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Seeking Spirituality
Guidelines for
a Christian Spirituality for the Twenty-First Century
by
Ronald Rolheiser
Edited
by
Hodder and Stoughton
ISBN 0-340-65623-9
Seeking Spirituality
Sections studied
Pages 3-18 What is Spirituality?
Pages 43 – 66 Essential Elements of Christian Spirituality
Pages 105 – 127 Spiritual images of the Church
Pages 127 – 132 So why go to Church?
Pages 133 – 157 A spirituality of the Paschal mystery
Pages 158 –
181 A spirituality of justice and peace-making
Pages 202 - 228
Sustaining ourselves in the spiritual life
Seeking Spirituality Ron Rolheiser
Chapter 1 What is Spirituality?
Desire, our fundamental dis-ease
p3 it is no easy task to walk this
earth and find peace
we are at odds with the rhythm of things
we are forever restless, dissatisfied, frustrated, aching
it is hard to come to simple rest
desire is always stronger than satisfaction
desire is the straw that stirs the drink
naming and analysing desire lies at the heart all the great
art, literature, poetry, philosophy, psychology and religion.
p4 Spirituality is ultimately about what we do with desire
p5 Spirituality is about what we do with our unrest
What is
Spirituality?
few words are as
misunderstood as the word “spirituality”
30 years ago there were few books about spirituality
today shelves teem with books
in the past spirituality was the domain of charismatic prayer
groups
today spirituality is increasingly mainstream
p6 everyone has to have a
spirituality
we all have a spirituality
spirituality is more about whether we can sleep at night than
about whether or not we go to church
p7-9 spirituality is about what we do
with our desires
with our eros ~ urgent longings / love
what shapes our actions is our spirituality
examination of Teresa, Joplin and Diana
Teresa
human bulldozer erotically
driven
disciplined
her dedication to God and the poor was her spirituality
Joplin
energy
excess
creativity, performance, drugs, etc was her spirituality
Diana
playboy
life style
no celibate nun
concern for the poor, or the oppressed
jet set life style and concern for the poor was her spirituality
p10 spirituality is about what we do with the fire inside us, about how we channel our eros
The two functions of the soul
p11 What is a soul?
p12
Our soul is not something we have it is something we are
It is the very life pulse within us that makes us alive
The soul gives us energy
The soul not only keeps us alive, it keeps us together
The soul is the glue that holds the body together
p13 At the second of death the hold of the soul breaks and the chemicals of our bodies begin to go their own way
p14
Every soul has a principle of order and a principle of chaos within it
Too much order and we die of suffocation
Too much chaos and we die of dissipation
Every healthy spirituality will worship God at two shrines~ chaos and order
What is healthy for our souls and unhealthy
Is this particular experience healthy or unhealthy for me right now?
p15 examples of legends about souls
Japan
baby’s soul as vulnerable and strange
Norwegian
soul
kissed by God before birth and holding a sense of that kiss throughout life
all living things have souls
p16 the bamboo story
p17 we have in us, spirit, soul and what we do with that soul is our spirituality
p18 The struggle with the religious dimension of spirituality is the key question for Christian people
Discussion
[1] [a] How easily can we identify the things that stop us from being at peace?
[b] How do we cope with these things, what can we do about them?
[2] [a] Do you have concerns about the word “spirituality” and are you clear about difference with “spiritualism”
[b] Does “new age spirituality” cause you concern and why yes or no?
[3] [a] Do you agree that spirituality is about what we do with our desires?
[b] How aware are you of your own desires and how do we get to know them?
[4] [a] What do you make of the bit about the soul?
[5] [a] Does the Church stifle or nurture spirituality?
[6] [a] Where does the Bible fit into this issue?
[7] [a] Where does prayer fir into this issue?
[8] [a] Any other issues you want to raise as a result of the Chapter?
Seeking Spirituality Ron Rolheiser
Page 43-66 Essential Elements of Christian Spirituality?
 | What is essential and non negotiable within Christian Spirituality |
| What are the pillars upon which we should base our spiritual lives? |
Page 44 Where have we come from?
Roman Catholicism
with a stress on religious rules and practices
Protestantism with stress on rules, etc but also practical
Christianity with a focus on reading and living the Bible
Secularisation
where post Enlightenment, everyone has a spirituality
Page 48
The situation today
Variety and Choice in experiences
Attend a Bible
Study Go to a prayer meeting
Join a social justice group Become a feminist
Join a men’s group Sign up for Promise
Keepers
Practise variation in prayer
Meditate
Twelve step programmes Eastern Religions
Enneagram Marriage
encounter classes
Ignatian Retreat Be born again
Return to nature Address the wolf
inside you
Books about
Creation and Nature Lordship of Jesus
women and the oppressed men and their struggles
injustice + God’s new order meditation and prayer
addictions
soul’s angles and demons
mythology + imagination
pursuit of excellence
Page 49
Sorting out ~
the search for substance and balance
how do you recognize the right voice?
in the name of Christ what do we ignore or
reject?
Page 50
traditionally Christianity argues a hierarchy of truth
there are essential truths, necessary and non negotiable, that apply to
everyone, eg the Ten Commandments
there are also accidental truths that you can choose to accept or reject
There are four essential pillars to every healthy Christian spirituality
- private prayer and private morality
- social justice
- mellowness of heart and spirit
- community as a constructive element of true worship
Page 52 Some stories of imbalance
the lady who had a strong sense of private prayer and private
morality but no desire for social justice
the man who had a very strong sense of justice
but no morality or prayer
strong on prayer, morality and justice but no mellowness of heart
strong on prayer, morality, justice and mellowness of heart but no
community involvement
page 59 The need for fullness and balance
page 59 Private prayer and private morality
an anchor of the spiritual life
be aware of a fundamentalist personal relationship with Jesus
remember it is not just Jesus and me
we will only make spiritual progress if we build on private prayer and
personal morality
page 61 Social justice
Christian Scripture contain a repeated
fundamental call to reach out to the poor
God cannot be related to without continually digesting the uneasiness and
pain that are experienced by looking at the weakest in society, asking how
they are faring and how are we affecting them
Page 63 Mellowness of heart and spirit
We can and will do the right thing for
the wrong reason
sanctity has to do with gratitude
sanctity is as much to do with a mellow heart as it is believing and doing
the right things
the importance of doing the right thing for the right reason
page 65 community as a constructive element of true worship
God calls us as a community
how we relate to each other is just as important as how we relate God
for a Christian concrete involvement in an historical community of faith
[church going] is non negotiable
page 66 To walk on earth like gods
How do Christians walk on earth as gods
~ as persons, in God’s image and likeness, trying to help God save the
planet and everything in it
How do we fulfil our God given vocations ~ by being part of God’s ongoing
Incarnation
Discussion
- Is it worth looking back beyond the Reformation to our catholic roots [ and Benedictine monasticism?]
- To what extent does the past influence the present?
- Any experiences of variety choice and books?
- Reaction to the four pillars of Christian Spirituality?
- Is anything missing?
- Is private prayer an integral part of contemporary life?
- How do you define private prayer?
- How do we prevent the community from blocking people from finding God because of its rules and practices?
- How do we walk , in God’s image and likeness?
- What can we do to try to help God save the planet and everything in it?
- What are our God given vocations?
- How do we fulfil our God given vocations ?
- How can we be part of God’s ongoing Incarnation?
- What other issues does this passage raise?
Seeking Spirituality Ron Rolheiser
Page 105 - 127 Spiritual images of the Church?
| The necessity or the non necessity of the institutional Church |
| More and more people are divorcing their search for God from involvement in a Church community |
| Bad history, lack of Grace, and lack of impact on the world mitigate against the institutional Church |
| People still want a Church label and use the Church for funerals, weddings, etc |
| People aren’t leaving their Churches they are just not going to them |
| People want a kingdom but not a church |
| What we need is a better spiritual understanding of why we might want and need a Church |
Page 107
The Church is the people – apostolic community?
|
people came before buildings or structures, ministers or moral codes |
| Jesus formed a community around him, animated it, and then left it his word, his Spirit, and the Eucharist |
The Via Negative ~ the Church is not …
[1] …like minded individuals gathering on the basis of mutual compatibility
| the church is people bound together by love |
| the people of the Church need love, not compatibility |
| the people of the Church are different and transcend theses differences |
[2] huddled together in fear and loneliness
| When the Spirit descended on the disciples huddling together in fear, they were free to move out of their closed room and into the world |
[3] …”Family” in the psychological sense
|
a “normal” family comprises two people who come together in love and sexual relation and maybe have children |
| the Church community is not a functional substitute for emotional and sexual intimacy |
| large churches do not afford warmth and intimacy which we seek, but we are consigned to spend eternity with trillions of others |
[4] …One roof, one ethnicity, one denomination, one rule book, or one prayer book
| there is much more to apostolic community than simply the framework and structures |
[5] …A shared task, a common mission
| a common mission demands team effort but that is of the “what and how” ~ we seem to be looking more of “why” |
| the Church is a common focus ~ around Jesus Christ ~ and a living in the light of His Spirit |
| the common mission has hallmarks like peace, joy, love, faithfulness, humility, self control, patience, goodness and long suffering |
| all who live in Christian virtues are one body with each other and constitute the Church |
Page 114
| The church is abstract and a historical as well as concrete and historical |
| The church celebrates the Word of God, the Sacraments, etc but is more than just Sunday Worship |
| In some way the Church means a common life and some achieve this by living in religious communities |
| being the Church, outwith religious communities, calls for us to share our lives ~ prayer, rites of passage, joys and fears, hospitality, etc |
| being the Church, outwith religious communities, calls for us to share responsibilities of finance and the like to maintain the Church |
| once we belong to a Church we longer fully own our lives |
| we can’t say “This is my life ~ butt out, that’s none of your business ~ |
| The Church is the people |
Page 115 The Church is the rope ~ Baptism and Conscription
| Baptism consecrates us and consecration is a prescriptive rope that takes us where we would rather not go ~ suffering that produces maturity |
| To consecrate means to be set aside ~ displace from ordinary usage ~ we loose our ordinary freedom |
| Page 117 to 118 and the example of families |
| Once consecrated we cannot opt in and opt out as we choose |
Page 120 The Church is the sarx ~ the blemished Body of Christ
| Christ is met in community |
| the community is a constitutive element in the Christian Quest |
| in the community we are taught that “then we shall see clearly” |
| when we meet God within the community we do not encounter God in purest form |
| Considering Church history, to be a member of the Church is to carry the mantle of the worst sin and the finest heroism of the soul |
Page 122 The Church is the house of many rooms ~ catholicity
| The bosom of God is not a ghetto. God has a catholic heart, in that catholic means wide and all-encompassing |
| Any church spirituality has to emphasise wide loyalties and inclusivity |
| A healthy member of a church community does not pick between boundaries and freedom |
| To be a member of the church is to choose all and to have hearts with many rooms |
| The task is to stand shoulder to shoulder with those who have differences but share a common faith |
Page 124 The Church is the banquet table ~ the ointment
| What is Church? Church, ultimately, whether we do it in a church building or around our table, is about people getting together for no reason other than to take the ointment ~ to offer each other love and affection |
| we go to Church to worship God and to tell people we love them and hopefully hear that they love us |
| we go to church to help get each other ready for death |
Discussion
- What we need is a better spiritual understanding of why we might want and need a Church?
- How do we reach out to those who do not go to Church but who have an active spiritual belief and yearning?
- What do we do to keep people away?
- Reactions to the Church is not …….?
- How can we make our Church more than just Sunday Worship?
- How can we enable opportunities to share feelings, etc?
- The Church is the people
- The Church prepares people for death ~ does it?
- Where does love feature on a one to ten scale in our Church with one being the weakest?
- The bosom of God is not a ghetto. God has a catholic heart, in that catholic means wide and all-encompassing
- Other issues from the passage?
Seeking Spirituality Ron Rolheiser
Page 127 - 132 So why go to Church?
| We need to ask why we go to Church |
| What do we tell others who don’t go about the Church? |
| Why might you go if you did not go? |
| What could serve as a vision, a list of reasons, for telling people in the Glens and Kirriemuir Old Parish Church Congregation and Parish why they should attend church? |
Page 127 Because it is not good to be alone
| We are essential social by nature |
| To be human is to be with others |
| Our quest for God must be consistent with our nature |
| A communitarian element is not negotiable |
Page 128 To take my rightful place humbly within the family of humanity
| three stages to life |
Birth Growing up Adulthood
| at birth we are naked, helpless, smelling of the earth and the womb and we are still primordially linked to the family of humanity and we are humble |
| Second stage, we wash the smell of the earth of ourselves and we spend years trying to establish our individuality. We seek independence and we loose our humility |
| Third stage and adulthood, our task is not to emerge but to merge back into community and loose our separateness |
| To be human is to be part of the group, naked and unmarked |
| The church offers us a concrete place to merge |
| The church offers a place to die to elitism ~ perhaps its greatest benefit and obstacle |
Page 129 Because God calls me there
| Neither God’s call or the Holy Spirit are private property |
| Spirituality is a communal search for the face of God |
| The Call of God is to worship the divinity and link to humanity |
| Love God and love neighbour |
| There can be no real Christian Spirituality without the Church |
Page 129 To dispel my fantasies about myself
| We can make religion a private fantasy world |
| We cannot lie in the company of people with whom we regularly share life |
| In community the truth emerges and fantasies are dispelled |
| The saying that nobody deflates us like our own families can also be applied to the Church |
Page 130 Because 10,000 saints have told me to
| I go to church because by far the majority of good and faithful persons that I know go there |
| The saints of yesterday and today are fairly unanimous about the importance of the Church |
| There are good people who don’t go to church but their lives reflect the good qualities of church life |
Page 130 To help others carry their pathologies and to have them to help me carry mine
| The primary function of a family is to carry the pathologies of its members |
| In the past when families were stronger there was a lot less need for private therapy |
| To go to Church is to seek the therapy of a public life and to be part of the therapy for others |
| I go to Church so that other people might help me carry whatever is unhealthy within me and that I may in turn help them |
| We should not be surprised by what “sicknesses” emerge |
Page 131 To dream with others
| What we dream alone remains a dream but what we dream with others can become a reality |
| The power of the individual versus the power of the group |
Page 131 To practice for heaven
| Heaven 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 |
| In life it is good to get some practice of community |
| It is good to be in situations that stretch the heart and the Church community does that |
| Remaining private does not stretch the heart |
Page 132 For the pure joy of it
| case study story |
| We go to church for the same reason that we gather as a family ~ for the pure joy of it |
Why Why not
To live longer Message confronts materialism
Because parents go Because parents don’t go
To be entertained God let them down
For the rites of passage Poor Ministers
Spiritual searching Poor presentations
For social status, it looks good Irrelevant music and language
Community focus Wrong times for worship
For help Church is too bland
To be part of good works Other attractions
Discussion
- To what extent do we stop people from coming to Church?
- Are we an elitist Congregation?
- To what extent do we reveal our own sicknesses and to what extreme do we accommodate and help others reveal theirs?
- Should the Church take on a social work / counselling role?
- What dreams do you have for the Church?
- In what areas should the Church exercise its collective power?
- Do you see the Church either as practice for heaven or a work out for your heart?
- Is the Church a place of joy for you?
- What others reasons are there for going to Church?
- What reasons are there for not going to Church?
- What steps can we take to encourage others to come to Church?
- What is the perspective through the eyes of those who do not attend?
Seeking Spirituality Ron Rolheiser
Page 133 - 157 A spirituality of the Paschal mystery?
Note
Paschal Lamb
A lamb
which the Israelites were commanded to eat with peculiar rites as a part of
the Passover celebration. The Divine ordinance is first recorded in Exodus,
xii, 3-11, where Yahweh is represented as giving instructions to Moses to
preserve the Hebrews from the last of the plagues inflicted upon the
Egyptians, viz. the death of the
firstborn. On
the tenth day of the first month each family (or group of families, if they
are small) is commanded to take a lamb without blemish, male, of one year,
and keep it until the fourteenth day of the month, and sacrifice it in the
evening. The blood of the lamb must be sprinkled on the transom and
doorposts of the houses in which the paschal meal is taken. The lamb should
be roasted and eaten with unleavened bread and wild lettuce.
The whole of the lamb must be consumed -- head, feet, and entrails -- and if
any thing remain of it until morning it must be burned with fire. The
Israelites are commanded to eat the meal in haste, with girded loins, shoes
on their feet, and staves in their hands "for it is the Phase (that is,
Passage) of the Lord." The blood of the lamb on the doorposts served as a
sign of immunity or protection against the destroying hand of the Lord, who
smote in one night all the first-born in the land of Egypt, both man and
beast. This ordinance is repeated in abridged form in Numbers xix, 11, 12,
and again in Deuteronomy, xvi, 2-6, where sheep and oxen are mentioned
instead of the lamb.
That the Paschal Lamb prefigured symbolically Christ, "the Lamb of God", who
redeemed the world by the shedding of His blood, and particularly the
Eucharistic banquet, or new Passover, has always remained the constant
belief of Christian Tradition.
Just remember in the winter
far beneath the bitter snow
Lies the seed that with the sun’s love
in the spring becomes the rose
p133 The timeless issues of suffering, death and transformation
|
A critical view
suggests that Christianity sets itself the absurd task of teaching happy |
| Freud blamed Christianity for a neurotic anxiety of mind |
| No philosophy of life / spirituality / can be mature without grappling with the haunting, timeless issues of life and death and suffering. |
| The mystery of suffering, death and transformation lies at the heart of Christian Spirituality |
| We pay lip service to the fact that Jesus did suffer and die for us but we seldom try to understand what that means and how we might appropriate it within our own lives. |
| What is the Paschal Mystery of Christ and how do we enter that mystery and live it out within our own lives? |
p134 A theological paradigm of the paschal mystery
| stories that give us a flavour of the paschal mystery |
| Judith Hearne |
dreaming of the perfect life
seeking marriage
finds an unsuitable man who turns her down
alcoholism
recovery
realisation that happiness does not depend upon somebody outside of me but
upon being at peace with what’s inside of me
| Young man and dying father voicing “Dad, let go! Trust God, die, anything is better than this |
| King David’s son |
While the child was alive I fasted and prayed, hoping that God might spare him. Now he is dead there is nothing I can do to bring him back ~ but am alive and must go on living in the face of this and must continue to create new life
| The Paschal mystery is the mystery of how we, after undergoing some kind of death, receive new life and new spirit. |
Jesus in his life and his teaching showed us a clear idea of how this could happen
p137 A paradigm [idea / concept] of the paschal mystery
| unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies it remains a single grain; but if it dies it yields a rich harvest |
| in order to come to fuller life and spirit we must constantly be letting go of present life and spirit |
| two kinds of death and two kinds of life |
terminal death where life and possibilities end
paschal death where life ends but a new richer and deeper life then opens
up
resuscitated life where one is restored to a former life
resurrected life where one is given a radically new life
| the need to distinguish between life and spirit |
| after Jesus died the disciples were given the new life of Christ but it was only at Pentecost that they got the spirit of this new life |
| Paschal mystery is the process through which we are given both new life and new spirit ~ both are needed in balance |
p139 The Paschal cycle
Good Friday: the loss of life ~ real death Name your deaths
Easter Sunday: the reception of the new life Claim your births
Forty days: readjusting the new / grieving the old Grieve losses and adjust to the new
Ascension: letting go the old, letting it bless you Do not cling to the old, let it go
Pentecost: receiving the new spirit of the new life Accept the spirit of the new life
|
not a once only cycle but a daily routine |
|
The Paschal Mystery is the secret to life |
p 140 Undergoing the various deaths of our lives
The death of our youth
| you are alive at your real age and not the age you once were |
| how do you cope with your advancing age ~ fight it or embrace it |
| Good Friday is the realisation of the death of your youth |
| Pentecost is when you begin to live to the full potential of your age |
p141 The death of our wholeness
| the death that occurs when part of us is fractured and dies |
| the anger of the woman who had been abused as a child |
| Good Friday was the time of her abuse |
| her task is to manage her ascension ie, grieve what has died and at the right time, let it go |
| the example of the woman who had the double mastectomy who learned to see herself differently and whose husband did the same |
p144 The death of our dreams
| not the dreams of the night but the dreams that we nurse in our hearts |
| the example of the aspiring pro hockey player and his what ifs |
| the “forty days”, 25 years of grieving for a hockey career |
| ascending to receive the spirit of a 45 years old overweight shop keeper |
| the story of Jephthah’s daughter and the need for us to mourn what is incomplete and unconsummated within our own lives |
| ultimately we will all die with dreams still to be realised ~ we all sleep alone ~ and we need to come to terms with this fact |
p148 The death of our honeymoons
| man woman meet, fall in love, marry, passion, 15 years on they know the honeymoon is over |
| their marriage is far from dead |
| they have a choice to either yearn for the past or they can grieve the honeymoon and receive the spirit of a couple who have been married for 15 years |
| this is true of all relationships |
| the downside is that honeymoons die but the upside is that God is always giving us something deeper, richer, fuller |
p150 The death of a certain idea of God and church
| the example of the change in the liturgy of the RC Church over the past 40 years |
| the choice of clinging to the church of our youth or looking back to the church that gave me faith, recognising that it has died, grieving its passing, letting it bless me, letting it go and then receiving the spirit of the church within which I am actually living |
p153 A note on grieving and on letting ourselves be blessed by the past
| Henri Nouwen’s call to mourn |
| unless we mourn properly our hurts, losses, life’s unfairness, shattered dreams, inconsummation, and all the life we had once but that has now passed us by, we will live either in an unhealthy fantasy or an ever intensifying bitterness |
| the example of the older brother in the Prodigal Son |
| the need for critical awareness and ownership of the reality of our lives |
| the example of how we can let the past bless us either by owning our roots or denying them |
No matter how bad your father and mother have been, some day you will stand by their graveside and recognise 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.
ISSUES, ETC
- GENERAL REACTIONS AND POINTS FROM THE CHAPTER?
- HOW CAN THE CHURCH MINISTER TO THE FULL POTENTIAL OF EACH AGE GROUP?
- EXAMPLES OF THE DEATH OF WHOLENESS?
- THE NEED FOR DREAMS SO THAT THEY CAN DIE
- THE HONEYMOON PERIOD OF THE MINISTER
- WHAT OF THE CHURCH OF OUR YOUTH DO WE HOLD ON TO?
- THE IMPORTANCE OF NOT LETTING OUR ROOTS OWN US
Seeking Spirituality Ron Rolheiser
p158 - 181 A spirituality of justice and peace making
Strength without compassion is violence
Compassion without justice is mere sentiment
Justice without love is Marxism
And … love without justice is baloney
Cardinal Sin
God
asks only one thing of us, that we
“act justly, love tenderly, and walk humbly with
our God”
Micah 6:8
What does it mean to act Justly?
p 159 What
is Christian Social Justice
Justice is beyond private charity
| The story of the bodies in the river |
Justice is systematic conversion
Difference between private charity and social justice