Remembering Our Beloved Deceased

The Apostolic Christian traditions—Catholic and Orthodox, as well as Anglicans— regularly pray for those who have died. A number of times, I have heard Christians say, “I do not pray for the dead. Their fate has been sealed.” Evangelicals make this claim because they “know” that “the dead” cannot benefit from our prayers. The problem is not with “the dead,” but with Evangelical Christians, who in this case, as in so many others, think that they know what they do not know. Their claims to knowledge show a lack of faith, and a misunderstanding of faith. In fact, Evangelical Christianity is in some decisive respects outside the Christian tradition; it is a version of Gnosticism, in which one is saved by “knowledge.” (As St. Irenaeus wrote c. 200, “Gnostics open God like a book.” These folks claim to “know” that they “are saved,” and that claim hubristically assumes a prerogative that belongs to God alone:  to know with certainty the fate of any human being. We pray for those who have died because we love them, and we gratefully entrust our dear ones to the Creator. We can and should pray with confidence, not because we know the fate of the ones who died (which we do not), but because we trust in God’s goodness and mercy. Our faith is in God, not in our own so-called “faith” or “certainty of being saved.” (Again, such certainty is not Christian, and beyond the human condition. Avoid such spiritual magic.) Christian faith invites us to remember to the LORD all who have died, especially those dear to us, because they are alive in God (in a condition unknown to us); and we may commune with them, express our love, share our thoughts with them, trusting that God knows what is best for us and for them. Simply put, we pray for and commune with those whom we love, whether they are alive on earth or have died; life is only in God. Love is not love if it ceases with death. It may have been use, or shared pleasure, but love does not know death, it does not cease at death, it cannot be overcome by death. On the contrary, love is the power at work in human beings which not only is greater than death, but transforms death into life eternal.  “Love is of God; for God is Love.” To honor our Creator, we lovingly remember to Him those human beings and little ones whom he has given us to love in this life. Our love for one another does not detract from our love for God, nor does God say, “Love me alone, and do not invest love in any creature.” On the contrary, by loving the creature in God, we are loving the Creator all the more, all the more truly, and surely with more affection and gratitude, as we remember our loved ones who have died. In the words of Jesus, “To God, all are alive.” That more that suffices to stir up my confident faith to pray for dear ones who have suffered death. To God, they are alive, and that is what truly matters for one who loves God “above all, and in all, and through all.” LORD God, lover of all creatures, to You we entrust with confidence and gratitude all of our dear ones who have suffered death. Fill them eternally with your love and peace.  Amen.

A Note On Universal Humanity In History

​Dear Jeanie,

Whether or not you fit neatly into your own description as a “Positivist,” I do not know. Here is a question to consider in any case: What constitutes universal humanity in history? That is one of the questions taken up by Voegelin in Volume 4 of Order and History, entitled The Ecumenic Age. It is probably my favorite single volume by Voegelin.
 

Briefly, what has been interpreted as forming “universal humanity” in our “present age” would have to consider: the Enlightenment conception of reason reaching into the French thinker, Comte (founder of “Positive Science”), with its belief that everyone shares in immanent reason. (This conception would be rooted in ancient Greek philosophers, but with a radically different understanding of reason than that explored by Parmenides, Heracleitos, Plato, Aristotle. My sheer guess is that when you studied philosophy as an undergraduate, your studies proceeded under and with an Enlightenment conception of reason, and professors did not clarify, perhaps did not understand, the difference between Platonic-Aristotelian nous (reason, intellect) and the notion of reason presented by thinkers such as Descartes and John Locke, and then in the self-styled “Enlightenment” and in “Positive Science.” This kind of “Enlightenment” reason could explore world-immanent phenomena, such as natural processes and “bodies in motion,” but could not explore the divine-human realm as accessible to this kind of rationalistic “reason.”

A second and also still extant understanding of what constitutes universal humanity in history comes from Hegel, writing in the early 19th century. Grounding himself on experience, and in his case, a clearly Gnostic experience, Hegel clearly has an interest in exploring “universal humanity” in history, and does so as human being grounded in “self-consciousness.” The essence and completion of human being is human self-consciousness, a work of reason, understood as human being coming to know itself as divine. Whereas Locke and the Enlightenment speculatively separated human nature from God, and especially reason from its openness to divine transcendence in any way, Hegel imaginatively collapsed human reason with the divine mind or spirit, the Geist, in “full self-consciousness.” A Positivist, I dare say, would not appreciate the Hegelian turn. Actually, Hegel’s “System of Science,” fallacious as it was, constituted an important step in the recovery of the understanding of reason and of humanity. Hegel returned away from doctrine and dogma into the truth of experience; unfortunately, his grounding experience was not an open, searching spiritual experience, but a Gnostic experience of self-enclosure, even self-divinization. Young Marx and other Hegelians knew well that Hegel had imaginatively “taken the divine back into man,” the action that Hegel himself described as “the Protestant principle” in his ever-enlightening lectures on the history of philosophy. (Luther would not have agreed with Hegel’s “Protestant principle,” but Jacob Boehme would have.)

As I have come to understand modern and contemporary philosophy, Voegelin has done well what Hegel attempted, but was fundamentally derailed by his Gnostic (self-divinized) experience. Voegelin does not operate within the bounds of reason as articulated by Descartes, Locke, the French philosophes, Kant, Comte, Marx, or Nietzsche. Rather, Voegelin returns to the Platonic-Aristotleian understanding of reason as a knowing but limited participation in the divine Nous that orders the Whole, the Kosmos. This Greek philosophical reason (nous, logos) cannot contain or comprehend the divine, but it can explore divine reality as present in the structure of reality, including human being. Like Hegel, Voegelin appreciates the Judaeo-Christian pneumatic revelations as well as the Greek theophanies in reason, something that neither Locke, nor the Enlightenment, nor Comtean Positivism saw as having value for a more valid understanding of universal humanity—of what it means to be human being in history. But Voegelin’s range of empirical knowledge is far vaster than Hegel’s, which was already astounding for the early 19th century. As an example, Voegelin even learned Chinese and studied Chinese classics and the “Chinese ecumene,” which was parallel in time to the western ecumene (Persian, Greek, Roman empires). Voegelin searched for “order in history” in the full amplitude of divine-human experience, or theophanies.

What Voegelin demonstrates is that to understand human being in history, one has to have vast empirical knowledge, as well as solid theoretical grounding. On both of these scores, the Enlightenment and Hegel were too narrow and parochial, in addition to making the theoretical errors hinted at above. In Voegelin, the philosophical enterprise so well advanced by Plato and Aristotle has been renewed and furthered. And Voegelin’s work lacks the dogmatizing tendencies present even in as great a mind as Thomas Aquinas. In my understanding, religious dogmatic conceptions, as well as rationalistic simplifications, had to be renounced, and the seeker for truth about God-in-man had to return from rigid conceptions to the simple and joyful truth of experience.

The question for you is, as noted, “What constitutes universal humanity in history?” Or do you want to do what Marx did in his “Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts” of 1846 (as I recall), and say something such as “Socialist Man [or Positivist human being] does not ask such questions…Don’t think, don’t ask such questions.” That comes from a passage Voegelin analyzed as “logophobia” (fear of reason) in Marx, and sparked an outcry among German Marxist intellectuals when he analyzed Marx as an “intellectual swindler” who forbad human beings to ask basic questions of existence. But the words are there in Marx’s texts, and Marx never pursued such questions as “why is there something, why not nothing?” He refused to think. Do I not remember finding a similar forbidding of questions in Positivism, including Logical Positivism? Yes, the phrase “Scheinprobleme” (merely “seeming problems”) comes to mind, from no less a thinker than Wittgenstein, as I recall. Questions should not be refused or cut off for ideological reasons. Fundamentalists pull that stunt, as you and I both know. But so do Enlightened intellectuals of one stripe or another. They refuse to ask the pressing questions of human existence.

Here is a summary line from Voegelin’s lengthy analysis on humanity in history: "The mankind whose humanity unfolds in the flux of presence is universal mankind. The universality of mankind is constituted by the divine presence in the Metaxy.” (Ecumenic Age, p. 304). The “Metaxy” is one of Voegelin’s significant borrowings from Plato. In the Symposium, especially (but in other dialogues as well), Plato explores human existence as a movement between (Greek, metaxu) the human and the divine, between good and evil, between fullness and emptiness, etc. Love, for example, is a movement between the human and the divine poles of existence; it is neither strictly human nor solely divine, but a mutual participation of the divine and human. Hegel flattens out the Metaxy, the in-between, into “human self-consciousness,” breaking the “tension of existence,” and replacing philosophy as “love of wisdom” with philosophy or Science as “real knowledge.” Voegelin effectively restores the Platonic emphasis on search (zetesis) rather than on knowledge as possession (Greek, gnosis). Not surprisingly, Voegelin finds “the Question,” and especially the recurring existential questions, such as “Why am I alive?” or “Why is there something?” as constitutive of humankind in history, and not particular answers. If I may say so, Positive or Secular Science and Hegelianism have definite answers, or dismiss the questions, as noted, and in this sense, they are no better than religious fundamentalists who lock God up into a book. Philosophy seeks and asks the fundamental questions of existence. Surely you read enough Plato and Aristotle to have seen those two great minds engaged in “the search for truth,” without claiming to have “built a system” or arrived at any final understanding. Insights are gained, of course, but they lead to more searching, not to a closing off to reality. And you probably know that second-rate minds later tried to provide “answers” and “definitions” based on Plato and Aristotle, and even developed a so called “metaphysics” out of Greek explorations of reality. Remember the Roman conception, summarizing the Greek, as human being as the “rational animal”? The insight was alive for Aristotle in his explorations of the nous; it was not a mere definition to be bandied about by “thinkers.”

For many good reasons, the Enlightenment, Positive Science, and Hegel criticized “doctrinaire thinking,” and “metaphysics,” etc (attacks already visible in Descartes, of course). But the proverbial baby was thrown out with the bathwater, and a new kind of doctrinaire thinking (or refusal to ask the big questions) was passed off as intellectually justifiable. In truth, there is no substitute for the open-ended search for truth. The answer to all ideologies—Christian, Muslim, Positivist, Hegelian, Marxian, Liberal, etc—must come from genuine philosophical inquiry. It is this inquiry, at once empirically well grounded and rooted in the truth of personal experience, that keeps drawing me back to studying Plato, Aristotle, Voegelin, and to any mind that is philosophical in the sense of engaging in an open-ended search for the truth of reality in its full range of being.

These thoughts are sketchy, perhaps a little heavy. But I share the thoughts with someone who probably disagrees, but who may perhaps understand them. In my own search for truth, I read in order to converse with great minds who have advanced the exploration of reality, and especially of what it means to be a human being.

Living Now

Everywhere we look, nature is telling us that our year is ending: that summer is past, winter coming, and the golden days of autumn are leaves blowing away. Such a colorful and delightful end to the hot extravagances of summer, and the overrich excesses of early fall. Those days are past. We have gathered wood, and are lighting fires to dispel the chill air. Soon we hear readings from the Bible about the end of the age, and coming days of gloom and glory. Some of the less balanced folks around us talk about the “end of the world,” either by “total corruption,” by a “total collapse of the system,” or by supposedly man-made “climate change” that threatens to “make the whole planet uninhabitable,” as a man running for President recently announced. Despite the bizarre apocalyptic dreams of windy minds and flapping tongues, it is true that everything existing changes, and that the unknown God is moving reality to some unimaginable condition beyond what comes into being and passes away.  

Despite and fears and imaginings, however, some present questions need to be asked. One question that should be pressing for each of us is this: How should I live my life now? A former student of mine posed a particular form of this good question to me last week, a question which we might all consider: Suppose you had two months to live, two months before you died. How would you live? What would you do?” I told him, “I will think about that,” and he said, “No, live now as if you had only two months to live.” Taking his challenge, I immediately began acting as though I had only two months to live, and I quickly realized that some of my activities make no sense on the edge of death, whereas other activities do. Why should I bother planning for my future, or go through an operation and its demanding recovery, or get my car repaired, or chat with people casually, or preach what I do, if I have so little time to live? What would I let go of quickly, and what would I do, if I had two months to live? What would you do, if you lived on such “borrowed time,” on a two-month lease of life? What would you let go, as a no longer needed part of your life? Whom or what would you seek out?

As a sample, I share of few thoughts that occur to me—although by no means am I done thinking about my two-month sentence. Most urgently, I would get a will drawn up, and I would make special and detailed arrangements for someone to take devoted care of Moses, someone who would love him as he deserves. I would visit my sister and her husband in San Diego, and my brother and his wife in Utah. What could I possibly say to you, the parishioners?  “Prepare to meet your God!” And I would spend much time preparing myself to meet God. To this end, I would spend time in solitude and quiet contemplation. And I would hope to be able to walk along the ocean, gazing silently out to sea, knowing that I am going out with the ebbing tide.

By Faith, Not By Beliefs (Part I)

As I understood a recent visitor say, there is a strong desire among younger Catholics in America now to attempt something like a return to the Church of the 1950’s, including a highly doctrinal conception of the faith; including a return to a more cultic style of liturgy that is more markedly removed from everyday American life; including a return to Latin in prayer and song; and even including a return to an older style of church architecture in which the altar is raised above the level of those attending Mass. Although we did not discuss the matter, perhaps my visitor also had in mind the kind of vestments one finds favored and worn by several young priests in our diocese. And one could multiply such particulars, but they do not change the overall problem.

I do wish and intend to address some of these particular matters, but I think that they are largely irrelevant, frankly. The image that comes to mind is that a building is on fire, and someone is worried about refurnishing it and redecorating it, rather than helping human beings escape from the fire to safety. That our culture is seriously flawed, that many human beings are suffering badly from the effects of major social problems, that life in the Christian churches is often mediocre at best should be obvious to anyone of sense. As I see it, to concern oneself with Latin in the liturgy, or with the direction the priest faces, or with the kind of music, or with vestments, or with proper liturgical diction (such as the highly stilted, cultic English in the poorly done new Sacramentary)—such concerns are frankly largely irrelevant. Even if a small number of traditionalistic Catholics want a return to earlier theological, doctrinal, and liturgical ways, from years of pastoral experience I can say that such people are a very small minority of practicing Catholics. Furthermore, based on what I have observed in my own diocese, the few young priests who have sought to impose such antiquated, Romanticized, and surely doctrinally and liturgically rigid norms upon actual Catholics have driven more people away from the Church, and surely have caused much division and needless squabbles over relatively unimportant matters.

We are all dying. It appears that our culture is dying, the country that we have known for decades is dying, the churches (Catholic and other) appear to be very sick or dying, and of course each of us individually is dying. Given the reality of our spiritual and cultural health (or lack of it), what possible good can arise from attempting to return to now fairly long-gone ways of worship, of faith and belief, of life? The attempt truly to help human beings by the kind of “reform” that these traditionalists seek seems to me at least as foolish and as tin-eared as the attempts of some clergy fifty years ago to “accommodate” to the “modern world,” and to adapt its ways. Granted the Catholic Church and Christianity in general are in serious trouble, the kind of quasi-Tridentine revival that I am seeing attempted seems to me inordinately foolish and unlikely to produce anything like the good results expected. It may or may not appear to be “beautiful,” but in truth it is more of a museum-piece than a return to the truth of God experienced through faith.

                                                 A different approach
Rather than respond to each concrete proposal of the would-be Tridentine or at least “pre-Vatican II” clergy and lay people, I wish to examine the real problems in the spiritual lives of real human beings in our society, as I have seen them from years of pastoral and teaching experience. I really have no wish to enter into any discussion on liturgical vestments or cultic language, because such matters “do not tend to edify” (borrowing a phrase from the Buddha), and even derail a genuine search for what really does matter. Again, I refer to the image of persons quibbling about redecorating a building that is burning down right now, with human beings dying in the flames.    

As I see it, Christianity as it emerged over the centuries, as it existed in various cultures, as it benefited or hurt millions of human beings, is either dying or at least undergoing major changes requiring leaders and thinkers who can deal with present reality, and not dream of imagined pasts. What is at stake is not Christian dogma or doctrines, or styles of liturgy or music, but how to live well, to live happily, and attain peace with God and with one’s fellow human beings. For my part, I have no interest in protecting or shoring up old and fixed dogmas, doctrines, creeds, styles of worship, hierarchies, institutions. I surely have no interest in preserving the “hierarchy” as it has emerged historically. My focus is on seeking to help concrete human beings experience the reality of God, and respond to the presence of God with self-giving love. That is what matters, and not plastic, artificial, even naive notions about “holiness.” One must ask himself or herself: “Do I truly wish to be holy, to be alive in God, or do I want to appear `holy’ to others, and so to flatter my own ego in the process?” From what I have seen of the traditionalistic clergy, they have a strong desire or need to appear “holy,” and far less interest in seeking God and helping others to seek the true and living God. They want their religious deeds to be seen before men.

A large part of the problem for human beings in the various churches is Christianity itself. Many of its doctrines are misleading to contemporary minds; more importantly, the entire emphasis on doctrine rather than on lived spiritual experience is a betrayal of the truth and goodness of God. Faith is not a belief in creeds, doctrines, Scripture, or clergy; faith is a simple, childlike, and intensely personal and loving surrender to the presence of God breaking into one’s consciousness. Faith opens up to God, not to sets of beliefs and liturgical practices. Indeed, real faith frees one from attachments to all externals. By focusing far too much on non-essentials, the Christian churches have, for centuries, in effect betrayed, mislead, and surely malnourished millions of human beings. Some good has come across to people despite the petty preoccupations of clergy. Fortunately, God has been able to work on human beings outside the structures and strictures of the historically decaying Christian churches. Whether through the beauty of nature, the truth of love, the expansion of the human mind through genuine learning and science, or nourishment through the arts, God has played a role even in the lives of practicing Christians—despite the failures of “religion.”  

What does a minister of Christ owe the human beings to whom he or she has been “sent” to minister? The role of the minister is not to preserve an institution, nor to destroy it; the minister’s task is not primarily to “teach doctrine” or “celebrate the Sacraments worthily,” or “bring about social change.” The minister’s task is utterly simple, and can be well expressed through the words of the Apostle Paul, who know much about ministering: “My little children, with whom I am in labor, until Christ be formed in you.” Such is the ministerial task. If one truly trusts in the presence of God, one does not attempt to tell the other persons the only ways in which God can be found or experienced. God works on and in each human being according to what works in and for that person: “Whatever is received, is received according to the manner of the one receiving,” borrowing St. Thomas’ apt phrase. No doubt there are some human beings who need or at least want strict conformity to externals to think that they are “close to God,” or “holy.” These men, women, children are also “the little ones” to whom one must minister, but they are not the most mature or healthy souls. Out of fear and mistaken understandings of genuine spiritual life, these “traditionalists” cling to externals and to what is not essentially God. They need to be helped to grow up, but it is a serious mistake to allow spiritual immaturity, and even a kind of religious neurosis, to rule in the churches, and dictate what and how others worship. Often it is the more immature human beings who seek to “change the liturgy,”rather than do the hard work of allowing God to be present to them.

From my experience, and knowledge gained by questioning actual adults, I know of very few human beings who want to return to “pre-Vatican II” ways of thought and worship. For many of our older people, even to suggest a return to the past is in effect pointing them back to what they now think was largely a prison which they had to suffer through, and surely not something to which they in any way wish to return. The clear majority of Catholics with whom I have spoken have expressed with pain and anger their disgust at the pre-Vatican II church, and the way it treated human beings, making them feel imprisoned in excessive human rules and mindless practices. Many regular Catholics now, for example, refuse to go to confession, or abstain from eating meat on certain days, because for years they felt forced to obey and do such things under the threat of damnation. For many of our older Catholics, a return to the past is a return to a vengeful, punitive, childish deity; they have tasted the sweetness of the God of love, and of “Christian liberty,” or “the Holy Spirit,” and now even the attempt to impose rigidities from the past disturbs them. When I have asked parishioners about returning to the older style of worship, for example, they look me in the face and shake their heads no, not even wanting to consider the option. Why not? When they speak, their words are simple, and often tinged with pain: “I was made to fear that God would punish me if I did not obey the priest, or sister, and keep all of the knit-picking rules.” And they will add, “I never understood what we were doing, or why. Now I feel a part of the service, part of the church, and I understand, and I appreciate it.”  

What the Christian churches need is not a Romantic and futile attempt to return to the past, but a more genuine openness of spirit to the Spirit, a rediscovery and practice of the ongoing search for the God who is searching for us. They need—or rather, we all need—an appreciate exposure to other ways of worship, to various insights into God, or into divine peace, and not to be forced into a sectarian, cultic box. Our parishioners need truly to seek God, to question, and to discover the joy of using their God-given, God-inspired minds. They need and deserve far more than can ever be gained by “following an antique drum.” Ministers need to discover and practice various forms of prayer to ground themselves in God, and then to share the fruit of their response with those to whom they minister. Many priests, for example, are so busy tending multiple parishes, or engaged in “works of justice,” that they neglect quiet prayer. Without a return to genuinely contemplative prayer—of one type or another—there will be no real spiritual or healthy revival in the lives of Christians. External worship not supported by the minister’s study, meditation, and contemplation is actually empty and stultifying, regardless of what vestments the minister may be wearing, or in what language he or she publicly prays. Only by a renewed and ongoing grounding in God, through contemplation and faith working through love, can the fire of divine love leap from one soul to another. Only the utterly free Spirit can truly bring about union with God and one’s fellow human beings. 

By Faith, Not By Beliefs (Part II)

​It is likely that traditionalistic Catholics, who desire a return to the Latin Mass and to ways before the Second Vatican Council mean well. These people seem to have a zeal for “God,” or for “holiness,” but the zeal does seem largely unenlightened. It is misguided. In the preceding memo on this subject I used the image of desiring to redecorate or refurnish a building that is burning down. That seems apt, but we will explore a little more.

Faith transcends beliefs, even mythical beliefs. God transcends the God or gods or beliefs, doctrines, ceremonies. Catholic traditionalists seem to want a cultic, ritualistic God, and they want a God who can be defined, or at least presented, in unchanging, fixed dogmas and doctrines. Traditionalists want to “worship” their imagined God and to the extent possible to live in a cocoon that protects their minds and hearts from contacting reality. Finding the world, the country, the society, the church as they are now unacceptable to them, they desire to change the church into a cocoon of their own making, to protect themselves from unpleasant and ever-changing reality. They do not want or tolerate change. They seek not only to stop history, to stop change, but even to reverse time and return to an imagined time of unthreatening safety, in which they can feel isolated from corruption and “worldliness.” The traditionalistic Catholic seeks to escape from reality into an imagined Utopian dream, a kind of liturgical nirvana. By praying in Latin, their minds are left free not to be confronted by the word, and they can imagine that they are rooted in the Catholic past. (Or they are free to pray the rosary during “Father’s Mass,” as so many did in the not-so-distant past.) These traditionalists do not know, do not understand, that the roots of Catholicism were not Latin, nor primarily liturgical ceremonies, nor doctrines, but concrete experiences of reality.  

It is not the truth of reality, nor the truth of the God beyond human imaginings, that traditionalists are seeking. They seek the comfortable and pinned-down deity of doctrine and ritualistic formality. They believe that the dogmas and doctrines are “objective,” and show little awareness that the truth in the Catholic teaching arose from the truth of genuine spiritual experiences by men and women open to reality and to the unknown God, not entrapped in the doctrinal formulations of the past. Stephen, the first Christian martyr after Jesus, was stoned to death for saying, according to the evangelist Luke, “God does not dwell in buildings made of stone but in hearts of human flesh.” Those who could not tolerate such a rejection of the fixed, familiar, old, and safe ways chose to silence Stephen by death. It is ironic and unfortunate that these present-day successors to the Jerusalem Temple cult of the first century want more “traditional worship,” and are also divorcing themselves from the nourishing truth of experience. As with the Temple cultists who rejected Jesus and stoned Stephen, these traditionalists do not want contact with the living God unless it comes in a way and measure acceptable, predictable, and controllable. In reality, their faith is insufficiently weak for the adventure of faith. They cling to beliefs rather than risk themselves by faith. Rather than swim in the ocean, they seek to build sand castles on the seashore: sandcastles with high neo-Gothic altars attended by plasticized priests wearing pretty and expensive vestments. And of course gold vessels on the high altar.

                                                              ***
The truth of reality lies not in doctrines, formulations, or rituals, but in real experiences by real human beings living in the present under and in the Divine. All doctrinal formulations, all rituals, are secondary at best. Reality lies open to spirits that are open, and God presents himself to those living in the present, here and now, demanding nothing, not seeking to change anything, receiving what the God has to offer here and now.  

That our world, our country, our society, our church, and we ourselves display real problems is evident to anyone with eyes to see. The solution is not in escapism of one type or another, not in political or liturgical tampering, not in “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” to borrow a popular cliche. What is needed in the Catholic church, in the Christian churches, is not a withdrawal into an imagined past nor into credalism, but a Spirit-guided movement into greater contact with God and with reality. The churches of self-professed disciples of Jesus Christ need to be open to the full range of truth as it has been manifested in history. How can a community call itself “universal” if it is not genuinely open to all truth? The churches need members who live in accord with the Nous of Plato, with the dhamma of the Buddha, with the Tao of Lao Tsu, with knowledge gained through natural sciences, with the whole range of truth as it has become known in history.  The churches need to be opened up, not closed off; they need to be attuned to a far richer world than they have yet known. And this openness is not achieved by changing doctrines or rituals, but through charity, study, and contemplative prayer.

                                                              ***
When a storm blows, little men scurry about, seeking the hut they had found in the ravine when they were children, or when their grandparents were children. “My goodness,” they cry, “so much wind, so much dust, who can endure it?” Storms come, winds blow, leaves fall, rain pours down, and the earth is prepared for growth tomorrow. By faith one ventures forth, not knowing where one will end up, or how bloodied one may become in the process, but trusting that “all will be well.” By a lack of faith, by the artifice of mere opinions and beliefs, fearful people shrink back.

“Christ emptied himself.” So must we empty ourselves of ego to become real human beings. So must the churches empty themselves of dreams, static conceptions, addictions, romanticized visions of the past, or we will become empty of humanity, empty of anyone actually attending.

Contemplation, AA, and Zazen

 The decisive issue is not how you become holy or truly good, but that you become good. The issue is not how you acquire peace within, but to gain peace so that your soul becomes a still lake. Our Catholic tradition is highly rich and diverse in ways to attain holiness and peace. Some of the popularized teachings of Catholicism detract from the true path, however, by focusing attention on non-essential matters that “do not tend to edify,” that do not help one truly to grow in God-union. Some things have the show of holiness, without the reality. All too often, religious peoples have been taught to concern themselves with non-essentials, believing that in mere external matters one finds holiness. Using popular but misleading language, “You must build the Kingdom within.” (In cleaner language, the Kingdom is not to be built anywhere; the “Kingdom of God” means God ruling over human hearts and minds. The point: Let God rule within you, and live out His rule of love faithfully). 

To let God rule within, one must develop spiritual practices usually known as prayer, meditation, contemplation. Prayer that edifies is not an attempt to wring what one wants from God, but an attunement of one’s heart and mind to God’s will and mind. Ways of Catholic meditation and contemplation are abundantly available for those who seek; not that many, unfortunately, bother to seek. To aid one who longs to grow in inner peace without doctrinal quibbles, I recommend three ways. You may combine two or all three of these ways, but you yourself must make the effort. Growth in holiness, of Christ-within, or inner peace, is not automatic; and to those to whom it seems to come naturally, they often make poor progress. Being outwardly religious is insufficient to become a man or woman of God, in God.
  
Christian contemplation has no finer embodiment than what one finds in the classic work, the Cloud of Unknowing. To have effect, one must study this text and put it faithfully into practice; no one can do it for you. Two other ways to attain inner peace are more common in our culture today, and are readily available to the seeker. One way is a 12-step program, such as AA, with the emphasis on full submission to God’s will. The other readily accessible way has been offered to us through the transplantation of Zen Buddhism from Japan into America during the last eighty years or so. Decisive for Zen is not religious or philosophical speculation or doctrines, but the faithful practice of Zazen: sitting still in silence.   

Beginning in two weeks, we will offer an introduction to 12-step (AA) spirituality. Perhaps later I give instruction on the Cloud of Unknowing or on Zazen. Ultimately, these ways are not matters of teaching and of learning, but of faithful practice.