Holy Longing

Section Internet Links	Interpreting the Author	Complementing the Author	Back to Index
Jock. Interpreting the Author. What is madness, but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance. ... Roethke Rolheiser commences his construct of what it means to have a Christian Spirituality with a venture into madness and a being at odds. The subject is perennial. Every generation he says has struggled spiritually, and it is precisely in this struggle that each generation redefines spirituality. 1. Naivete about the Nature of Spiritual Energy. But this struggle is against a powerful unknown. Energy of any sort, but especially of a spiritual sort, is he says likely to "beat us up". We are very naive about this business. The Bible describes encounters with God as unexpectedly and dramatically overwhelming. A rope was tied to the ankle of the high priest for example on the occasion of his annual entry into the holy of holies in case he died in the presence of God and had to be hauled out. So first our forebears understood spiritual energy as coming from God and properly to be redirected back to God. Persons were taught to see themselves as having meaning in theological terms as being "made for God". Second, Human cultures have always required this power to be mediated and interpreted by laws, taboos and rituals. Not all of this was bad says Rolheiser. If they lived with more superstition, they lived with also less anxiety than we. Our generation wants to manage spiritual energy all on our own. In consequence we are "rarely on an even keel, always either too low or too high, feeling dead inside or unable to act or sleep properly because we are too hyper and restless." In fact it seems most of us live today in a state of chronic depression. We are void of delight in the goodness and beauty of life. We have lost the joy of children. He cites CS Lewis saying delight has to catch us unaware, and St Francis saying in giving we receive. How often he asks do we suddenly stop with an awareness that "it feels great to be alive". Or we are at the opposite pole of inflation - so full of ourselves that we are a "menace to our families, friends, communities, and ourselves. We have a problem both ways, accessing and containing energy." So we might learn from our forebears why they controlled this spiritual energy with taboos and ritual. "The energy inside us is simply too much and when we attempt to handle it without the proper reverence, safeguards, taboos, and mediation, we will soon find ourselves stripped of all joy and delight. ..[it is not] about sin and morality, it is about whether or not ... we sit in delight or depression ..." "Spirituality is about properly handling the fires." 2. Pathological Busyness, Distraction, and Restlessness. Our age suffers also Rolheiser points out, in "not just to think about God or to pray, but simply to have any interior depth whatsoever". Check here for the public revew page at Amazon on Shattered Lantern, where the author deals at length with this theme of not having any time for the spiritual. This involves 3 aspects he says. Narcissim or self-pre-occupation. Pragmatism - or life is too much with us - there is no time for else but work. Unbridled Restlessness - we never stop for rest, or reflection. We are more busy than bad. He cites Thomas Merton , Neil Postman and Henri Nouwen as having written eloquently on these matters. Click on their names to find out more. 3. A Critical Problem with Balance, Leading to a Bevy of Divorces. Balance is the key and we are pretty bad at it he says. And it seems the characteristic of our age is to take a thing and polarize it, stretch it out into two opposite things, then select one, dismissing the other. Good Spirituality he says knows these are the yin and yang aspects that are found in all things. He gives 5 examples of this separation - this divorcing. a. The Divorce Between Religion and Eros. Many today think that religion is dull including many in its service. And so the secular world is where the joy is. It falsely makes us think the choice is church or society. b. The Divorce Between Spirituality and Ecclesiology. "We are witnessing a drastic decline in church life right in the midst of a spiritual renaissance." He lays some of the responsibility for this on Sam Keene who noticed and named this modern phenomena in the 90's. Certainly many today believe their spirituality is antithetical to a church connection. Rolheiser in fairness notices that many churched persons have "the obedience but not the truth". c. Divorce Between Private Morality and Social Justice. Says Rolheiser, "...private and social morality are too rarely found within the same person." d. The Divorce of the Gifted Child and the Giving Adult. Rolheiser uses Alice Millar's idea that a gifted child is a giving child and not an abused child who has withdrawn from others. Such giving is too rare. We see ourselves today as victims - embittered even of our own sacrifices for others. "When is something altruism and when is it simply being a doormat?" But it is the churches more than secular society that knows these things. e. The Divorce by Contemporary Culture of Its Paternalistic Christian Heritage. Our modern culture is the son he says of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and so angry that the sweetness has not been passed along, but only the bitterness. "Like any child, caught in a painful divorce, we stand between them, sense their incompatibiity, and do not know to which we should give our hearts." 4. Toward a Christian Spirituality. With this then as a stage setting, Rolheiser promises to show us the direction to travel. Asking us to accompany him on the path of this book - to travel on while sharing, to search out while doubting, and to share the discovery of truth and error.
Wayne. Complementing the Author. I would like to complement Rolheiser and Jock in my comments. As I understand my role complementation implies both affirmation and critique. 1. There has been no golden age for spirituality I believe that Rolheiser makes a good point, here. We have a tendency to think that conditions in the past were more conducive to a spiritual search. If we refelct more on that, however, the search of our forebearers was often not so much a free quest, but a confined, sometimes even abusive obligation. I learned my catechism, before I was confirmed, from my Lutheran grandmother Edna Holst, who believed that helping me to accurately memorize by rote every word of that Q & A exercise was the best way to give me caring spiritual direction. I recall her once telling me with a great deal of concern blended with love - "Vayne," she said, "when you grow up I vood like you marry goot Lut-eran girl yet." Probably Rolheiser is right. Questions of meaning and morality were generally answered within a framework that included God, religion and church. My grandmother assumed that if I learned my catechism well, and lived faithfully within the only religious community she really knew anything about, I would make it through life OK. No longer do we tend to look to the church as the primary, much less the only, way to answer our most important questions or to shape our lives. A major paradigm shift has occurred in the experience of many of us still living for half a century of more. As a case in point I could refer to the matter of homosexuality in Canadian society. Significant changes have taken place in the way we have dealt with homosexuality during the past few decades. Human rights legislation has tended to bring homosexuals out of the closet and into the Canadian mainstream. Most of Canada¹s churches as having a hard time keeping up with the implications of that legislation. Imagine! The church needing to learn lessons from the estate devoted to law. Society in general seems to be outpacing many Christians in terms of accepting homosexuals as human beings with rights and privileges like everyone else! This is but one example of understanding the changed position of the church in modern Western cultures. In the past, religious leaders seemed to be ahead of the rest. They had a vision of the good, and they worked to change the laws in support of the best interests of humanity. That is, in many instances, no longer the case. Many in society tend to view the influence of the church as an albatross around their necks rather than a laurel of personal freedom and achievement. And yet, I wonder if there ever really was a golden age for spirituality? I am currently reading an excellent new biography of Martin Luther by the Chicago theologian, Martin E. Marty. One of the alleged psychological problems that plagued Luther was what today we might call bipolar disorder. In some ways it might be argued that the fate of the Protestant Reformation sometimes hung in the balance of Luther¹s emotional highs and lows! He suffered terribly from what he called ³anfechtungen", or periods of despair. The great concerns of his early spiritual quest, before Luther discovered faith, evolved around the question: "How can I find a loving and righteous God?" Today, the problems of many moderns are more often as not to focus on the absurdity that results when God has departed from their worldview. They have difficulty finding something to take God¹s place . 2. Spiritual (erotic) energy is not friendly. Jung, says Rolheiser, tells us that finding a way to channel our deepest and most elemental spiritual energies, is not at all easy. We really cannot work it out by ourselves. Too often our efforts result in negative, rather than positive, effects of energy welling up within us. We become depressed trying to contain something we cannot contain by ourselves. The story of the older couples becoming psychologically conflicted after observing the behaviour of young people under the influence of loud music, booze, drugs and sex in the park (pp. 28-9) is an excellent one. My guess is that not only were those oldsters angry and frustrated because they could not act out like the youth. They was also reminded of how often, over the years, their own personal eros had been painfully skewed because of faulty or awkward handling. I think that Rolheiser says something very perceptive here. ³There is nothing wrong with Aphrodite and Eros having sex under a tree. What is problematic (in our society) is that this is not an event to be watched. It is too raw. Love is meant to be made behind closed doors." In other words, in the words of a famous Canadian, Pierre Trudeau, the nation has no business in the people¹s bedrooms. Spirituality is about properly handling the fires, those powerful energies, that flow through us. Rolheiser says, ³Channeling eros (the madness of the gods in us) correctly is not, first and foremost, about sin and morality. It is about whether or not, like those Ontario couples (in the park), we sit in delight or depression while eating our suppers at night." What does he mean by that? How has our society changed from the days of more formal strictures on human eros, and are we any better off today than the Victorians? 3. Preoccupation, distraction and restlessness - too busy or too afraid? I do not wish to go much further into this issue, right now. Jock has already outlined the major points that Rolheiser makes and gives us good hyperlinks for references on the website. What I do want to say is something autobiographical. I usually find the time to do the things I think are important in my life. If I do not seem to have time to work on my inner spirituality, perhaps it is because I am afraid of what I will find inside me if I ever attempt to open Pandora¹s box. If I am restless and distracted when it comes to being quiet and inwardly focused, perhaps it is because I know only too well what I will find if I looked. 4. The False Divorces Rolheiser says that there are real divorces today between religion and eros, spirituality and ecclesiology, private morality and social justice, the gifted child and the giving adult, contemporary culture and its paternalistic Christian heritage. I am wondering if Rolheiser is actually creating some false dichotomies here for effect. Are they divorces, really? Rolheiser then says that all these are false dichotomies. ³We, like the children of (those divorces) like all children in a broken home, find ourselves torn between the two, and unconsciously longing for them to come back together again." I believe that we need a new set of eyes to see what may appear to be separated but which are, in essence, joined. I believe we have always had seers and visionaries pointing the way for us, but we have not been hearing them. Or perhaps, we have been listening too readily to seers and visionaries from a bygone era who do not have all that much to tell us about today¹s realities. Questions for Group Discussion: 1. Compare and contrast "eros " and "spirituality" according to Rolheiser. 2. Rolheiser says that in the matter of divorce between private morality and social justice, the "the person who who leads the protest group usually does not lead the prayer group. The personal 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" (page 36). Discuss.

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