The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality

by Ronald Rolheiser

However, should you let your youth ascend, should you be able to say: “It was good to be twenty, good to be thirty, good to be forty, and fifty, and sixty; but it’s even better to be seventy!”—then pentecost will happen. You will receive the spirit for the life that you are already in fact living, the life of a seventy-year-old, which is a different spirit than for somebody who is twenty. Some of the happiest people in the whole world are seventy years old and some of the unhappiest people in the world are that age. The difference is not in who has kept himself or herself the slimmest and most youthful-looking, but in pentecost. The happy seventy-year-old is a woman or a man who has received the spirit for someone that age—that spirit which scripture says is given to each of us in a most particular way for each particular circumstance in life.

It is interesting in this context to note that the ancient Egyptians used to mummify their dead, soaking dead bodies in formaldehyde so as somehow to keep them intact forever. As an image, this is the antithesis of the paschal mystery. The Christian idea is to let go, to let nature take its course, to trust that the God who once gave life will now give it in an even deeper way. If I am seventy, but trying, through every technique and cosmetic known, to preserve my youth, I am in my own way attempting to mummify my body.

Striving to maintain youth is like trying to mummify our bodies

2. The Death of Our Wholeness …

I want my life back! I wasn’t born this angry. I don’t want to die this angry. I don’t want this god-awful death that wasn’t my fault!”

Let us look at that story in terms of the paschal mystery. This woman is right. At that moment of abuse, something inside of her, her wholeness as a person, died—and died irrevocably. No therapy, positive attitude, or sheer willpower can ever undo that any more than they can undo the original Good Friday. Like Jesus, she has been crucified. But she isn’t dead.

But she is alive with the life of someone who has been violently abused, not with the life of someone who has not been. Her task is to manage an ascension.

Some of the happiest people in the world have been abused and some of the most unhappy ones have been. The difference lies not so much in extent of the trauma of the original abuse or the quality of the subsequent therapy but in the ascension and pentecost.

3. The Death of Our Dreams … One of the deaths that Jesus talked about is the death of our dreams, not the dreams we dream at night, but the dreams of specialness and consummation we nurse in our hearts.

“I had a realization in church last year. I don’t know what Sunday it was, but I was listening to the readings a little more closely because my daughter was the reader. Well, just after my daughter finished, the priest started reading how Jesus’ body went up into heaven. A thought struck me then: That’s what has to happen to my daydream—I have to let it go up to heaven, like Jesus’ old body. It was a good dream, but it’s over! I have to stop living that dream so that I am not so damn restless and can get inside my own skin. I have every reason to be happy, but I’m not. There must be people like me, forty-seven years old and forty-five pounds overweight, living in small towns and working in Safeway stores, who are happy—and I want to be one of them! It’s a shame for my wife and kids—who are really good and in the end the only thing that’s important—that I haven’t been there for them like I should have been. I got to be who I am and get inside of my own life instead of trying to live somebody else’s life or trying to live a dream that was over a long time ago.” This man is ready for the ascension.

He has had his “forty days,” twenty-five years of grieving and adjustment. Now he is ready to let the old ascend so that he can receive the spirit for someone who is forty-seven years old, overweight, and living and working in a small town in northern Canada.

A certain king, Jephthah, is at war and things are going badly for himself and his army. In desperation he prays to God, promising that if he is granted victory he will, upon returning home, offer in sacrifice the first person he meets. His prayer is heard and he is given victory. When he returns home he is horrified because the first person he meets, whom he must now kill in sacrifice, is his only daughter, in the full bloom of her youth, whom he loves most dearly.

Despite the unfortunate patriarchal character of this story, it is a parable that in its own earthy way teaches something profound about the paschal mystery, namely, that we must spend our forty days mourning what is incomplete and unconsummated within our lives.

As Karl Rahner once put it, in the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable we begin to realize that here, in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished.

Rahner. Powerful.

In the end, we all die, as did Jephthah’s daughter, virgins, our lives incomplete, our deepest dreams largely frustrated, still looking for intimacy, never having had, in terms of consummation, the finished symphony—and unconsciously bewailing our virginity. This is true of married people as much as of celibates. Ultimately, we all sleep alone.

at some point, go into the desert and bewail her or his virginity. It is when we fail to do this, and because we fail to do it, that we go often through life demanding, angry, bitter, disappointed, and too prone to blame others and life itself for our frustrations.

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.

4. The Death of Our Honeymoons …

Or, they can grieve their honeymoon and receive the spirit for a couple who have been married for fifteen years—which is a different spirit than for one who have been married for fifteen minutes.

A couple who have shared life for fifteen years should (barring some major pathology, dysfunction, or infidelity in the relationship) have a far deeper and more life-giving bond than a couple who are on their honeymoon.

The downside of this is that all honeymoons die, but the upside is that God is always giving us something richer, deeper life and fuller spirit.

5. The Death of a Certain Idea of God and Church

All of this is also true for how we conceive of God and church. Here too we constantly need to be letting go of what we once had to ...

Whatever its dysfunctions, and there were some of those too, the Roman Catholic Church of my youth was a powerful incarnational expression of the Body of Christ. And, for me, it was the vehicle through which I received the Christian faith. But now, forty years later, the God and the church of my youth have, like the original body of Jesus, been crucified—by time, circumstance, culture, and countless other forces.

But the church is not dead. It is very much alive, bursting with life in many ways. However, it is alive with the life of today, the life that we are actually living at the turn of the millennium, and not with the life of the 1950s.

It is no accident that, in Roman Catholicism, among those over forty years of age, conservatives and liberals are equally obsessed with the pre-Vatican II church for there has been an equal failure on both sides to grieve that church and to let it go. On the other hand, I can accept the paschal mystery as it applies to the God and church of my youth. I can look at the church that gave me the faith, recognize that it (like my own youth) has died, grieve its passing, let it bless me, let it go, and then receive the spirit for the church within which I am actually living. In biblical terms, what all Roman Catholics of my generation, liberal and conservative alike, would need to do is to go out to the Mountain of the Ascension and let the church of our youth bless us and then let it reverently ascend so that we can all receive the new spirit for the ecclesial life we are in fact already living.

Why can they not recognize him? Because they are too focused on his former reality. They are so focused on their former image of him, their former understanding of him, and the way he was formerly present to them that now they are not open to seeing him as he walks among them. Sadly, that is often true for us, both in terms of our understanding of God and of the church. By clinging to what once was we cannot recognize God’s presence within a new reality.

Rabbi Abraham Heschel, the great Jewish spiritual writer, shared a story that illustrates this. A young student came to him one day, complaining of religious confusion and doubts about God’s existence. The young man had grown up in a family that was full of faith; he had attended the synagogue regularly, read the scriptures daily, and had been quite pious. Now, as a university student, his religious life had dissipated considerably and he was beset with every kind of doubt. He shared with Rabbi Heschel his pain about these doubts and how he could no longer find the God of his youth in his present situation. Rabbi Heschel asked him: “And what makes you think that God wanted your former peace but does not want your present pain?”12 A wise, paschal, counsel.

Wow!

Like all things temporal, our understanding of God and the church too must constantly die and be raised to new life. Our intentions may be sincere and noble, but so too were Mary Magdala’s on Easter morning when she tried to ignore the new reality of Jesus so as to cling to what had previously been.

A Note on Grieving and on Letting Ourselves Be Bl...

Henri Nouwen once began one of his articles with these words: “Mourn, my people, mourn. Let your pain rise up in your heart and burst forth in you with sobs and cries. Mourn for the silence that exists between you and your spouse. Mourn the way you were robbed of your innocence. Mourn for the absence of soft embrace, an intimate friendship, a life-giving sexuality. Mourn for the abuse of your body, your mind, your heart. Mourn for the bitterness of your children, the indifference of your friends, and your colleagues’ hardness of heart.… Cry for freedom, for salvation, for redemption. Cry loudly and deeply, and trust that your tears will make your eyes see that the Kingdom is close at hand, yes, at your fingertips!”13

Spiritually we see an illustration of this in the story of the older brother of the prodigal son.14 His bitterness and unwillingness to take part in the celebration of his brother’s return points to what he is still clinging to—life’s unfairness, his own hurt, and his own unfulfilled fantasies. He is living in his father’s house but he is no longer receiving the spirit of that house. Consequently, he is bitter, feels cheated, and lives joylessly.

We can spend the rest of our lives angry, trying to protect ourselves against something that has already happened to us, death and unfairness, or we can grieve our losses, abuses, and deaths and, through that, eventually attain the joy and delights that are in fact possible for us. Alice Miller states this all in psychological language, but the choice is really a paschal one.

We face many deaths within our lives and the choice is ours as to whether those deaths will be terminal (snuffing out life and spirit) or whether they will be paschal (opening us to new life and new spirit). Grieving is the key to the latter.

We face many deaths within our lives and the choice is ours as to whether those deaths will be terminal (snuffing out life and spirit) or whether they will be paschal (opening us to new life and new spirit). Grieving is the key to the latter.

Good grieving, however, consists not just in letting the old go but also in letting it bless us. What is meant by that?

No matter how bad your father and mother may have been, some day you have to stand by their graveside and recognize what they gave you, forgive what they did to you, and receive the spirit that is in your life because of them. Making peace with the family depends upon proper mourning and letting the ascension and pentecost happen.

Refusing to Cling

Mary Magdala herself, had we ever found her gospel, would, I suspect, explain it this way: I never suspected Resurrection and to be so painful to leave me weeping With joy to have met you, alive and smiling, outside an empty tomb With regret not because I’ve lost you but because I’ve lost you in how I had you— in understandable, touchable, kissable, clingable flesh not as fully Lord, but as graspably human. I want to cling, despite your protest cling to your body cling to your, and my, clingable humanity cling to what we had, our past. But I know that … if I cling you cannot ascend and I will be left clinging to your former self … unable to receive your present spirit.17

A Spirituality of Justice and Peacemaking

Act Justly—the Great Imperative God asks only one thing of us, that we “act justly, love tenderly, and walk humbly with our God.”

What Is Christian Social Justice? 1. Justice Is Beyond Private Charity—a Parable

There is a story told, now quite famous within social justice circles: Once upon a time there was a town that was built just beyond the bend of large river. One day some of the children from the town were playing beside the river when they noticed three bodies floating in the water. They ran for help and the townsfolk quickly pulled the bodies out of the river. One body was dead so they buried it. One was alive, but quite ill, so they put that person into the hospital. The third turned out to be a healthy child, who they then placed with a family who cared for it and who took it to school. From that day on, every day a number of bodies came floating down the river and, every day, the good people of the town would pull them out and tend to them—taking the sick to hospitals, placing the children with families, and burying those who were dead. This went on for years; each day brought its quota of bodies, and the townsfolk not only came to expect a number of bodies each day but also worked at developing more elaborate systems for picking them out of the river and tending to them. Some of the townsfolk became quite generous in tending to these bodies and a few extraordinary ones even gave up their jobs so that they could tend to this concern full-time. And the town itself felt a certain healthy pride in its generosity. However, during all these years and despite all that generosity and effort, nobody thought to go up the river, beyond the bend that hid from their sight what was...

2. Justice as demanding the Transformation of Systems

Private charity responds to the homeless, wounded, and dead bodies, but it does not of itself try to get at the reasons why they are there. Social justice tries to go up the river and change the reasons that create homeless, wounded, and dead bodies.2

Social justice, therefore, tries to look at the system (political, economic, social, cultural, religious, and mythical) within which we live so as to name and change those structural things that account for the fact that some of us are unduly penalized even as others of us are unduly privileged.

a recent commentary in Sojourners magazine was less than fully impressed by the fact that multibillionaire American Ted Turner recently gave one billion dollars to the United Nations, stating, “I’m putting the rich on notice. They are going to be hearing from me about giving money away.” Instead of celebrating Turner’s huge gift, Sojourners commented that “God put the rich on notice a long time before Ted Turner did” and the more important question is “why one man can have so much to spare (and get praised for it!) in a country where poverty (especially among children!) is on the rise.”3 That kind of comment helps clarify what social justice is.