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August 23 - December 25, 2022
More than a few Christians might be surprised to learn that the call to be involved in creating justice for the poor is just as essential and nonnegotiable within the spiritual life as is Jesus’ commandment to pray and keep our private lives in order. Jesus’ teaching on this is very strong, consistent throughout all the Gospels, and leaves no room for equivocation.
Jesus never disputes that. He takes it further. He identifies his own presence with the poor and tells us that, ultimately, we will be judged on how we treat the poor. Bluntly put, we will go to heaven or hell on the basis of giving or not giving food, water, clothing, shelter, and justice to the poor.
The call to become involved in helping the poor to find justice is a nonnegotiable pillar within Christian spirituality. Much of our culture today, and conservative Christianity in particular, struggles with this, protesting that this is really a question of politics and not something that lies at the very heart of religion itself. But, as Jesus himself makes clear, there can be no real relationship with him when the poor are neglected and injustice abounds.
Only one kind of person transforms the world spiritually, someone with a grateful heart.
Asceticism is as much about disciplining the emotions as it is about disciplining the body. What good is a trim body, free of fat and toxins, but full of anger and unhappiness?
Asceticism
d. COMMUNITY AS A CONSTITUTIVE ELEMENT OF TRUE WORSHIP
He suggests that an authentic religious conversion has within it six dimensions: It is religious, theistic, Christological, ecclesial, moral, and intellectual.
For Jesus, the two great commandments, to love God and love one’s neighbor, can never be separated.
For a Christian, concrete involvement within a historical community of faith (churchgoing) is a nonnegotiable within the spiritual life. This is something that is difficult for our age to hear. As we saw in the previous chapter, our age tends to divorce spirituality from ecclesiology. We want God, but we don’t want church. By doing this, however, we bracket one of the primary demands inherent right within the very quest for God.
Without church, we have more private fantasy than real faith.
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.
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.
Sharon’s Christmas Prayer She was five, sure of the facts, and recited them with slow solemnity convinced every word was revelation. She said they were so poor they had only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to eat and they went a long way from home without getting lost. The lady rode a donkey, the man walked, and the baby was inside the lady. They had to stay in a stable with an ox and an ass (hee-hee) but the Three Rich Men found them because a star lited the roof Shepherds came and you could pet the sheep but not feed them. Then the baby was borned. And do you know who he was? Her quarter
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The Centrality of Christ
A God who is everywhere is just as easily nowhere.
Scripture uses the expression the “Body of Christ” to mean three things: Jesus, the historical person who walked this earth for thirty-three years; the Eucharist, which is also the physical presence of God among us; and the body of believers, which is also the real presence. To say the word “Christ” is to refer, at one and the same time, to Jesus, the Eucharist, and the community of faith. 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
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When he says we are the Body of Christ, does he mean this in a corporate or a corporeal way? Are we Christ’s body the way a group animated by a common spirit (say, for instance, the Jesuits) are a body? Or, are we a body like a physical organism is a body? With some qualifications (and, of course, some exceptions) scripture scholars agree that it is the latter. The body of believers, like the Eucharist, is the Body of Christ in an organic way. It is not a corporation, but a body; not just a mystical reality, but a physical one; and not something that represents Christ, but something that is
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The Difference Between a Christian and a Theist
A theist believes in God. A Christian believes in God, but also in a God who is incarnate. What is the difference? To put the matter into street language, one might say: 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.
Yes! Loving human documents
Preach the word of God wherever you go, even use words, if necessary. —FRANCIS OF ASSISI
Everyone who asks receives; everyone who searches finds, and everyone who knocks will have the door opened.”1 Have you ever wondered why, in fact, that does not always work? Many times we ask and do not receive, seek and do not find, or knock and find the door firmly barred against us. Yet, Jesus seemingly promised the opposite. Why does God not always answer our prayers?
To pray as a Christian demands concrete involvement in trying to bring about what is pleaded for in the prayer.
For Understanding How We Should Seek Reconciliation and Healing
The motif of physical touch is everywhere present in Jesus’ ministry.
Notice in this story the woman is healed simply by touching Jesus, even before she actually speaks to him.
Simply put, what it tells us is that, just like this woman, we will find healing and wholeness by touching the Body of Christ and, as members of the Body of Christ, we are called upon to dispense God’s healing and wholeness by touching others.
1. Reconciliation and the Forgiveness of Sins
the primary sacrament of forgiveness is touching the hem of Jesus’ garment, the Body of Christ.
We have our sins forgiven in the same way as the woman in Mark’s gospel stopped her hemorrhaging, through contact with Christ’s body, that is, the Eucharist and the community.
How can touching the community be healing? Imagin...
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You are touching the hem of the garment, you are making the basic move toward reconciliation, your body and your actions are saying something more important than any words: “I want to be part of you again.” At that moment, the hemorrhaging stops (even if only for that moment). If you dropped dead on the spot, you would die reconciled to your family.
We have our sins forgiven by being in community with each other, at table with each other. Bluntly put, we will never go to hell as long as we are touching the community—touching it with sincerity and a modicum of contrition.
To state things rather crassly for the sake of clarity, if I commit a serious sin on Saturday night and, whatever my physical state on Sunday morning, enter a church with some sincerity and contrition in my heart, I am forgiven my sin. I am touching the hem of Christ’s garment.
When one understands herself or himself as part of the Body of Christ and as touching the Body of Christ, the rationalizing individualism that precisely tempts us never to confess to another person, especially an official representative of the church, drops away and we, in fact, begin to sense a burning obligation (coming from far beyond any ecclesiastical law) to confess our sins.
We do not, at the most basic of all levels, need explicit confession to a priest to have our sins forgiven—that is an unequivocal truth taught in scripture, by the church fathers, in Christian theology of every kind, in dogmatic tradition (even in the Council of Trent and the theology and catechisms that ensued from it), in church tradition, and especially in the lived practice of the faith.12 The essential sacrament of reconciliation has always been sincerity and contrition as one approaches Eucharist and touches the Christian community. But that does not say that confession is unnecessary
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What did Jesus say that was so strong and cutting that he went from someone whom they wanted to make king to someone whom they wanted to kill? How do you go from great popularity to a persona non grata on the basis of one homily?
“No comparison,” she replied. “Being with and eating with my family is a good human experience [mostly], but it is not religious. It’s just human. In meditation I have true religious experience.” A Christian needs to be both pagan and incarnational enough to dispute her answer. 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
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As Nikos Kazantzakis puts it: “Wherever you find husband and wife, that’s where you find God; wherever children and petty cares and cooking and arguments and reconciliation are, that is where God is too.”19 The God of the incarnation is more domestic than monastic.
Wow!
Some years ago a Christian journal carried the lament of a woman who, with some bitterness, explained why she did not believe in God. Never in her explanation did she mention dogma, morals, or church authority. For her, the credibility of God and of Christ depended more on something else, the faces of Christians. Her complaint went something like this: Don’t come talk to me of God, come to my door with religious pamphlets, or ask me whether I’m saved. Hell holds no threat more agonizing than the harsh reality of my own life. I swear to you that the fires of hell seem more inviting than the
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Wow!
The challenge is not, as the woman just quoted makes clear, to pass out religious tracts, establish religious television networks to make Jesus known, or even to try to baptize everyone into Christianity. The task is to radiate the compassion and love of God, as manifest in Jesus, in our faces and our actions.
Our loved ones live where they have always lived and it is there that we will find them. What does that mean? Simply put, we find our deceased loved ones by entering into life, in terms of love and faith, in the way that was most distinctive to them. We contact them and connect ourselves to them when, in our own lives, we shape the infinite richness of God’s life and compassion in the way that they did, when we pour ourselves into life as they did.
Spirituality, as we have already said, is not a law to be obeyed, but a presence to be seized, undergone, and given flesh to.
Lost is a place, too. —CHRISTINA CRAWFORD
A Spirituality of Ecclesiology
People are voting with their feet. They simply are going to church less and less. Church attendance and church involvement are falling off drastically. Statistics vary from country to country, but every country in the Western world is experiencing a major drop in church attendance.
As a Canadian sociologist of religion, Reginald Bibby, puts it: “People aren’t leaving their churches, they just aren’t going to them.”
They want a kingdom, but not a church.
The churches may have the water of life, but less and less people want them anywhere near the fire. What’s to be done about that?
We go to church looking for friendship or ideological soulmates and, often, do not find them. This does not necessarily mean that there is something wrong with the church, merely that we have false expectations.
Thus, when it is the Spirit of God and not fear that unites us in community, no distance of time or place can separate us.”
