The following letter is part of a dialogue with a young Catholic father who
is strongly concerned with the lack of spiritual nourishment in the Church
today.
20 June 2018
Dear friend in Christ,
As I wrote in my last memo to parishioners, one’s
“spiritual life,” or mental-spiritual development, depends on the efforts a
human being makes as trusting in the presence and creative power of God. It
does not depend on attending Mass or on the Sacraments, in and of themselves.
What the churches offer may invite those present to “participate worthily,” that
is, to be attentive and eagerly desire God, and lovingly surrender to the
ever-present One, putting His “will” into practice. Put concretely: what
happens or does not happen in the mind / “heart” of the participant is what
matters in religious services, and not what happens in space-time (externally).
What matters is utterly simple: either one is turning towards God, or away from
God. All life is either conversion or diversion, epistrophe or
apostrophe, using the technical terms developed by the Stoics. As St.
Augustine lamented in his Confessions: “Behold, You were within, but I was
without….” External worship encourages one to linger “without,” rather than to
be present within—present to and with the Presence that we by long tradition
call “God.”
The serious problem with Christianity, far beyond
clerical abuses of various kinds, is clerical neglect: the failure to help
nourish parishioners with healthy, wholesome intellectual-spiritual formation
and guidance. One way to put this is simple: Consider your own life, and
imagine what your spiritual life would be without the efforts you made to study
philosophy (and perhaps theology). I consider my own example, known from
within: My family attended religious services weekly as I was growing up, but I
am not aware of having received much spiritual or intellectual nourishment
through them. The same is true today: other than some “consolation” people may
get from attending religious services (and that consolation is of limited
value), the benefits that I have seen have come to those men and women who took
their own spiritual life seriously, who made a deliberate and conscious effort
to study, pray, turn from evil, and do good; very little benefit accrues to
those who passively attend any kind of service, whether evangelical, Catholic,
Orthodox, and so on.
The real problem facing human beings is how to become
truly awake and alive in one’s lifetime. Meditation and study, linked with
personal discipline, as in the Christian and Buddhist traditions, does far more
good than fairly mindless, passive sharing in any religious ceremonies. The
example, goodness, love from men and women who happen to be Christian of one
sort or another has been highly helpful to me, but such goodness is not directly
linked to attending services, or “reading the bible,” as in evangelical
traditions. Furthermore, much of the good that can be offered to persons in
religious services is lost on social programs and the “social gospel,” which is
indeed “no gospel at all.” Clergy have often neglected to assist in the
spiritual formation of their people, probably in large part because “one cannot
give what one does not have.” From what I hear from parishioners who attend
Masses elsewhere when they travel or are away from home, they find little
intellectual-spiritual meat in the preaching / teaching, but rather see emphases
on outward forms of worship, entertaining music, social action programs, and the
like. In the case of Catholic clergy, many do not even struggle to prepare
homilies, but download canned “homilies” off the internet, or take them from
“homily helps.” Unless the priest or minister is speaking “from faith to faith”
(Romans 1), he or she is not “preaching Christ,” and helping to form the hear,
but just amusing, entertaining, perhaps chastising. The word that forms the
hearer must grow out of a spirit alive in the now to the presence of God.
Otherwise, it is not the “word of God,” but mere human words of more or less
mindless chatter. If and only if the one preaching is immediately present to
divine Presence is one in truth a “minister of the Word.” In the words of the
Apostle, “the written text kills, but the Spirit gives life.”
Had I not studied philosophy and sought to practice
meditation as a Benedictine monk, and not been blessed to have some truly good
examples of right living and practical wisdom in my life, I think that I would
have received very little spiritual-intellectual nourishment as a Catholic
Christian. What do the churches have to offer to human beings? One often must
seek God, loving and doing the truth, despite what is being done in and by the
churches. Neither the educational establishments in our society, nor the
religious institutions, are now offering human beings much that is truly
beneficial. Or to put the matter differently: unless one struggles to learn,
and works hard to grow morally, intellectually, and spiritually, one will be
unformed, deformed, malnourished. Our schools, universities, churches have
largely been failing to do what they ought to do, and generally pretend to do,
at considerable expense.
In Christ,
Paul
