The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality

by Ronald Rolheiser

Neil Postman suggests that, as a culture, we are amusing ourselves to death, that is, distracting ourselves into a bland, witless superficiality.

Henri Nouwen has written eloquently on how our greed for experience and the restlessness, hostility, and fantasy it generates, block solitude, hospitality, and prayer in our lives.

What each of these authors, and countless others, are saying is that we, for every kind of reason, good and bad, are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion. It is not that we have anything against God, depth, and spirit, we would like these, it is just that we are habitually too preoccupied to have any of these show up on our radar screens. We are more busy than bad, more distracted than nonspiritual, and more interested in the movie theater, the sports stadium, and the shopping mall and the fantasy life they produce in us than we are in church.

Pathological busyness, distraction, and restlessness are major blocks today within our spiritual lives.

3. A Critical Problem with Balance, Leading to a ...

a. THE DIVORCE BETWEEN RELIGION AND EROS

Some years ago, I was serving as counselor to a young nun who was struggling to make sense of her religious life. Her struggle was not easy. On the one hand, she had genuine faith. She believed in God and believed, moreover, that God had called her to be a nun, even though the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience did not sit very well with her natural temperament. On the other hand, there was within her a gnawing restlessness and her erotic pulse for life made living in the convent hard to take. Eventually she made a decision. She gave up trying to be a nun and this is the way she reasoned it. Her words, which I quote here, are the words of our culture, uttered consciously or unconsciously by millions of sincere women and men as they try to sort out their spiritual lives: “I’ve decided that I’m too full of life to ever be truly religious. I love life too much, am too sexual, too physical, too red-blooded, and too much rooted in this earth and what it offers to ever be really spiritual. I can’t serve God and church, I’ve too much erotic and creative energy!”

What she articulates here is the divorce in Western culture between religion and eros. Like all divorces it was painful, and as in all divorces, the property got divided up: Religion got to keep God and the secular got to keep sex. The secular got passion and the God got chastity. We, the children of that divorce, like all children in a broken home, find ourselves torn between the two, unconsciously longing for them to come back together again.

Wow!

b. THE DIVORCE BETWEEN SPIRITUALITY AND ECCLESIOLOGY

We are witnessing a drastic decline in church life right in the midst of a spiritual renaissance. What is happening? A divorce is taking place between spirituality and ecclesiology, between those who understand themselves to be on a spiritual quest and those inside our churches. Again, the simplest way to explain this is to give an example.

Typical today is the person who wants faith but not the church, the questions but not the answers, the religious but not the ecclesial, and the truth but not obedience.

But this split is not just one-sided. The reverse, sadly, is just as true. We have more than enough churchgoers who want the church but not faith, the answers but not the questions, the ecclesial but not the religious, and the obedience but not the truth.

THE DIVORCE BETWEEN PRIVATE MORALITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

Too rare is the case where we see together in the same person, the same ideology, the same group, or the same church, an equal passion for social justice and for private morality, for action as for contemplation, and for statecraft (politics) as for soul-craft (mysticism).

What this means is that the person who leads the protest group usually does not lead the prayer group, the person concerned with family values is usually not as concerned with poverty in the inner cities, and the social, political agitator generally lacks the interior depth, selflessness, and calm of the mystic. The reverse is also true.

e. THE DIVORCE BY CONTEMPORARY CULTURE OF ITS PATERNALISTIC, CHRISTIAN HERITAGE

Among many things, this is an image of the relationship between the Judeo-Christian tradition and the culture within the Western world today. The culture is the son. It stands before its parent, the Judeo-Christian tradition, more than a little deviant. Using the very secrets that it learned from its father, it is telling him: “You handed bitterness to me when you should have been handing me sweetness. You lied to me! You are too full of false prohibitions, bitter taboos, and needless fears! You are supposed to be handing down the sweetness of life, but your commandments and taboos bring death and guilt instead of life and sweetness.” The Judeo-Christian tradition is the father, patriarchal, hierarchical, standing at the foot of the honey tree, feeling betrayed by the child who it itself taught the secrets of the woods—indeed, as René Girard says, it is not because we invented science that we stopped burning witches but rather when, because of the Judeo-Christianity, we stopped burning witches that we invented science.21 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. Like any child, caught in a painful

Toward a Christian Spirituality

And so, leaning on the words of Augustine, I begin with these words: “Let my reader travel on with me when she shares fully in my convictions; let her search with me when she shares my doubts; let him return to me when he recognizes that he is in error; let him call me back to the right path when he sees that I am in error. In this way let us advance along the road of charity toward Him [Her] of whom it is written.”22

The Essential Outline for a Christian Spirituality

It is time for both the left and the right to admit that they have run out of imagination, that the categories of liberal and conservative are dysfunctional, and that what is needed is a radicalism that leads beyond both the right and left. That radicalism that can be found in the gospel which is neither liberal nor conservative but fully compassionate.

1. Our History—Where Have We Come From?

a. ROMAN CATHOLICISM

b. PROTESTANTISM

c. SECULAR SOCIETY

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. Such was the view of the Enlightenment and such is still, basically, save for a few confederate pockets of cognitive deviance, the view of secular society.

However, the human spirit is incurably religious and, secular philosophy notwithstanding, it keeps doing religious things.

2. The Situation Today

To walk into a spiritual bookstore today is to be nearly overwhelmed by variety and choice. The same holds true for the many moral and religious voices that daily bombard us. These voices tempt us toward every kind of spiritual practice, traditional or new.… Attend a Bible study. —Go to a prayer meeting. —Become involved in a social-justice group. —Become a feminist. —Join a men’s group—sign up for Promise Keepers. —Practice this kind of prayer. —Try that kind of meditation. —Face your addictions through a twelve-step program. —Develop your highest potentials through these steps. —Learn what Eastern religions can offer you. —Do an enneagram. —Make a marriage encounter. —Recover the fire in your belly. —Get in sync with the wolf inside you. —Do an Ignatian retreat. —Be born again. —Give your life to Jesus. —Be more in touch with nature. We hear many spiritual voices today.

3. Sorting Out—the Search for Substance and Balance

The Essentials of a Christian Spirituality—The Four Nonnegotiable Pillars of the Spiritual Life 1. In Caption

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.

2. Some Stories of Imbalance a. PRIVATE PRAYER AND PRIVATE MORALITY—BUT LACKING IN JUSTICE

b. SOCIAL JUSTICE—BUT LACKING IN PRIVATE PRAYER AND PRIVATE MORALITY

c. PRIVATE PRAYER AND PRIVATE MORALITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE—BUT LACKING MELLOWNESS OF HEART AND SPIRIT

“But I had to sit there a long time. Many thoughts ran through my head, and at one stage, I asked myself the question: ‘Would Jesus be in there eating and drinking and having a good time?’ And I had the horrible realization that he would be! John the Baptist—with his leather belt and his grasshoppers!—would be with me on the bus, boycotting all this joy in the name of the poor. I realized that, in my mind, Jesus and John the Baptist were all mixed up, and I also realized that there was something wrong with me. There was something cold inside of me. I had become like the older brother of the prodigal son, doing all the right things, but having no celebration in my heart.”

A most revealing story. Here is a young woman who is seemingly living out Jesus’ full praxis. She is praying, fasting, and giving alms, combining private prayer and a good private life with a healthy concern for social justice. So what is missing in her life? Where is her spirituality inadequate?

d. PRIVATE PRAYER AND PRIVATE MORALITY, SOCIAL JUSTICE, MELLOWNESS OF HEART—BUT LACK OF INVOLVEMENT WITHIN A CONCRETE COMMUNITY

Also, church involvement, when understood properly, does not leave us the option to walk away whenever something happens that we do not like. It is a covenant commitment, like a marriage, and binds us for better and for worse.

Prior to this kind of commitment you can gird your belt and go wherever you want, but, after joining a concrete church community, others will put a belt around you and take you where you would rather not go.7 And Jesus is right. 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. Real churchgoing soon enough shatters this illusion, and gives us no escape, as we find ourselves constantly humbled as our immaturities and lack of sensitivity to the pain of others are reflected off eyes that are honest and unblinking.

3. Toward Fullness and Balance—Some Detail Regarding the Four Essential Pillars Within Christian Spirituality

a. PRIVATE PRAYER AND PRIVATE MORALITY

Within liberal Christianity, and within the secular culture as a whole, there is a certain fear that having too-privatized a relationship with Jesus is dangerous, that this is something that takes us away from true religion.

Piety too is considered by many to be a conservative virtue.

While this critique of the private aspect of spirituality by liberal Christianity and secular culture is not without its merits (or historical reasons), it is itself spiritually dangerous. Irrespective of whatever else needs to be emphasized in religion, the question of private prayer and private morality may never be written off or trivialized in any way as unimportant.

It is true, as one of the harsher criticisms of conservative Christianity states, that we can keep the commandments and not be loving; but it is also true, and Jesus teaches this very clearly, that we cannot pre...

There are real dangers in an overprivatization of spirituality. The spiritual life is not just about “Jesus and I.” However, there are equal dangers in not having en...

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.

Important

as Henri Nouwen so well puts it, I might find that “just when I was being praised for my spiritual insights, I felt devoid of faith. Just when people were thanking me for bringing them closer to God, I felt that God had abandoned me. It was as if the house I had finally found had no floors.”

b. SOCIAL JUSTICE