Holy Longing

Section Internet Links	Interpreting the Author	Complementing the Author	Back to Index
Jock. Interpreting the Author. Chapter 9. A Spirituality of Sexuality "Perhaps there is nothing in this world as powerful to break selfishness as is the simple act of looking at our own children..." Sexuality as Divine Fire. As a force for love, life, blessing yet also for hate, death and destruction, we need to respect this fire - that is the spiritual task before us. The root meaning of sexuality is having been cut off. Aloneness, the ache, the feeling of being cut off is part of being human. The common meaning of sexuality - making love - he says should not be trivialized, nor seen in a negative light. The general prudish view of Christians is wrong. Many Christian mystics have used the image of sexuality to portrary the divine. The Greeks he notes had 6 meanings for Eros and did not expect one aspect of love to carry the others. This powerful sacred energy leads us to overcome our incompleteness - to move towards unity - to find our way back to the garden of Eden - to make us co-creators with God. And to help with our understanding of this he says sexuality in full bloom looks like: a mother beaming with delight at her child, a grandfather proud of his grandson graduating, an artist satisfied with competion, a hero having saved a child, someone spontaneously laughing, a nun smiling, people at a graveside, a couple sharing, a family at table, a person in service to others, God acting in the world. Again the good Father has some nonnegotiables. Sex is sacred. Sex is linked to marriage. Sexuality is God's energy inside us. Sex always needs chastity. Chasity he says is simply respect, reverence and joy. Of course these are his Catholic beliefs, and whatever we may otherwise think, or the world of this position, they are he says the road to avoid the "terrible heartaches, family breakups, violence, and occasional suicides that result from fractured sexual relationships."(p200). Our culture has and should have taboos to protect us from this holy fire. Living in Inconsummation - Some Christian Perspectives In this life, all symphonies are "unfinished". Freud says we are all sexually frustrated. So how do we live in incompleteness? We should understand our time. Our life is short. Sadness touches all we do. We should not be Stoic, but understand we have been given a promise of a future where we will not any longer be incomplete. We should understand sexuality roots our creativity. We ultimately will embrace the universe. We are restless, uncentred, unhappy. This can direct us inward to our solitude.and our own source of strength. Henri Neuwen had 4 steps for this: 1. Own your pain and incompleteness. 2. Give up false messianic expectations - that somewhere, sometime, someplace things will change and we will be happy. 3. Go inward. 4. This is movement, not a once and for all thing. Loneliness, rather than fostering anger can lead us into understanding of the poor and the poor in spirit. Because humans are not gods, our relationships are always incomplete. Love and life are tragic elements and yet they reveal our nobility and power Loneliness will always exist. In the absurdity of this is a place where marriage and celibacy are possible and beautiful. Chapter 10. Sustaining Ourselves in the Spiritual Life. "To pray, I think, does not mean to think about God in contrast to thinking about other things, or to spend time with God instead of spending time with other people. Rather, it means to think and live in the presence of God. All our actions must have their origin in prayer. Praying is not an isolated activity; it takes place in the midst of all the things and affairs that keep us active. In prayer a 'self-centred monologue' becomes a 'God-centred dialogue." Henri Neuwen "Spiritual Life" is Rolheiser's key phrase. This is something beyond mere spirituality. It is in our life, our action, our energizing of the spiritual dynamic that we come to understand the meaning of life and to grow our spirituality. He notes St. Augustine from the experience of his own life said "Knowledge alone cannot save us." The secret says the author is we need both knowledge and heart. And how shall we move along in our journey, what practices shall we follow? Well the time-honoured one of course. Nothing has changed here he says. Prayer. Charity. Help the Poor. Be active in church. Love. Be a Mystic. Personal Experience. Our culture no longer carries our faith for us. Our understanding of Christian tradition is more agnostic than believing today, more the adoption of a Christian ideology he says, than a matter of Christian belief. We need a personal faith and that depends upon prayer. All those who have experienced the divine are people who pray though prayer may seem to mean different things, and have different names and practices. But fundamentally prayer seems the same the world over. "Only prayer can provide for you that fine line (spiritual, psychological, and emotional) between depression and inflation. ... because only prayer can ground a soul - and only it can save you from being either a depressive or an asinine personality. If you do not pray, you will either be habitually depressed or obsessed with your own ego." (p219)" A Mysticism for Our Age - Prayer as Pondering, Carrying Tension. Scripture he says tells us to "Pray always" and he asks how do we do this. The delightful word ponder give us insight. Biblical characters pondered. They stood before life's great mysteries with a willingness to carry a great tension says Rolheiser. "We are better persons when we carry tension, as opposed to always looking for its easy resolution. "(p221) And he finds this same theme in great literature. "Great joy depnds upon first having carried great tension. Jesus embodied this tension - in his life and in his death. "In Jesus' message there is a strong motif of waiting, of pondering, of chastity, of having to carry tension without giving in to premature resolution. The idea is that the resurrection follows only after there has been an agony in the garden. That is also true for faith."(p223) Respect says Rolheiser is why we should carry tension. Living without restraint is disrespect. Carrying the tensions of life provides opportunities to transform hurt to forgiveness, anger to compassion, and hatred to love. Sin Bravely We have shared this Lutherism before. Rolheiser sees its boldness and its meaning essentially as honesty. Luther saw in the Gospels that it "is not weakness that is problematic within our relationship to God, but rationalization, denial, lying, and the hardening of our hearts in the face of truth."(p226) There is only one unforgivable sin. Here is Rolheisers insightful paraphrase of Jesus: "Be careful not to lie, not to distort the truth, because the real danger is that, by lying, you begin to distory and warp your own hearts. If you lie to yourself long enough, eventually you will lose sight of the truth and believe the lie and become unable any longer to tell the difference between truth and lies. What becomes unforgivable about that is not that God does not want to forgive, but that you no longer want to be forgiven."(p227) "If we are Honest, eventually God, truth, and love will find us."(p230) This provides a key to the success or failure of all therapeutic programs respecting addictions he says. Without this kind of honesty, there can be no help. Gather Ritually Around the Word and Break the Bread ..." "For where two or three gather in my name, I am there among them." ... Jesus "Christian life is not sustained only by private acts of prayer, justice, and virtue. It is sustained in a community, by gathering ritually around the word of God and through the breaking of the bread. However, it is important to understand that this kind of gathering is not simply a social one, capable only of doing what social gatherings can do. To gather around the word of God and the breaking of the bread is a ritual gathering and ritual brings something that normal social gathering does not, namely transformative power beyond what can be understood and expllained throught the physical, psychological, and social dynamics that are present."(p231) We the "adult children of the Enlightenment, tend to be ritually tone-deaf in that we distrust basically everything that we cannot rationally explain." But there is he notes in our time, a returning interest to spiritual matters and a recognition that there is comfort and purpose in ritual gatherings. It is a mystery how this works. "How does a kiss work?" he asks. Ritual helps us not to "fall apart", and to "stay alive". In considering ritual, we are not in an area of change and novelty, but a place of archetypal rhythms. In a beautifully expressed sentiment he says "We gather to communally worship God and to let God do in us what we cannot do within ourselves, namely, give us faith and shape us into a community beyond our conflicting emotional pulls and all the things we need therapy for. Christianity has sustained itself for two thousand years. ... We just have to gather in his name around the simple, clear rituals he gave us. He promised to do the rest."(p237) Worship and Serve the Right God. He finishes the book again with Neuwen. In The Return of the Prodigal Son we have an image of God, new in its time, and fresh in our time; and we have images of ourselves. We have often projected our anger into our image of God. Rolheiser says in our effort to get rid of the punishing god, we have not done very well in replacing him. The god of orthodoxy bears a frown and the liberal god is a worried whining god. But the God of Jesus, of Julian of Norwich, smiles on the planet and on its people. "all shall be well, and all shall be well, and every manner of being shall be well." Rolheiser is very assured in this book. He is trying to embrace both the conservative and the liberal perspective and find a truth between. He is looking to the left and to the right and feels very rooted where he stands. And he recommends to us to also examine where we are in such context. If his perspective seems pedantic, it is his profession. He sails in the mainsteam of Catholic tradition, and sees the streams of change as entering the mainstream. If our experience suggests there are other waters to sail upon, his instructions are still a valuable summary of our traditions, and an excellent review of our present spiritual circumstances.
Wayne. Complementing the Author. 1. A Spirituality of Sexuality Because sexuality is such a divine fire, and should neither be seen in a negative light or trivialized, our culture should have taboos to protect us from the overpowering dynamism associated with this fire. Back in 1966 (38 years ago) when it came time to choose my master of divinity thesis, I picked a subject that was timely because it was the sixties, and everything that had been nailed down in our culture was coming loose. I picked a subject that was a major personal issue for a twenty-four year theological student, namely me. I decided to research, write and defend a dissertation on the crisis of premarital sex and healing ethics! I was operating from the narrow perspective of my conservative upbringing; the raging hormones of a young male at that age; and the sincere desire of a student preparing to become a teacher, preacher and counsellor on subjects relating to what makes for life and what makes for death according to the Christian way. I was fortunate in having a thesis advisor who had specialized in Freudian psychology in his own doctoral work at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He was well read in the secular literature of his time, and advised me to read, among others, the philosopher consort of French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, whose name was Simone de Beauvoir. De Beauvoir was an early feminist whose book Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter may now seem rather quaint and dated today, but which was revolutionary at the time. To this neophyte, aspiring to understand the real world in ways my parents or pastors could not explain to me, this woman was an eye-opener. She helped me to begin thinking of ethics, not in terms of supernatural metaphysical laws, but in terms of consequences. In other words, I began to discover the moral thinking which became known as ³situation ethics.² In short, this approach to ethics, as many of you may recall, implied that context and consequences should take precedence over universally applied behavioral principles. Interesting, how an approach that was so risque for many of us in the 1960's should become the dominant modus operandi, even for many Christians, during the next two generations, and counting! The basic thing I learned from writing and defending that thesis was not the part about pre-marital sex right or wrong. It was about healing ethics. Since the 60's the floodgates have opened on a number of other previous taboos, such as abortion and euthanasia, as well. While I first thought of healing ethics as ways of coming to terms with the destructive results of law-dominated lives I began to see the issues were much more profound than that. The life implications of following a certain ethical approach became as important as the rules themselves. We have come to discover that while some rules are meant to be broken, some things never change. It is for that reason, I believe, that the ever-pastoral Rolheiser maintains his commitments to two key ethical principles - celibacy for those who make such vows; and fidelity within a marriage commitment. I think that what he has to say about the value of celibacy for those who choose not to marry, and fidelity within marriage has much to commend it. I am not going to either defend or debunk his view. I honour the principles he advocates, but I believe he says something more important than that in his book. 2. Sustaining Ourselves in the Spiritual Life That leads me to what I consider the basic point he makes in chapter ten. For me, it is the answer behind the answer relating to his point about containing the divine fire, referred to in chapter nine. Jock points this out, in his reflection on Rolheiser's comments about being a mystic - a mysticism for our age - prayer and pondering, carrying tension (pp. 219 ff). Rolheiser says (p. 221) ³We are better persons when we carry tension, as opposed to always looking for it's easy resolution.² He refers to the ³greatness of soul² implicit in Jane Austin's work Sense and Sensibility (which was made into a movie in 1995). Elinor Dashwood, the heroine, undergoes a great deal of pain while living authentically her pre-Victorian mores and her conventional, noble self-denials. As we observe this behaviour from the vantage-point of a very different age, we cannot but admire this starched Austin character, all the more believable because she tries so hard to keep things in check. Indeed, she has her reward as the story concludes because, even though some folk have sense, but no sensibility; and some folk have sensibility but no sense, Elinor seems to possess a measured balance of both. And so, in the end, she gets her man, and together, they live out their days in peace and contentment. The point I am attracted to is not the set of social expectations and ethical principles that the society of her time follows. The point is that, within the context of those expectations and principles, Elinor determines to live the tension of her situation. She does not look for an easy resolution to her problems, even when it would seem good for her to do so. She lives what she must live, in season and out of season. She has determined to follow her conscience whether it results in reward, or otherwise. That, to me, is what makes the story timeless. Ultimately, we must all live with our consciences. Your conscience will not suffice for mine, nor mine your's. Once more, I will refer to the statement of Luther who admonished his colleague Melanchton to ³sin boldly and to trust in Christ even the more boldly.² That famously line - peccate fortiter - has always been one that has inspired me. Rolheier says that this statement does not, as a superficial understanding might interpret, invite us to sin. Rather it invites us always to be in that space where God can help us after we have sinned, namely, in a state where we honestly admit our sin. As Luther understood it, the problem is not so much that we sin, but that we do not sin boldly. What does this say to me? It says that moral thinking - healing ethics - does not happen if we spend our whole lives trying to colour inside the lines. That is deadening. We need to do our best with those lines, and live within the tension of living within those lines - whatever they may be - and then trust God with the mistakes we make in the process. For me, sustaining ourselves in the spiritual life can be summed up between these two poignant phrases of Jane Austin and Martin Luther: ³sense and sensibility² (and) ³sin boldly² Questions for Consideration: 1. Do you think Rolheiser offers you a satisfying approach to living spiritually today? Give your reasons. 2. What questions would you like to ask Rolheiser during a personal interview?

	Clicking the icon left will activate the e-mail on your machine and direct your comments to us. Comments are welcome and will be posted with usual editorial courtesies.
EMAIL