christiannonduality.com Blog

Tom Roberts is editor at large for the National Catholic Reporter. To get a better feel for parish life today, he has been on the road visiting Catholics along the way.

Watch NCRonline.org for updates. He recently turned in his 19th installment.

http://ncronline.org/blogs/in-search-of-the-emerging-church

From reading Tom’s series, a reality that has been impressed upon me is how well so many are doing and being church. And the way they live and move and have their being emulates the aspirations our leaders have articulated in our emerging church conversations.

Many of these people will never blog, never tweet and never use Facebook or friend as a verb, but they competently (even if unconsciously) integrate contemplative lives with social justice in an honest relationship to Jesus finding, sometimes founding, authentic community. And there you have it: Emergence with a capital “E”!

Of course, we recognize and affirm a diversity of ministry in our unity of mission. When I was in Louisiana’s nonpartisan think tank on poverty, I sought out the Fourth World Movement, which was working with the radically poor in New Orleans (a precious little French missionary family, at that; in other words, foreign missionaries in America!). I learned that what the desperately poor want, sometimes more than a crumb of bread or a sip of water, even, was a place at any table of dialogue where there destinies were being worked out. (And I sigh and think of the lines that were drawn on Middle Eastern maps by departing colonial powers.)

Another thing that was impressed upon me was that they wanted to tell their stories and to have their stories passed along, such that they might matter as persons to somebody. My eyes were opened by one quote relayed to me by one of the 4th World missionaries. A desperately poor person crying: “I don’t want to be an icon of your fucking Christ!” That made me a post-patriarchal, post-colonial, post-paternalistic, post-hierarchical, post-institutionalistic, post-whatever faster, smoother and more efficaciously than all of my immersion in abstract postmodern philosophy and theology. We objectify people when we make them a salve for our hurting consciences or a badge of honor for our heroic strivings.

And we learn this from Merton, that we all have crises of creativity and continuity, the first corresponding to our need to feel like we make a difference to someone, the latter, all the forms of death we encounter, literally and metaphorically.

And in this regard, I realized how poverty-stricken so many in America’s board rooms, war rooms, classrooms, living rooms and even bedrooms are, how utterly miserable are so many of the people we all rub elbows with daily. And I resolved to minister to what I came to call The 5th World, in other words, this litany of rooms, which all too often has so much less joy than we can find in either the 4th or 3rd world.

And this is no naive romanticization of poverty.

I know, now, in my heart of hearts, that the preferential option for the poor is the Gospel because it is Good News for all, for at some time or another, sooner or later, it is going to be consolation for every last one of us.

This is reproduced from my post at Cathlimergent Conversation: Catholics in the Emerging Church Conversation. Please, join us there!

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One of the richest reflections on this I have ever come across is in Merton’s __New Seeds of Contemplation__, especially in the preface and first three chapters, which reflect on what contemplation is and is not and what the true self and false self are.

The most concise summary I could come up with would be that,

1) for our true self, our joy is found in God’s glory;

2) our will is oriented to God’s love;

3) the work of our journey is to co-create with God our identity through and with and in God;

4) that we may become wholly in His image, holy in His image;

5) when we do have our memory, understanding and will integrated and holistically operative, we experience our true self but

6) this co-creation of our identity and this surrender of our memory, understanding and will to faith, hope and love are effected through theological virtue gifted by the Spirit by an elevation of nature through grace and transmutation of experience through grace and not by a perfection of the natural order by our natural efforts, which is to say

7) we are in need of salvation to overcome both death and sin and the most fundamental vocational call we answer is

8 ) to be saved and then

9) transformed.

In other words, we don’t enter the monastery or undertake a life of prayer to make us better human beings — rather, we urgently and in crisis and seriously and radically place the utter dependency and abject poverty of our selves (which are nevertheless good) at God’s disposal in order to be dramatically rescued.

Teresa of Avila did say that we must desire and occupy ourselves in prayer not so much so as to receive consolations but so as to gain the strength to serve. Still, a careful reading and parsing will note that she didn’t negate or eliminate our desire for consolations but only added to them. I like the simple distinction between eros or what’s in it for me? and agape or what’s in it for God & others?

Agape, however, does not extinguish or negate eros, but, rather, transvalues it and recontextualizes it. Thus we do not let go of what’s in it for me? even as we strive to transcend it with agapic love.

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Below is a sidebar conversation I was having with someone else re: the Rohr-Keating retreat, where the subject of the true-false self terminology came up. I thought I’d tack it on here:

It turns me off in this sense. It is bad terminology. Unfortunate use of words. But we work with them because of their heritage in our tradition.

Why unfortunate? Because of what you said: False self is not bad.

I prefer to use: early on our journey and later on our journey thus and such happens. [This is not to deny that many unduly put off the journey to such things as transformation and even adulthood.] The early stages of formation and transformation are good. So are the later. And nothing that takes place on our early journey is abandoned.

The false self represents our socialization, moving from little animals to humans. It represents our humanization. And our humanization and divinization are inextricably intertwined, not really distinguishable really. The more fully human we become, the more we reflect the Divine Image, the imago Dei. So, we don’t abandon the false self. Not at all. Rather, we take full possession of it in order to surrender it to crucifixion. [And one cannot surrender what one does not form and possess.] We give it up in order to be radically saved (from sin and death); it is no mere pious gesture. Thus the seed falls to the ground and dies … Thus every other metaphor for the Paschal Mystery …

This is my False Self.

I give it up for you.

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Another Mertonesque thought: We are moving toward an existential realization of how critical to our spiritual survival prayer really is. This realization is attained when we feel our need for prayer as acutely as we would feel the need for a breath when underwater.

That is my crude rendering from memory. I think this has something to say to us all whether we are called to discursive mediation, lectio, meditatio, oratio, contemplatio, operatio or what have ya. Whatever our prayer gift as led by the Spirit, it is to be engaged with the sense of critical and acute and urgent need that affirms our radical dependence and perennial state of existential crisis.

Now, don’t get Merton wrong. This is all dialectical. One moves into crisis to lose crisis. One loses self to gain self. First, there is a mountain. Then, there is no mountain. Then, there is. One recognzies one’s radical dependency to move to place of radical trust. One experiences one’s emptiness and abject poverty to realize one’s utter fullness. One moves into paradox and pain and contradiction to realize that, whatdaya know, all is well.

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Love, eminently reasonable, needs no reason, inasmuch as it is sufficient unto itself. Happiness, finally, cannot be pursued but must ensue. So, too, with good feelings. They aren’t needed but will often ensue, which is to say, follow, love.

Merton noted that often, when we are in pain and conflict and contradiction, we incorrectly associate same with old wounds, with old injuries that truly have been resolved and healed already. During such times, Merton encourages us to consider the very real possibility that we are, rather, being invited to open ourselves to a new level of being through such pain and conflict and contradiction. In other words, if we are not properly attentive, then we run the risk of stagnation, desolation and aridity, sometimes for months or years, dwelling on the wrong integrative and transformative issues, missing the invitation to move to another level, a level that could be attained in a day even.

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Another distinction from Merton.

Merton discusses two of the types of confessio, of confession, but I don’t recall the latin terms for both. One was laude or praise. The other was re: the more familiar “It was me. I done it.” that we know from the Rite of Reconciliation and from police shakedowns, or parental busts re: hands in cookie jars.

This distinction makes for rich reflection and meditation but I’ll try to control my imagination and focus on the transformative process.

The confession of praise is the converse: “It was God. He done it.”

The psalms are about 50:50 penitential supplication taking the form of “I done it” and of praise taking the form of adoration of “He done it.”

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Merton has touched upon a dynamic, when he speaks of existential crisis, which is very much related to the Cross for Christians although it happens with all people, even in science. The dynamic, more specifically, involves our confrontation with a problem. We initially perceive the problem as soluble and we work mightily to solve it. It matters not whether it is a philosophical conundrum or some scientific hypothesis or some existential crisis/spiritual emergency. We exhaust all of our resources and then arrive at the point where we pretty much conclude that this particular issue is insoluble. At this point, we resolve to leave it alone, give it a rest, to forget about it altogether.

So, we do.

Then, when you least expect it, whether in a dream or while playing or working or chopping wood and carrying water, the solution comes to us in a flash, totally gratuitously and unmerited as pure grace, so to speak.

Now, this dynamic is very natural and involves the workings of the human mind at a subconscious level, intuitions bubbling up to the surface, to be sure, not unaided by the Holy Spirit.

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