The Spiritual Life
(for the Notre Dame Undergraduate Theological Symposium,
31 March, 2008)
This is a reading from the Katha Upanishad, from the sacred writings of India:
The Self-Existent Lord pierced the senses,
And therefore we see outer things and not the inner Self.
Rare discriminating people who desire immortality
Turn their eyes away and see the indwelling Self.
The Sanskrit words used there are very interesting: the word which is translated here as pierced "vyatrnat" actually means more like destroyed or killed or at least injured: the Self-Existent One (that is, God) destroyed or killed or at least injured the senses; and so we look outside of ourselves and do not see what? The antar-atmanthe inner atman, what St Paul or St Peter might refer to as our spirit or the inner person: St Paul (Col 3:3) you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God; St Peter (1 Pt 3:4), let your adornment be the inner self with the lasting beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit.
I do a lot of study and work in comparative religion, and I must confess that sometimes I myself think that I see too many parallels in things. But listen to this reading from Romans (8:8-11)
Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.
But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit,
since the Spirit of God dwells in you.
if Christ is in you,
though the body is dead because of sin,
the Spirit is life because of righteousness.
If the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you,
[the one] who raised Jesus from the dead
will give life to your mortal bodies also
through his Spirit that dwells in you.
and compare that with what the Upanishad taught: our senses are made to look outward, the Upanishad says. We live so much outside of ourselves, drawn out by what attracts us. I heard a teacher describe it this way: he said our eyes, for example, are always eating the world, attaching, craving, drawing things into ourselves. I think this is the meaning of 1 John 2:15-17 when he speaks us all that is in the world --the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches The eyes here are just a metaphor for the rest of the senses. There is obviously something just fine about that: thats what the senses are for, to allow us to interact with the outer world, but only up to a point.
Recall the famous section of St Augustines Confessions when he says to God:
You were within me, but I was outside,
and it was there that I searched for you
On entering into myself I saw,
as it were with the eye of the soul,
what was beyond the eye of the soul, beyond my spirit:
your immutable light.
God pierced our senses to look outward, and so we look outward, as Augustine would say, into the lovely things that [God] created. At some point, every now and again, some rare discriminating people suddenly get the grace of an intuition to look within. And what could they possibly find within themselves? The Upanishads call it atmanthe Self. What might we followers of Jesus see if we were to look within? St Paul answers that question best of all in Romans 5, a scripture passage that actually gets used on Pentecost: The love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Spirit living in us. What we might see if we look within is the love of God; what we might see if we look within is the Holy Spirit who has been poured into our hearts, at the very center of our being, as the very center of our being.
Jesus himself refers to this Spirit, whom he was to send, in John 7:37-39another reading used for Pentecost, by the waywhen he stands up at the great festival and proclaims:
Let anyone who is thirsty come to me,
And let the one who believes in me drink.
Out of the believers heart shall flow rivers of living water.
And, in case we didnt understand it, John adds, as if in parentheses: he was talking about the Holy Spirit. Even God is not just out there: God, the Holy Spirit, shall flow from out of my heart, by that Spirit living in me.
God made the senses to look outward, and so we look outward all the time and fail to see our inner self, our real self that is hidden with Christ in God, that deepest part of our being where we are in some way already in union with God, if for no other reason than by the grace of our Baptism and the sacramental life of the Church through which, as from the pierced side of Jesus on the cross, the love of God is poured into our hearts, into the deepest part of our being.
That is who we are!
What we find out along the way when we study theology is that for the most part all of our theological questions, including our questions about liturgy and especially our questions about spirituality and the spiritual life, are at the same time usually also anthropological questions. We are not just asking who and what God is; what we are asking is Who am I? And how do those two things go together?
Who is God? Who am I? And how do those two things go together?
This is who you are: the love of God has been poured into your heart, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of the Risen Christ. This is who you are: a tabernacle, a fount of life giving water, a vessel of Divine Love, a temple.
Now, back to that reading from St Paul, and hear it again for the first time:
you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit,
not because of anything you have done or earned but simply because
the Spirit of God dwells in you.
And if Christ is in you
If the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you,
Then the one who raised Jesus from the dead
will give life to your mortal bodies also
through his Spirit that dwells in you.
Thats why we look within, because this is who we are, someone in whom the Spirit of God dwells.
So the spiritual life begins herefor a moment withdrawing our senses from outside and taking a long loving gaze within. As the Upanishad said, at least those who seek immortality will do so, and when they do they behold the deathless Self, who we have come to find out is none other than the Spirit of God, the Spirit of the Risen Jesus poured into our hearts.
Now let me take a step backwards, because from my perspective we often run into a real problem in our discussion about the spiritual life.
It is especially a propos, and for me delightful, to speak of all this during the Easter season, when chrism is still glistening on foreheads, because Easter focuses so much on the resurrection of Jesus body and, as I understand it, even though we are in the Spirit, Christian spirituality is still also all about the body. And in some way it is discovering the bridge between the body and spirit that the spiritual life is all about.
Unfortunately what often finds its way immediately into Christian anthropology is just the opposite notion. For example, the late great Jesuit Jacques Dupuis says we need only to bear in mind and contrast the Greek belief in the immortality of the soul and the Christian faith in the resurrection of bodies.[1] (A not unimportant side note: what I am about to bring upchallenging Greek philosophyis a bit of a hot button topic right now, especially since our present Pope is such a defender of the marriage of the Hebrew revelation with Greek philosophy even from the earliest days of Judaism. So I am leaning here on real scholars, not on the mere opinion of a wandering, guitar-playing monk, to present this other side of the argument, and point out, for all it has benefited us, some of the deficiencies that we may have also inherited from Greek philosophy.) According to the Greeks, life is destined to death, since the body (soma) is a tomb (sema); so salvation can only consist in being freed of the body through some kind of evasion. Tomas Spidlik (in his book The Spirituality of the Christian East) gives a list of the most famous invectives, starting with the Fathers, of the church riffing on this theme.
And so, says Clement of Alexandria, we must free the soul from the fetters of the flesh or, as Gregory Nazianzen writes, from its bond (desmos) with a corpse, because the body is like mirewhere the soul can only befoul and defile itself.
Gregory of Nyssa says that the body is a stranger to the soul and an ugly mask, so we should free ourself from the body and lay down this burden,
or, as St Basil wrote, we should take care of the soul and never mind about the rest.
The monks are just as bad if not worse.
Palladius, the great monastic chronicler, records the saying of Macarius the Great that we should despise, mistreat, and kill the body: It kills me I kill it;
Antony the Great likewise says of the body, It flays me I flay it.
And John Climacus says that the body is an ungrateful and insidious friend of whom we should be suspicious.[2]
The problem is, that couldnt possibly be the final word on the articulation of Christianity, because part of the scandal of Christianity is first of all that the Divine Word could have become flesh at all. Its helpful to recall exactly what this Greek philosophical concept logoswordhad come to mean to Jesus contemporaries. For example, for Philo (who was a Hellenized Jewish philosopher who lived from 20 BC to 50 AD) the logos was both the creative principle and divine wisdom, but he, like all the ancient Greeks always felt it was necessary to maintain the distinction between the perfect idea and imperfect matter. And thats why the logos was necessary, he taught, because God cannot come into contact with matter. This is exactly what Christianity turns on its ear in claiming, as in the Prologue to Johns Gospel, that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. God has come into contact with matter! Worse yet, God has become matter. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. God becomes a baby with dirty diapers. So the flesh could not be bad or the Word would not have taken it.
Now think again about these marvelous events in Jesus own life: the Transfiguration, when Jesus divinity is revealed in his very flesh; the Resurrection and, further on, the Ascension. Having been raised in the theological environment of the historical critical method and liberal exegesis, I had gotten pretty comfortable with accepting the notion that the story of the actual rising from the dead was possibly just a pious myth that was trying to convey a deeper truth. But at some point I came to realize that if we lose the empty tomb, if we de-mythologize the actual risen body of Jesus away, we lose the fact that this is all about the body, Jesus body and the flesh in general. The body was not annihilated by the death experience, the story tells us; even the body was saved in some marvelous mysterious way. When we lose that empty tomb we are not actually making more sense out of the story; we may in fact be in danger of over-spiritualizing it, no doubt the very opposite of the effect intended. The same applies to the Ascension, when Jesus body and soul goes to the right hand of the Father.[i]
What we are also in danger of forgetting is that these events are also all about the triumph of the flesh, not just Jesus flesh: that triumph for one human being was a triumph for all humanity, so the triumph of that one body was a triumph for all flesh.[ii] It starts with the fact that Jesus doesnt just preachhe heals bodies. Peoples bodies are important! But look again at each of these events in Jesus life and see how they are also all about us.
If the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you,
[then the one] who raised Jesus from the dead
will give life to your mortal bodies also
through his Spirit that dwells in you.
And, I might add, Paul teaches us in the letter to the Romans, all creation is groaning and in agony while we work this out, this redemption of our bodies (Rom 8:22-23).
But most of all, lets look at Pentecost: because thats when we celebrate who we are: that the love of God does not just rest on our heads like tongues of flame; the love of God is poured into our hearts, the love of God that makes all of these other things happen in us. This is who we are, and the realization of that and its implications is what the spiritual life is all about.
How does this apply to our discussion of the spiritual life in this day and age? We need and are looking for and slowly finding a new vocabulary to articulate it. I lean often on the teachings of Fr Bede Griffiths who was very cautious in how he worded his critique of tradition. He simply said that perhaps, given all that we have just re-articulated about the bodys place in the Christian economy of salvation, for instance, the idea of mortification of the flesh derived from the Fathers of the Desert and their tendency toward extreme asceticism had past its usefulness. (He also thought that the asceticism such as that found in Thomas à Kempis Imitation of Christ, was also not a good model for today because it is so limited and so negative.) Their aim was to conquer the flesh by watching, fasting and bodily mortifications, and they probably found these disciplines necessary but it had a very bad effect on the Christian tradition of asceticism. The result is that many people reject asceticism altogether.[4] On the other hand, what we have grown to understand is that what we are trying to do is rather learn to appreciate the body and the world, and [learn] to integrate [our bodies and the world] into our Christian lives.[5] What we are coming to understand that asceticism and the spiritual life in general are all about re-establishing right relationship. Why? Because out of the best of the early Christian tradition we also get this famous adage from Tertullian: because caro salutis est cardothe flesh is the instrument of salvation.[iii] (There is an Indian equivalent of that in the writings of Sri Aruobindo: sariram khalu dharma sadhanathe body is the means to fulfill the dharma.)
So now, with that as introduction, I want to give you a practical approach to the spiritual life, because we find out along the way spirituality is ultimately a practical science. Along with being practical, and this language I am also borrowing from others, I want to propose to you an integral approach to spirituality. My vocabulary for this for the most part comes directly from Fr Bede again, who taught consistently that instead of thinking of the human person as merely body and soul as we normally do in the Christian West, we think of the human person as spirit, soul and body. What biblical revelation adds to our understanding of the human person is that beyond, behind, and before body and soul we are spirit, that is our openness to the Divine, our supernatural existential, our possibility for self-transcendence, the high point of our soul that in some way is already the place of union with the divine, where the love of God, the Holy Spirit has been poured into the depth of our being. And further, Fr Bede would also teach, and this has been the practical basis for my own spirituality for years now, we need to learn to incorporate all three of those levels of our being at all times, establish right relationship between them.
I think that the best way that I can present this to you now is in a series of bullet points. First of all the body:
Now, lets deal with the soul:
So we have talked about two aspects of our being: our body and our soul. But both the body and the soul must sacrifice their autonomy to a deeper reality.
And so, brothers and sisters, I could not speak to you as spiritual people (pneumatikos), but rather as people of the flesh (sarkikos), as infants in Christ.
But just earlier 1 Corinthians 2 (vss.14-15) he had also said,
Those who are unspiritual (psykikos) do not receive the gifts of Gods Spirit Those who are spiritual (pneumatikos) discern all things, and they are themselves subject to no one elses scrutiny.
If the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you,
[then the one] who raised Jesus from the dead
will give life to your mortal bodies also
through his Spirit that dwells in you.
Last thingslet me be even more practical since, as I said, spirituality is a practical science. In the words of Fr Bede Griffiths regarding the body, soul, and spirit: we have to integrate these three levels of reality that exist at every moment.[7] I like to use a simple graph, if you can imagine it a circle cut into four quadrants (the fourth element will make sense in a moment) with which I can chart practically how I live my life:
· My dear old friend the infamous Michael Baxter wrote somewhere that he thought of the two poles of Christian life as the Catholic Worker and the Trappists. I like that but I like to add that while we have a venerable tradition of distinguishing between the active and the contemplative life, it is in actuality a false dilemma. In between those two poles are myriad relationships. We breathe in, we breathe out. We breathe in the love of God; we breathe out the love of God. Many ministers in the church get pretty good at breathing out; my role tonight is to point out that we also need to learn to breathe in if our spirituality, as well as our relationships, are to have depth and health and endurance.
· Sometimes we have a real and profound spiritual experience and we think that sums up everything, and we neglect the other parts of our personhood. But even St Francis apologized to his body at the end of his tragically short life. Lets learn from our ancestors and find ways incorporate and nurture all these aspects of our beingour bodies, our soul with their minds and imaginations and intuitions; our spirits, that deepest aspect of our being where God blows the breath of life into us.
Let me end by paraphrasing St Augustine
God is within us, but we are outside,
and it is there that we search for God
On entering into ourself
we will see, as it were with the eye of the soul,
what is beyond the eye of the soul, beyond our spirit:
Gods own immutable light.
Cyprian Consiglio, OSB Cam.
[1] Dupuis, incontro, pp. 154-155; see also Vagaggini, The Flesh Instrument of Salvation, Alba House, 1969, p. 19: between the Greek mode of thinking and the scriptural notion there is merely a sahde of difference but this nuance is most important.
[2] All recorded in Tomas Spidlik, pp. 109-110; see his endnotes for specific references.
[3]Corbon, p. 35
[4]Bede Griffiths, River of Compassion, p. 114, New Creation, p. 26-27
[5]ibid, p. 26
[6] The full name of the book is Sex and the Sacred City: Reflections of the Theology of the Body
[7] Bede Griffiths, Integration of Mind, Body, and Spirit,An Occasional Paper of the Fetzer Institute (Kalamazoo: 1994), 1.
[i] I have found it interesting how many people who are more comfortable with Indian philosophies and metaphysics easily defend both of these events, as well as the Assumption of Mary. They say that Jesus gross body was transformed into a subtle bodythe glorified body at his resurrection; and then into a causal or spiritual body at the Ascension. See especially the writings of Sri Aurbindo which were highly influential on Bede Griffiths.
[ii] Cipriano Vagaggini writes: Where is the root of this defect? In my opinion it is to be found in a contemporary anthropology that is unwittingly faulty. Without our realizing it, there is a survival in us of a kind of dualism resulting from an exaggeratedly spiritualistic idea of man. The body and its functions in human nature are scorned in favor of the soul.
We therefore no longer understand how within the means of salvation willed by God the physical body of Christ possesses a function that is always active and permanent and even eternal. Consequently we no longer clearly see the function of the resurrection of Christand therefore that of the paschal mystery and of our own resurrectionnor the function of the Eucharistic mystery. Actually, we can understand both of these notions and therefore the true nature of the liturgy only when we realize the ever active and permanent part willed by God that is played by the physical body of Christ in the accomplishment of salvation in us. (Flesh the Instrument of Salvation, p. 16)
[iii] Mind you this is not a problem confined to Christianity. On a practical level I have found this issuewhat we call dualismcome up in almost every tradition I have studied. It seems like the right thingbody bad, soul good! Here is an example from the Dhammapada, the early Pali text of Buddhism.
Look at the body adorned,
A mass of wounds, draped upon a heap of bones,
A sickly thing, this subject of sensual thoughts!
Neither permanent nor enduring!
The body wears out,
A news of disease,
Fragile, disintegrating,
Ending in death.[iii]
And antidotes also are articulated in other traditions grappling with the same issue. For example, Sri Aurobindo, the great 20th century philosopher of India wrote: In the past the body has been regarded by spiritual seekers rather as an obstacle, the body has been regarded as something to be overcome and discarded [rather] than as an instrument of spiritual perfection and a field of the spiritual change But if the activities of human life are taken up and sublimated by the power of the spirit,
the lower perfection [the perfection of the body] will not disappear; it will remain but will be enlarged and transformed by the higher perfection which only the power of the spirit can give whatever perfection has already been attained included in a new and greater perfection but with the larger vision and inspiration of spiritual consciousness and with new forms and powers.[iii]
In other words, we are waiting for our Savior, who will transfigure our lowly bodies into glorious copies of his own.
So whats my point? I am quoting here the late spiritual writer Wayne Teasdale, a close friend of Cardinal George, by the way, from his book The Mystic Way:
So many forms of spiritual life work only from the neck up, as if the body didnt exist. We need to find creative ways to include the body in the spiritual journey. the West has had an unbalanced view of the place of the body in the spiritual journey. This lack of balance must be corrected. The body is sacred, and it has to be integrated into the mystical life.
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