Holy Longing

Section Internet Links	Interpreting the Author	Complementing the Author	Discussion Notes	Back to Index
Wayne. Interpreting the Author. 1. Facing Pluralism When it Comes to Spirituality Rolheiser claims that we benefit from a rich selection of choices in the spiritual quest today, but what is lacking is clarity in support of our journey. He then speaks of three main spiritual traditions that influence us. With 43% of the Canadian population having Roman Catholic background, the Catholic spiritual tradition is dominant in our country. That does not mean we know much about it, however. This would be especially true of those whose spiritual influences have been either narrowly Protestant or essentially secular. Until a generation ago, a good Roman Catholic probably honoured the following spiritual guidelines. Regular church attendence. Private prayers. Living the ten commandments and in step with the church¹s teachings on marriage and sexuality. Supporting the church through offerings (and) not causing a public scandal. The focus of Catholic spirituality until the last century was essentially the nurturing of private faith. These practices had a distinct tone of monasticism, asceticism, piety and solitude about it. Only more recently has this spiritual list included the practice of social justice (elaborate from points made on pages 46-7). Protestants, who now together make up just a little less than the Catholic population of Canada, were also encouraged to focus on churchgoing, private prayer and private morality. Protestants, however, were discouraged from many of the practices of Catholic piety. They distrusted Catholic devotionals and sacramentals. Instead, Protestants encouraged Bible reading, and in some cases, group study of the Bible. Some denominations have an early history of concern for social justice. The United Church is one of those denominations. Today, however, more and more Protestant churches are including social justice as part of their spiritual agenda. There was also a rather strong moralism to much of Protestantism. The 'do nots' were often more pronounced than the 'dos' (thus, smoking, drinking, gambling, and other forms of Olose living¹ like dancing and cardplaying were often high on the taboo list). Interestingly, Prohibition, the public policy attempt to ban the production and consumption of alcohol in Canada during the 1930s was enacted as a result of one of the first attempts by Catholics and Protestants to work together to produce cooperative legislation - mainly the result of efforts by Quebec Catholics and Ontario Protestants. The United Church, even up to the 1950s under the moderatorship of a man named Mutchmor, maintained a strong anti-alcohol stance. From that time on, however, the focus of the church tended to shift away from private morality to social justice. The United Church has been an exemplary leader in that field (health care, fighting poverty, international justice and development, peacemaking, equal rights for women, homosexuals, etc.) for the past half century. Secular society has tended to suspect both Catholic and Protestant spirituality. It has viewed much of what churchpeople do spiritually as esoteric and superstitious. Secular politics has tended to view spirituality as private, rather than public practice. On the fringes, rather than at the centre of society. Secular society has also developed a number of politically correct spiritualities, however. The cult of physical health is one. Studying the myths and legends of primitive and classical cultures, is another. Establishing new shrines to replace old ones - Graceland, and Lady Diana¹s tomb - are yet another. My view of the plethora of currently available choices - New Age practices, intellectual and popular gurus, etc. - is this. Humans are incurably spiritual. When the traditional religious options are forgotten or become unfulfilling, people find their spirituality somewhere. Adherents of traditional religion should not ignore or ridicules those quests on the part of spiritual seekers. Rather, we should try to understand what people are searching for and why they seem not to be finding them in church or synagogue today. (Speak a bit about Native Spirituality, and why I was drawn to it and what my approach to it has always been. Reflect also on Rolheiser¹s distinction between 'substantial' and 'accidental' truth). 2. The Four Nonnegotiable Pillars of the Spiritual Life I think Rolheiser does us all a favour by his attempt to reduce spiritual practice to four pillars. We may or may not agree with him on some or all of them, but what he does is give us a more specific set of priority behaviours from the mass of choice there is out there. What he also does that is helpful, I believe, is provide a generic list, at this point. Many religious traditions can effectively use that list. Here is his list: 1. Private Prayer and Private Morality 2. Social Justice 3. Mellowness of Heart and Spirit 4. Community as a Constitutive Element of True Worship 3. When there is Imbalance in the Use of These Pillars: 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. d. Private Prayer and Private Morality and Social Justice and Mellowness of Heart - But Lack of Involvement Within a Concrete Community. 4. Toward Fullness and Balance: Private Prayer and Private Morality - We will make progress in the spiritual life only if, daily, we do an extended period of private prayer, and practice a scrupulous vigilance in regards to all the moral areas within our private lives (page 64). Social Justice - This is not a marginal concern for a few issue-oriented folk. Social justice lies at the heart of the gospel which Jesus proclaimed (page 66). Mellowness of Heart and Spirit - Our spiritual motivation will be misspent if it is driven by anger or guilt. With Kierkegaard, we need to ³will one thing' but our motivation must be based on love. Involvement Within a Concrete Community - Spirituality must be communitarian. Our community must not be theoretical or esoteric, but real and practical. The search for God is not ultimately something private or for oneself. It must be worked through in relationship with others, and often with those with whom we would prefer not to be with. 5. Questions for Small Group Consideration: 1. Discuss Rolheiser¹s four non-negotiables. How well has he named them? 2. Reflect on his points about imbalance and balance in these non-negotiables. How well does he describe them?
Jock. Complementing the Author.- Rolheiser says spirituality is what shapes our action, and sees Christian Spirituality as living the Christian life. In this chapter he outlines the "unnegotiable core" he derrives from Jesus. In the earlier chapters, in our discussions of them, and in general use in society, the meanings applied to this word "spirituality" have had some recognition of a new element in the word, something beyond understanding it to be just religious practice of a particularly good sort and not of a bad sort. There is recognition by the common person of this new element in spirituality - it is the way in which they accept the existence and value of the holy dimensions in life. The very title of the book "Holy Longing" is a reflection of this cry of the people. And this new meaning is the meaning we particularly seek to understand. It is this new element that seems so elusive. Though we can recognize it frequently, we do not seem able to capture or contain it. We cannot agree on what characterizes it. To use a word coined by my grand daughter when confronted with Escher's paradoxical drawings, it is a confusement, and it is the same element of paradox that is being encountered here. And if we agree that there is a new dimension of spirituality, held in respect, and longed for by all persons, we also recognize the complaint of the common person when they say they do not wish to be religious. Yet here in plain sight, Rolheiser has leaped across the creek. He has launched into a history, a description, a justification and a forumula of the essential elements of religious practice. In detail, he has outlined what is the essense of the spiritual life of a Christian. He claims the authority of Jesus himself for his list. He has left behind the earlier awe and longing that was earlier so well described. Now it is a matter of "lets roll up our sleeves and get down to business". He says: 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. ... These are not elements we may choose or not choose to incorporate within our spiritual lives. They comprise the essence of the spiritual life. They also supply its balance." p 55-56 What has just happened is one of those proverbial leaps of reason - leaps of faith - that we encounter in the this business. We can't easily get from where Ron was in chapters 1 and 2 to where he now is in chapter 3. And the lines of explanation and definition he lays down are as arbitrary as any other description of the "holy longing" might be. So let us follow his Catholic formula and see how it leads us in our time and place into a deeper understanding of Christian spirituality. It is well considered. Rolheiser notes further unease with the new formulation, and lays a complaint upon the "liberals" who would object to the fact that for many Christians "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and the keeping of the ten commandments are still the centrepiece of spirituality." (p 63) It seems here again, that the word "spiritual" is now interchangeable with "religious". He then puts fundamentalism opposite to liberalism, and suggests both are extreme positions, and imbalanced. Balance, always balance is his message. His pillars image is also one of balance and suggests all 4 are needed to support the roof. Whatever the Catholic understanding of liberal might be, we might look at our own United Church (generally regarded as a liberal protestant denomination). Our United Church Creed outlines a relationship to God through Jesus that calls us to be the Church - in celebration, respect, service, justice.and proclamation. If spirituality is to be understood as activity, rather synonymous with religious practice, our United Church offers a framework very much a parallel of the Rolheiser formulation. We are not so different as he might suspect. The differences that distinguish the Christian family of denominations, and indeed Faith Communities of all traditions, are not so much different either. All establish means to sustain a relationship to God, the ground of our being, and a relationship to a nurturing community, and a call to social justice. Rolheiser's point might seem then to be that the religious traditions of the world's faith communities, are a spirituality in practice and in balance, whereas the common person's spirituality is often a spirituality with minimal practice and without balance. So as we look at other faith communities, we might better understand what is in common between us, and so better understand the riddle of what the uncommitted mean by spirituality, and what sustains that lack of committment. Tom Harpur in reviewing the characteristic claims of exclusive truth in the many religious traditions sees the need not for balance but "fuzziness" in these matters. The kind of tolerance which alone can make the world safe for all to dwell in will never be achieved until the prevailing relgious ethos for all faiths and all spiritual seekers becomes fuzzier, becomes less dogmatic, more humbly aware of the infinite Mystery of the being of God." p165 Would You Believe - Finding God Without Losing Your Mind. M&S. 1996. A last voice to attend is that of secular society. Rolheiser makes a survey of the secular view in this chapter, and suggests they are in fact a religious structure despite their protest of agnostic neutrality. He suggests that our modern society pretends to be officially neutral in its politics and institutions. He notes that humanism is the inheritor of the enlightenment, and is similarly invisibly biased to the religious propensity of the human race. He suggests that common secular society is unabashedly superstitious, and worships at any shrine - worse today than any earlier time But we may well need to build bridges across this creek to the secular side. We may well need to understand what might be a view, a legitimate expression of the spiritual dimension. The risk is to some extent that as we polish our own spiritual understandings in the familiar context of our traditions in the faith communities, that we may be learning more of an ancient language - a language not spoken across the creek. We may also find that the traditional faiths are very behind in their formulations, and so we may not discover the spiritual dimension of some issues in our lives as easily as we had hoped. Examples of when our language and our praxis can be too out of touch: the gay rights issues, liberation theology issues, ecological issues, third world issues, near-death experience, mental disease, diversity of understanding, liberal/conservative, fundamentalism, feminist theology. As we explore his 4 pillar framework and see how we might learn from it how to better our own spiritual practice and our own spiritual understandings, let's continue to look at the other side of the creek with a view to including those people too. I'll end with a thought from Jung from his essay "Eastern and Western Thinking" Religious faith, on the other hand, refuses to give up its pre-critical Weltanschauung. In contradiction to the saying of Christ, the faithful try to remain children instead of becoming as children. They cling to the world of childhood. ... Jesus is the perfect example of a man who preached something different from the religion of his forefathers. But the Imitatio Christi does not appear to include the mental and spiritual sacrifice which he had to undergo at the beginning of his career and without which he would never have become a saviour. .
Discussion **

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