brother Lawrence and the Practice of the Presence of God
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.
