The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality

by Ronald Rolheiser

Church community can never be a functional substitute for emotional and sexual intimacy. It is not intended to be. One shouldn’t go to church looking for a lover.

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 who live in these virtues are one body with each other and constitute the church.

Thus, there have always been religious communities, both clerical and lay, within Christianity who have tried to live this out through religious vows and promises that physically create a common house, common food, and a common purse. This has, however, always been seen as a special calling for some and has never been proposed as ideal for everyone.

What does it demand? It demands that there be some real sharing of life together, namely, that we pray together; that we celebrate our rites of passage together; that we celebrate some of our everyday joys, fears, and feasts together; that we are responsible to each other and open to each other as regards mutual correction and challenge; that we are responsible together for the ministry of the church; and that we have some common sharing of finances (even if this means only that we contribute financially to the support of our local church and its projects).

3. The Church Is the Sarx—the Exzemed Body of Christ

In essence, this means two things: First, that community is a constitutive element within the Christian quest. My task is not to walk to God as an individual but to be within a community that is worshiping God. Second, what is taught here is that, in this life, whenever I meet the presence of God within community I will not meet it in its pure form. All communities of faith mediate the grace of God in a very mixed way. Sin, pettiness, and betrayal are always found alongside grace, sanctity, and fidelity.

An old Protestant axiom has it: “It is not a question of whether you are a sinner or not, but only a question of what is your sin?” The same holds true for families, organizations, and churches—all of them. It is never a question of whether your family is dysfunctional, it is only one of—what is its particular canker and how bad is it?

So true

Today, many people cannot understand how, given certain aspects of the church’s history and some of its present infidelities, it can be seen as a privileged instrument of grace. Is God really to be found in an organization that slaughtered so many innocent people in the Crusades, that used the Inquisition as a divine tool, that sanctioned racism and sexism for centuries, and that has in its history so much in the way of religious wars, sinful silences, and blind imperialism? Is God really to be found in an organization that has some pedophiles among its ministers? How many millions of people have been hurt by the church? How can the church be forgiven for some of its history and parts of its present practice?

The church is always God hung between two thieves.

To be connected with the church is to be associated with scoundrels, warmongers, fakes, child-molesters, murderers, adulterers, and hypocrites of every description. It also, at the same time, identifies you with saints and the finest persons of heroic soul within every time, country, race, and gender. To be a member of the church is to carry the mantle of both the worst sin and the finest heroism of soul … because the church always looks exactly as it looked at the original crucifixion, God hung among thieves.

In the closing section of perhaps his most mature book, I Sought and I Found, Carretto addresses the church in these words: How much I must criticize you, my church and yet how much I love you! You have made me suffer more than anyone and yet I owe more to you than to anyone. I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence. You have given me much scandal and yet you alone have made me understand holiness. Never in this world have I seen anything more compromised, more false, yet never have I touched anything more pure, more generous or more beautiful. Countless times I have felt like slamming the door of my soul in your face—and yet, every night, I have prayed that I might die in your sure arms! No, I cannot be free of you, for I am one with you, even if not completely you. Then too—where would I go? To build another church? But I could not build one without the same defects, for they are my defects. And again, if I were to build another church, it would be my church, not Christ’s church. No. I am old enough. I know better!15

What does it mean to be catholic? Jesus gave the best definition of the term when he said: “In my Father’s house there are many rooms.”16 This is not a description of a certain geography in heaven but a revelation of the breadth of God’s heart. The bosom of God is not a ghetto. God has a catholic heart—in that catholic means universal, wide, all-encompassing. The opposite of a catholic is a fundamentalist, a person who has a heart with one room.

To be a member of a church is not to choose among these. It is to choose them all. Like our God in heaven, we too need a heart with many rooms. The true mark of church is wide loyalties.

When scripture tells us that, in Christ, there should be no male or female, no slave or free person, and no Jew or Gentile, it is telling us that there should also be no liberal or conservative, white or colored, new or traditional, feminist or antifeminist, pro-life or pro-choice, Democrat or Republican, Tory or Labor, or any other such ethnic or ideological pocket that matters in terms of church.

From the mouth of a dying young man we hear a great truth: There are only two potential tragedies in life and dying young is not one of them. What is tragic is to go through life without loving and without expressing love and affection toward those whom we do love.

I should go to church for these reasons: 1. Because It Is Not Good to Be Alone

To attempt to make spirituality a private affair is to reject part of our very nature and walk inside of a loneliness that God himself has damned.

2. To Take My Rightful Place Humbly Within the Family of Humanity

To join a church is to give up elitism. That is both perhaps the greatest obstacle to church participation and the greatest benefit of it.

3. Because God Calls Me There

4. To Dispel My Fantasies About Myself

What is too painful to deal with is not the church’s imperfection but my own fantasies about my own goodness, which, in the grind of real community, will become painfully obvious. Nobody deflates us more than does our own family. The same is true of the church. Not all of this is bad.

5. Because Ten Thousand Saints Have Told Me So

6. To Help Others Carry Their Pathologies and to Have Them Help Me Carry Mine

7. To Dream with Others

8. To Practice for Heaven Heaven, the scriptures assure us, will be enjoyed within the communal embrace of billions of persons of every temperament, race, background, and ideology imaginable. A universal heart will be required to live there. Thus, in this life, it is good to get some practice at this, good to be constantly in situations that painfully stretch the heart. Few things—and we certainly all admit this—stretch the heart as painfully as does church community. Conversely, when we avoid the pain and mess of ecclesial encounter to walk a less painful private road or to gather with only persons of our own kind, the heart need not and generally does not stretch. Going to church is one of the better cardiovascular spiritual exercises available.

9. For the Pure Joy of It … Because It Is Heaven!

The Timeless Issues of Suffering, Death, and Transformation

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.

Christianity, they say, focuses too much on suffering, death, and the next life, effectively destroying our capacity to enjoy this one. Freud, it seems, was of this mind. He blamed Christianity for a certain neurotic anxiety within the Western soul that, among other things, prevents us from being properly responsive to where the soul’s real happiness lies.3

Not all of this is wrong, a lot of anxiety has been taught in the name of Christian spirituality, but the critics of Christianity are naive if they suppose that humans are naturally content and that the issues of suffering, death, and the next life do not, without undue attention from Christianity, make us pathologically anxious.

In Christian spirituality, Christ is central and, central to Christ, is his death and rising to new life so as to send us a new Spirit. This is the central mystery within Christianity. Unfortunately, it is also one of the great misunderstood and ignored mysteries within Christian theology and spirituality.

What is the paschal mystery of Christ? How do we enter that mystery and live it?

The Pattern of the Paschal Mystery 1. An Umbrella Under Which to Understand: Some Paschal Stories

My happiness doesn’t depend upon somebody outside of me, but upon being at peace with what’s inside of me.”

The second story is one shared by John Shea at the beginning of his book Stories of Faith.7

Each night, after work, his son comes, sits by the bed, holds his father’s hand, and watches helplessly while he suffers. This goes on for a number of days. Finally, one night, sitting like this, the son says to the father: “Dad, let go! Trust God, die; anything is better than this.” Within a short time, the father grows peaceful and dies and the son realizes that he had just given voice to a very important truth—a truth about letting go and trusting God. For this man, coached into death by a loving son, Good Friday has just taken place. Like Jesus, he was finally able to give his spirit over to his Father.

The last story is from the Jewish scriptures and recounts the story of the death of King David’s illegitimate son.8

For King David, a certain resurrection has just occurred. His son is dead, but he is still alive, not in the same way as he was alive before his son died, but with a new life which he, in faith, begins to move into with some strength.

It does seem selfish though, doesn’t it?

The paschal mystery is the mystery of how we, after undergoing some kind of death, receive new life and new spirit. Jesus, in both his teaching and in his life, showed us a clear paradigm for how this should happen. We turn now to examine that paradigm.

2. The Paschal Mystery—a Cycle for Rebirth

We must distinguish between two kinds of death, two kinds of life, and between life and spirit. First, regarding two kinds of death: There is terminal death and there is paschal death. Terminal death is a death that ends life and ends possibilities. Paschal death, like terminal death, is real. However, paschal death is a death that, while ending one kind of life, opens the person undergoing it to receive a deeper and richer form of life.

There are also two kinds of life: There is resuscitated life and there is resurrected life. Resuscitated life is when one is restored to one’s former life and health, as is the case with someone who has been clinically dead and is brought back to life. Resurrected life is not this. It is not a restoration of one’s old life but the reception of a radically new life. We see this difference in scripture by comparing the resurrection of Jesus and the so-called resurrection (which is really a resuscitation) of Lazarus. Lazarus got his old life back, a life from which he had to die again. Jesus did not get his old life back. He received a new life—a richer life and one within which he would not have to die again.

The paschal mystery is about paschal death and resurrected life.

Finally, we must also distinguish between life and spirit. They are not the s...

Theologically, looking at Jesus’ teachings and especially at his death and resurrection and what follows from them, we can see that there are five clear, distinct moments within the paschal cycle: Good Friday, Easter Sunday, the forty days leading up to the Ascension, the Ascension, and Pentecost.

In caption, the paschal cycle might be diagrammed as follows: 1. Good Friday … “the loss of life—real death” 2. Easter Sunday … “the reception of new life” 3. The Forty Days … “a time for readjustment to the new and for grieving the old” 4. Ascension … “letting go of the old and letting it bless you, the refusal to cling” 5. Pentecost … “the reception of new spirit for the new life that one is already living” Put into a more colloquial language and stated as a personal, paschal challenge for each of us, one might recast the diagram this way: 1. “Name your deaths” 2. “Claim your births” 3. “Grieve what you have lost and adjust to the new reality” 4. “Do not cling to the old, let it ascend and give you its blessing” 5. “Accept the spirit of the life that you are in fact living”

Undergoing the Various Deaths Within Our Lives 1. The Death of Our Youth

You wake up one morning, look at your calendar, and come to the unwelcome realization that it is your seventieth birthday. You are seventy years old! At seventy, in terms of this life, you are no longer a young person—and all the cosmetics, exercise, plastic surgery, tummy tucks, and positive attitude in the world cannot change that. Your youth is dead. But you are not dead!

Paschally, in terms of your youth, this is your status: Good Friday has already happened, your youth has died. Resurrection too has happened; you have already received the life of a seventy-year-old, a new life, different from and richer than the life of a twenty-year-old. And now you have a choice: You can refuse to grieve and let go of your lost youth and, like Mary Magdala on Easter morning trying to cling to a Jesus she once knew, try to hold on to your youth. If you do that you will be blocking ascension and you will be an unhappy, fearful, and frustrated seventy-year-old because, like Judith Hearne before her breakdown, you will be trying to live your life with someone else’s spirit. A schizophrenic endeavor at best. Pentecost cannot happen for you and you will daily grow more fearful and unhappy about aging.