Getting to the Point: individualism

Showing posts with label individualism. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

We Don't Know How

Extempore prayer, to the Fathers, was tinged with a purely biblical color. Their hearts were replete with God’s word to the point of overflowing. Extempore prayers, which ‘man himself fits together’, in the words of St Isaac the Syrian, are nothing but a coherent and integrated recital of God’s memorized word. They express the condition of the human soul when moved and impressed by his word and will.

It is thus that meditation becomes closely linked to prayer in its first formal degree. When man applies it, he grows before God in all confidence and safety, since it is a prayer that proceeds from the core of the Bible. It is henceforth able to transform and renew man’s emotional makeup, his thought and his expression, in a radical way.

Extempore prayer, in Orthodox tradition, cannot therefore be counted as prayer unless man is imbued with the word of God. He has to be well trained in correct meditation. Otherwise, his words come forth unbiblically, and his ideas will falls short of expressing the will of God and his thought.

Matthew the Poor, Orthodox Prayer Life

Reflection – One last day on Abba Matthew and meditation, and then we’ll move on to something else. ‘Extempore’ prayer, here, is what in the Western tradition we call mental prayer, generally in the sense of conversing with God in one’s own words.

We see, though, the wisdom of this Eastern sense that mental prayer must flow from meditation and interiorization of God’s word, or it is not only inadequate but in fact not really prayer. I don’t think this is such a strange idea to those of us have some experience of the practice of prayer.

Who among us has not felt at times very hampered in mental prayer, very inadequate, very much not knowing what really to say to God. I mean, we have our grocery list of prayer intentions, ever growing, and we can always lapse back into verbal prayers like the rosary if we really get stuck, but I think most of us experience fairly quickly that just talking to God is not such a simple easy thing.

The fact is, this is quite proper and a sign that we really are in the divine presence. Of course we get tongue-tied in the presence of such majesty and grandeur, even if we are not particularly aware on the level of the senses of any such thing. Our spirits know that God is not simply to be chatted up as if He were the next door neighbour or Joe the bartender.

Our own human ideas and words and thoughts are woefully short of the mark when it comes to true prayer to God. And so it is God’s word, God’s ideas and God’s thoughts that are the only true and sure way to shape our own prayers to make them real. Meditation on God’s word teaches us how to pray, gives us the right words that become our words, then, and can come out to God as the authentic sincere prayer of our own hearts.

There is much to ponder here. One thing, for example, is that this corrects somewhat a slightly exaggerated tendency today to stress personal authenticity or originality to an extreme. The most important thing is that its your creation, your words, your own original authentic production—that can be the general thought, and indeed general counsel about prayer or about lots of other things. I may even be guilty of having counselled people in that way.

We see here that, while our prayer should be certainly be our own, and in fact must be lest it become just lip service, the content of the prayer really needs to be taught to us by God. We don’t know how to pray – the Lord does need to give us the words and the attitudes of mind and heart that are adequate for that activity.

There is a whole theological anthropology, a whole understanding of the divine origin and destiny and shaping of human life, that emerges from this one simple statement, ‘Lord, teach us to pray.’ There is a privileging of receptivity over initiative, of passive contemplation over active intellection that we learn in a natural way simply by the fact that meditation on God’s word precedes mental prayer and shapes it.

It is all very Marian, very much connected to the Woman who received the Word of God into her womb, and only then could pray her great Magnificat of praise and exultation. Mary is the pattern here, and so on this first of May, Mary’s month, I leave you with her example as the great orans, the woman of prayer and receptivity who can teach us to meditate, to receive the word, and then bring forth God’s word and not our own empty words, for the hungry world.

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Leaving the Cupboard

Confessing with the lips indicates in turn that faith implies public testimony and commitment. A Christian may never think of belief as a private act. Faith is choosing to stand with the Lord so as to live with him. This “standing with him” points towards an understanding of the reasons for believing. Faith, precisely because it is a free act, also demands social responsibility for what one believes. The Church on the day of Pentecost demonstrates with utter clarity this public dimension of believing and proclaiming one’s faith fearlessly to every person. It is the gift of the Holy Spirit that makes us fit for mission and strengthens our witness, making it frank and courageous.

Profession of faith is an act both personal and communitarian. It is the Church that is the primary subject of faith. In the faith of the Christian community, each individual receives baptism, an effective sign of entry into the people of believers in order to obtain salvation. As we read in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “ ‘I believe’ is the faith of the Church professed personally by each believer, principally during baptism. ‘We believe’ is the faith of the Church confessed by the bishops assembled in council or more generally by the liturgical assembly of believers. ‘I believe’ is also the Church, our mother, responding to God by faith as she teaches us to say both ‘I believe’ and ‘we believe’.”

Porta Fidei 10

Reflection - There is much to muse on in this passage, much food for thought. There are always two extremes which distort the nature of faith. There is the social/communitarian model of faith, whereby faith is just ‘what everyone does.’ We’re all Catholics, so let’s all go to Mass now—that kind of thing. While this was more common reality in previous eras, people who grow up in strong religious families can still fall into this extreme. We’re Catholics, Catholics have certain rules that they live by, and here’s what they are, so shape up, buddy!

Of course what is missing here is any sense of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, with God as Father, with the Holy Spirit as a real active presence. But then this personal model of faith can also become distorted. Me and Jesus and that’s all there is to it, a wholly individualistic and private matter of the heart. Very little if any sense of a community, a responsibility to be part of a group, a body, a society with moral obligations. Just… me and Jesus! All very cozy, but not really right.

Because Jesus didn’t live that way, you know. And ‘faith is choosing to stand with the Lord so as to live with Him.’ Jesus’ own relationship with the Father clearly had and has a personal intimacy and a directness that beggars our imagination – we’re talking about the relations of the Trinity here, about which we know precisely nothing! But the way Jesus lived out this intimate unity with His Father plunged Him fully into the life of the community, of the society of his time and people.

His engagements with the Pharisees, His teachings about the law and its application, His own practice of the Jewish liturgical life, His profound development for his disciples of the moral demands, the social principles, the all-encompassing implications of his Gospel—all of this makes nonsense of any kind of individualistic ‘me and Jesus’ faith.

Catherine Doherty used to tell a favourite story of her patron saint Catherine of Siena. St. Catherine began her life with God living a solitary life of prayer and penance in a cupboard under the stairs of her family home. This went well for quite a while, and she had mystical graces and all that good stuff. But one day Jesus said to her, “Now I want you to go out and serve my people.” She objected that she wanted to stay there and just be with Him. He said, “Well, you can stay in the cupboard, but I won’t be here!” And St. Catherine promptly went running out of the cupboard and dedicated the rest of her life to passionate, heroic service of the sick, the poor, and the troubled Church of her day.

Jesus calls all of us—even those genuinely called to be solitary hermits—out of the cupboard. Faith begins in ‘the cupboard’—that beautiful intimacy with Christ in the depths of our hearts—but once Christ is there, the cupboard door flies open, and we are called to live and love and serve and ultimately die for the world. Because that’s what Jesus did, and faith is all about standing with Him and living His life.

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Love Me, Love My Church (saith the Lord)

Jesus’ responds to Peter’s confession by speaking of the Church: “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church”. What do these words mean? Jesus builds the Church on the rock of the faith of Peter, who confesses that Christ is God.

The Church, then, is not simply a human institution, like any other. Rather, she is closely joined to God. Christ himself speaks of her as “his” Church. Christ cannot be separated from the Church any more than the head can be separated from the body (cf. 1 Cor 12:12). The Church does not draw her life from herself, but from the Lord.

Dear young friends, as the Successor of Peter, let me urge you to strengthen this faith which has been handed down to us from the time of the Apostles. Make Christ, the Son of God, the centre of your life. But let me also remind you that following Jesus in faith means walking at his side in the communion of the Church. We cannot follow Jesus on our own. Anyone who would be tempted to do so “on his own”, or to approach the life of faith with kind of individualism so prevalent today, will risk never truly encountering Jesus, or will end up following a counterfeit Jesus.

Having faith means drawing support from the faith of your brothers and sisters, even as your own faith serves as a support for the faith of others. I ask you, dear friends, to love the Church which brought you to birth in the faith, which helped you to grow in the knowledge of Christ and which led you to discover the beauty of his love.

Homily, Closing Mass of WYD Madrid, August 21, 2011

Reflection - We continue to reflect on Pope Benedict’s words to the WYD pilgrims. In the previous post, taken from the same closing homily, knowing Jesus Christ meant entering a life-long relationship, a communion which draws us into the depths of mystery and love. Now, we see that this same knowledge, this same relationship, and this same mystery of love is one with the mystery of the Church.

We cannot have Christ without his Church. Why not? Because he ordains it so. The head is not separate from the body, the shepherd from the sheep, the king from the kingdom, the bridegroom from his bride, Christ from his Church. To be in relationship with one is to be in relationship with the other, or we are not truly in relationship with the One.
This is difficult, admittedly. Not only is it difficult in our individualistic era, but always. The Church has always been made up of sinful human beings; some of the structures, policies and procedures of the instituational Church are of human origin, not divine, and are fallible, and all of the Church’s leaders are human beings, prone to fall short on many levels great and small.
All of this means that, as Flannery O’Connor put it, the Catholic has to suffer as much from the Church as for the Church. But this too is part of the mystery of Christ and our knowledge of Him. He died for the Church; we suffer from its human failures. And in this we are called to an ever-deeper intimacy with our Beloved.
And the Church itself in all its messy humanity invites us into a permanent overcoming, an ongoing thwarting of our ego, our self-enclosed ways and means and viewpoints. It’s not unlike getting married, or joining a religious community. You make the commitment, and then, there you are, and there is the other person or people. And they’re not going to change, particularly, and you have to deal with that. You have to find a way of living with that man, that woman, those folks. They are a constant and at times very painful reminder to you that you are not God, not in control, not the one calling the shots about life (at times the reminder can be delightful and joyful, too!). But commitment to any vocation places us into that deeply humble position.
And our total commitment to the Church has the same effect. It strips us of any illusion that we are the center of reality, that we are the measure of all things. There is this Thing (as Chesterton called it) that Christ created, that He loves, and that He commands us to love and be in communion with. Our choice to obey his command places us, as nothing else does, in a deep place of humble crying out for grace, for help, for vision, for mercy. And so it is all bound up together – Christ, the Church, our own self – in the mystery of love, pain, and communion, a mystery that has it joyful, sorrowful, and luminous aspects, but which bears us day by day to a glorious consummation in the kingdom of heaven.

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

A Universal Call to Friendship

I would say that these WYDs are a sign, a cascade of light -- they give visibility to the faith, visibility to the presence of God in the world, and thus give the courage to be believers. Often, believers feel isolated in this world, somewhat lost. Here they see that they are not alone, that there is a great network of faith, a great community of believers in the world. [They see that] it is lovely to live in this universal friendship, and in this way friendships are born that cross the borders of cultures, of countries. The birth of a universal network of friendship that unites the world with God is an important reality for the future of humanity, for the life of humanity today… I think WYD should be considered as a sign, as part of a great journey; it creates friendships, opens borders, makes visible that it is beautiful to be with God, that God is with us.

Press Conference on World Youth Day, August 18,2011

Reflection – In this introductory reflection about World Youth Day, given to reporters while travelling to Madrid, it is significant that Pope Benedict focuses on the word ‘friendship’ as a central meaning of the WYD phenomenon.

WYD is about friendship: friendship with other Christians, other believers, friendships across nations and cultures, friendships built up within and among the pilgrim groups as they travel together and experience both the joyful and trying elements of the event: both beautiful liturgies and line ups for Porta-potties, if you will.

Friendship is a really important word, isn't it? I’m sometimes a bit surprised at which posts on this blog attract the most readers. The ones about sex, of course, are quite popular and that’s no surprise, but one that startled me with its popularity was this one on the nature of friendship in Christ. It has out-performed the ‘sex posts’ by a wide margin!

The whole business of friendship seems crucial to our humanity. Now, I have to admit that I tend to be a pretty solitary guy. I am truly content, by and large, to be left alone with my own company and thoughts. This is a helpful trait to have if you’re a writer. But God in his mercy gave me a vocation to live in community, to live with people who are not me, have their own thoughts, ideas, personality quirks and who I am asked to love and be friends with, in the truest sense of that word. So friendship is something I’ve reflected on quite a bit over the years.

Friendship: what does that word mean, anyhow? It’s a word thrown around a lot, debased perhaps (I have over 500 friends on Facebook!!!!! But how many could I pick out of a police line up?). To call someone a friend means, I think, that this person’s welfare matters in my life. My own individuality, my narrow frontier of concern for myself above all, is compromised. I have been expanded in my humanity: no longer is it all about me, no longer is the story of my life a one-man play, no longer am I only seeing through the one narrow lens of self-concern and self-direction.

To have a friend is to have a second self, to have another human being whose thoughts, opinions, reactions, feelings matter to me in some sense. It is a question of being broken out of the prison of the self, and this is the central task of our humanity, the task of love and charity.

WYD, then, is about friendship in a radical, global, universal sense. We all come from some little corner of the planet, whether it’s the Upper Ottawa Valley or New York City. We all are shaped by that little corner, bearing the cultural norms and traditions of our society. WYD, among other things, breaks us out of the limitations inherent in this and calls us to embrace, enjoy, celebrate the diversity and richness of the whole human fabric, and to make that diverse and beautiful fabric our own in whatever way we can. And all of this is wrapped up in this beautiful profound word, friendship.

Saturday, July 30, 2011

What Does it Mean to Be A Person?

Mary is the open vessel of longing, in which life becomes prayer, and prayer becomes life. Saint John wonderfully conveys this process by never mentioning Mary’s name in his Gospel. She no longer has any name except ‘the Mother of Jesus’. It is as if she handed over her personal dimension in order now to be solely at his disposal, and precisely thereby had become a person.

Mary, the Church at the Source, 15-16

Reflection - A number of years ago, I had a personality clash with another member of Madonna House (I know, you’re shocked!). What rubbed me the wrong way was that she never called me by name – at the time, I was the director of our liturgical choir, and she always called me “Maestro” whenever she saw me. This annoyed me. One day I even snapped at her, “I have a name, you know!” She was duly chastised.

I thought I was quite justified at the time (don’t we always…). But now, reading these luminous words from the Pope, I’m not so sure. I want to be called by my name! I am a person! I am an individual! I have rights! R.E.S.P.E.C.T. – find out what it means to me, or feel my wrath.
Mary was a person, an individual with rights, a creature endowed with dignity, worthy of respect. And yet… ‘she handed over her personal dimension in order now to be solely at his disposal’.
We are so sure, we moderns, of what it means to be a person with dignity and respect. It means to be recognized, acknowledged, to be assertive and put across one’s own personal views/dynamism/presence into the world.
For Mary, to be a person was to be an open vessel of longing for God. For Mary, to be a person was to be arms wide open, lifted up in supplication, embracing, taking in God, and hence the whole world, into her embrace. For Mary, to be a person was to be an empty space, an unplanted field, a virginal womb awaiting the fullness of God.
A very different picture of personhood emerges here. We have two models of personhood, really. And they are sharply separate, clearly delineated, truly as far from each other as heaven is from hell. There is the person as self-assertion, self-expansion, aggression—which is truly a demonic idea of personhood. And there is person as open receptivity, humble waiting, responsivity to our Father who made us, the Son who died to save us, the Spirit who descends upon us to make our lives fruitful. The Marian person. And we really do have to choose what kind of person we are becoming, we want to become. And that choice is, simply, heaven or hell.

Friday, July 22, 2011

What a (lot of) friends I have in Jesus!

The question often arises if Christianity has:

an individualistic understanding of salvation, hope for myself alone, which is not true hope since it forgets and overlooks others. Indeed [this is not so]. Our relationship with God is established through communion with Jesus—we cannot achieve it alone or from our own resources alone. The relationship with Jesus, however, is a relationship with the one who gave himself as a ransom for all (cf. 1 Tim 2:6). Being in communion with Jesus Christ draws us into his “being for all”; it makes it our own way of being. He commits us to live for others, but only through communion with him does it become possible truly to be there for others, for the whole.

Spe Salvi 28

Reflection – Have you accepted Jesus as your personal Savior? The question asked by evangelical Christians is one that sometimes makes other Christians either puzzled or put off.

Well, it doesn’t have that effect on me, and not just because I’ve got a few evangelical Christian relatives who are very dear to me (hello, my E.C. relatives who might be reading this! Love ya!). I am a person, Jesus is definitely my savior, so yes, Jesus is my personal savior (what other kind could he be?).

However, we do see in this passage from Spe Salvi that there is something more going on in the Christian religion than just being ‘saved personally by Jesus.’ What a friend I have in Jesus! He walks with me and He talks with me. But it seems like Jesus has a few other friends in the world, a few other people besides me who he at least wants to walk and talk with. One or two or seven billion people He cares about, just a little.

And so my personal relationship with Christ, if it really is with Him, has to spill over into these one or two or seven billion other people. He died for everyone; the very least I can do is pray for everyone. He gave his life for the whole world; I can give whatever measly stuff I have to give for my little corner of the world, and ask him to multiply it, so it can feed everyone else.

If our faith is not like that, not opening us up to loving everyone, being concerned for everyone, wishing every good thing, every good gift from Heaven, upon every last human being on earth, then something has badly gone wrong. We’ve missed Jesus, somehow, in it all. And that’s a hopeless state of affairs.