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SPIRITUALITY TODAY
Elizabeth Dreyer:
Autumn 1987, Vol. 39, pp. 196-210.
Tradition and Lay Spirituality: Problems and Possibilities
Critically assessing past traditions of spirituality can provide today's Christians with new possibilities without inheriting old problems.
A well-known writer and lecturer in the area of lay spirituality, Dr. Dreyer is assistant professor of theology at the Washington Theological Union. She received her doctorate at Marquette University where she studied the spirituality of St. Bonaventure.IT has been said that "History is the 'Know Thyself' of humanity, the self-consciousness of humankind."(1) I would like to explore some of the contours of the relationship between our past spiritual heritage and our present understanding of the meaning of the spiritual journey. I will focus on the laity in the sense of those persons who are not clerics nor following a religious lifestyle under the rubric of the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. This is not meant in any way to exclude such persons, but it is the larger community that I envision.
I will be using the term "tradition" to mean the classic texts, lifestyles, conscious understandings, and unconscious habits that have to do directly with the spiritual life. While formal theological concerns, e.g., Christology, are foundational and do inform this discussion, my focus will be on the practice of the lived dimension of faith -- the ways in which faith becomes enfleshed in everyday actions and attitudes.
WHY WE RETURN TO THE PAST
Looking to the past is a perennial activity of the human community. In the ancient Greek world, the value of an idea was contingent upon its age. Old was good and new was questionable at best. A major stumbling block for the Greeks in accepting Jesus as the important figure the Christians proposed he was, was that he had died only a few years before. This principle also operated with regard to ancient writing. The late fifth century writer known as Pseudo-Dionysius pretended to be the convert of Paul so that his work would get a hearing. Indeed, because of this, his Mystical Theology has had an inordinate influence on Western spirituality and mysticism, second only perhaps to the Bible and Augustine.
In the Middle Ages, society and church continued to value the past. In the secular realm, the renewed interest in the lyrical love poetry of the troubadours and the emergence of courtly salons of an Eleanor of Aquitaine were fueled by the return to the love poetry of Ovid. In the Church, the term "authorities" was used to designate those past illustrious writers upon whom one depended to articulate the meaning of the spiritual life. Even though a theologian like Thomas Aquinas took great liberty in altering the thought of the masters to fit his own, he was also conscious of treating the authorities with utmost respect and reverence. When the meaning he assigned to a text differed significantly from that intended by the author, he felt he was still being faithful to the spirit of giants like Aristotle, Augustine, and Pseudo-Dionysius. One result of this hallowing of the past that has been a source of deep and continuous academic frustration is that scholars such as Aquinas and Bonaventure -- contemporaries who lived in the same city, were given chairs at the University of Paris in the same year, were probably present at each other's disputations and sermons, and even died in the same year -- never even mention one another's work. A living person was incapable of being an "authority."
The Renaissance offers a supreme example of the turn to the past, seen as a "Golden Age." In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, especially in Italy, we see the growing interest in and recovery of ancient Latin and Greek literature. This tradition became a centerpiece of the educational system and a mark of culture and refinement.
Of the many possible reasons for such a return to the past, I will mention only two. The first is the quest for identity. We see this reflected in our own age in the recent near-obsession with "roots." We have witnessed a renewed interest in family trees; in adoptive children going to great lengths and even bringing lawsuits to discover their birth parents; in religious orders struggling to recapture the spirit of their founders; in a Church that is busy examining its foundations in the scriptures and in the early Christian communities; and in the search of women to regain a history that ignored their presence and accomplishments. Just as the many specific elements of our family environment and up-bringing deeply influence who we are today, so too on the larger canvas of history we are products of our past. This is not less true in the area of spirituality. The very way we perceive spiritual reality is heavily dependent on the persons and ideas that have preceded us.
A second reason for a return to the past is disenchantment with the way things are in the present. When we feel discontent about some aspect of life, and begin thrashing about for ways to remedy the situation, the past often emerges as an appealing source of help -- at least in groups that value tradition. Accompanying this is the tendency to idealize the past (because it is past, of course), to imagine a Golden Age that, of course, never existed. The range here is enormous -- from the Renaissance to parents and grandparents talking about how it was in "the good old days" as opposed to the present which is "going to the dogs." When we begin to feel that we have lost our way, we turn quite naturally to the places from which we have come to see if we can find it again. The spiritual life is no exception, and although the way is fought with difficulties, the rewards are not insignificant.
Whatever the era, whatever the reason, we look to the past because it seems like a beneficial thing to do. Except for a scholarly, disinterested pursuit of history for its own sake and the pure pleasure of knowing it (which I am not disparaging), our return to roots is pragmatic. We see it as something that will make our lives better in the present, something that will remedy some of the ills we experience in our lives.
HOW WE RETURN TO THE PAST
I suggest that the process of the recovery of the involves two moments: (1) we have to try to understand the past on its own terms; (2) we have to correlate what we find there with the present. This second task includes both a critique of the past and the inclusion of selected elements from the past in a new creative synthesis. Both moments offer challenges, and are often performed by different persons on different levels of inquiry, but both remain intimately connected to each other.
The first task is primarily, although not exclusively, that of the professional student or scholar. It involves the asceticism of letting the figures of the past speak to us from their own times and their own structures of meaning -- both sometimes very foreign to us. In order to do this, it is important to know that no matter what we do, there is much that we will not be able to understand. The presumption must always be that what I don't understand exceeds what I do understand. For instance, it is crucial to know something about the social, political, economic, cultural milieu from which a past author speaks. It is also helpful if there is some biographical data available about the person's life experience -- what seemed important, traumatic, exhilarating. How did this person use language? How did she or he understand the meaning of certain terms? Against what forces were these individuals reacting in their writings or way of life?
This task requires the skills of attention, a certain level of freedom and disinterest, patience, and a good dose of historical imagination. It is very hard to imagine a worldview that is significantly different from our own. The temptation is to project present meaning and understanding onto the past. When we don't understand the past on its own terms, we tend to transfer past statements into the present in a literal way that creates many difficulties. For example, if we look at Augustine's statements on grace outside the context of the Pelagian tendencies he was opposing, they seem extreme and puzzling. (Because Pelagius seemed to attribute so much power to the individual, Augustine had to go to the other extreme to counter that position.) A second example: It is impossible to understand the preoccupation with the afterlife in the fourteenth century unless one has become familiar with the extreme conditions of war, plague, famine, and disintegration during this period. Where does one turn when this life becomes extremely precarious and dangerous? Often spiritualities even differ markedly from country to country in the same century. A third example: At some points in her writings, Teresa of Avila speaks very disparagingly about herself as a person and especially as a woman.(2) If we impose our present cultural self-images, our psychological viewpoint and our feminist consciousness on Teresa, the logical outcome is to reject her as unenlightened. For that matter, we could reject both Jesus and Paul for not speaking out against slavery, on the same principle. When we read the classics, it is not a dialogue with contemporaries. We must try to understand a spirituality on its own terms before we move to the next step.
If we recall for a moment the utter challenge of understanding a person with whom we live each day, then we can get a clearer picture of the difficulty of doing that with someone who lived five or six or fifteen hundred years ago.
CORRELATION
Following upon and utilizing the fruits of this first task understanding a text on its own terms -- we proceed to the task of correlating the past with our present circumstances. This might be called a pragmatic history in which we find particular lessons from the past to be applicable (or not) to present dilemmas. Does this specific past have any meaning for us today? Are there things that can help us solve particular problems of which we have become aware? Are there attitudes from the past that should be left there and avoided at all costs? This task does not involve blaming our ancestors in the faith for not seeing what we see now, but it is an acknowledgment that changes have occurred. One would not want to retrieve a spirituality of slavery from a time when that was an unexamined part of the status quo.
In this second task, we engage in discernment and decision. It is quite easy to agree upon ways to talk about the spiritual life in the most general and abstract of terms. Who in any age would quibble about saying that the goal of the spiritual life was union with God? Or that love was important to the journey? Or that the spiritual way involved moving from selfishness to self-transcendence? But the moment we ask what it means for a particular group or person to be united to God, or how, specifically, one goes about moving toward self-transcendence, we run into the specific difference of history -- not to mention those of race or sex or age or geography or economic status, etc.
We need to ask for whom and by whom a spirituality has been fashioned. Since this level of specificity is the level on which we live everyday existence, I would like to consider ways of enhancing our spirituality as active, lay, late twentieth-century folks -- using the past as the correlative. We need to ask: How can we appropriate the spiritual tradition of the Christian West? What should be left behind? What things can be transformed for us today? What are some of the glories that can be rediscovered and embraced? And what are some of the new things waiting to be born?
DUALISM
Two dimensions of past spiritualities are better left behind. The first is a dualistic mentality that includes a positive valuation of spirit, heaven, soul, and maleness while in significant ways disvaluing body, earth, nature, flesh, and femaleness. While the Christian tradition has often gone on record as one that values the struggles of this world, there is also a pervasive strain of other-worldly and anti-worldly preoccupation. There is no need to document specific examples here, since much contemporary writing on spirituality does just that.(3) But it is clear that this tendency can cause difficulty when we talk about a spirituality of persons whose lives are immersed in the "world" of jobs and family and body and economics, etc. And one issue continues to be a source of particular misunderstanding.
The more familiar I have become with the spiritual classics, the more I realize that many authors use language that suggests that it is good to avoid the things of the earth. In many cases, what they mean is that it is good not to be attached to anything but God, not to cling to things or persons, not to be so preoccupied with things that our ability to love freely is diminished. In some instances, a writer will go to great extremes to disparage the things of this world. When this language is transferred literally into another age -- and this has too often been the case enormous mischief is done. What is not understood is that often what the authors are disparaging is sin or anything that seems to them to be moving them away from the goal of loving union.
Consider, for instance, the function of a writer's personality in the ways in which she or he perceives the spiritual life. Persons who underline caution about attachment to the material world often experience in themselves an extreme passion for those very realities. Two examples from both ends of the historical spectrum are Augustine of Hippo and Dorothy Day.(4) As one gets closer to the persons behind the texts, one senses that both possessed a love for the things of this world that was so intense and so pervasive that it threatened to override them. Life and nature and intellect and friendship were so attractive that they could in a flash become idols and replace God in their lives. Because they knew this about themselves, they had to banish these things from their lives. They had to speak harshly about them in order to get their love for the world in line.
An important principle is operating here: Our God is a God of history and works not only within the context of a given historical period, but also within the context of a given personality. Augustine and Dorothy Day may be pointing to a danger in the spiritual life that is present in some ways in every age, but it is not helpful to absolutize these positions or to regard them in abstraction from the concrete personality expressing them. It might be a spiritual catastrophe for someone who had little tendency to make idols of friendship or theater to follow the specific ways of an Augustine or of a Dorothy Day. What is important is to identify what is that 1 make into an idol and to take precautions against it.
In placing this kind of "dualism" in its proper context, I do not want to deny that a bias against matter does exist in the Christian tradition. Augustine may appear to be a hero of the flesh in contrast to his Manichaean friends,(5) but the framework behind his thought and that of the Western Christian tradition in general is the worldview which holds that the way to the fullness of life is a way out of the prison of the body. This backdrop operates consciously and unconsciously in the ways in which we understand spirituality and in the ways in which we act that out in our daily lives. This bias against matter has been a serious obstacle to the full development of a lay, not to mention incarnational, spirituality.
ELITISM
The second problem in our tradition, and one I would also like to leave behind, is the limited range of persons held up as models of holiness and thus deciding the meaning of holiness for the rest of the community. Our perception of holiness has been elitist in many ways. Karl Rahner is instructive on this point with regard to the emerging "world church."(6) Following Christianity's first, predominantly Jewish stage lasting about fifty years after Jesus' death, a second stage -- one Rahner describes as Western and European -- lasted until Vatican II. He hails a third stage, still in its infancy, in which the Church recognizes its limited past and begins to open the doors to black, Asian, African, Hispanic, female, lay, and gay voices.
It is a fact of history that the main lines of the second stage of the Church's spiritual tradition were dominated by monasticism. And while I would be the first to point to the riches of that tradition for the world church today, I think it imperative to recognize the historical context of this tradition -- white, male, celibate, single-sex communities. This historical fact cannot be ignored or dismissed as unimportant. It is not necessary to exclude that group or to deny its contributions, but we do need to acknowledge its real limitations and open the way for others to be recognized. Our spiritualities and our understanding of holiness will mature only when we begin to include the ways in which God touches persons in a variety of historical circumstances. One of the most important theological tasks of our time is the articulation of the experience of God in the large and diverse community that we call the People of God. And of course, articulation is predicted on living the spiritual life in all its joys and rigors, and on a growing openness to the extraordinary graces of contemplative union. But more about that later.
SELF-KNOWLEDGE
Two elements of the spiritual life central in every age are self-knowledge and community. A renewed understanding of these two realities can benefit us today in significant ways. Almost without exception, self-knowledge appears in the tradition as what I call the "first base" of the spiritual life. The meaning of self-knowledge is nuanced from writer to writer, but it has to do with at least two basic realities: first, that we are creatures and sinners, and second, that we are made in the image and likeness of God. For most pilgrims on the spiritual journey, these are simply truths -- no more and no less -- that need to be in place before it makes sense to proceed on the journey. For some, this knowledge functions to get the picture in focus. We are not creators of our own existence, but owe our existence to a loving God. Teresa laments our ignorance of our true ancestry in God.(7) Catherine of Siena hardly ever mentions knowledge of God apart from knowledge of self.(8) The two are intimately connected. A natural consequence of this awareness is an attitude of thanksgiving and praise. We are sinners and therefore we need God. Second, we are made in God's image and likeness and are destined to return to the fullness of that reality.
Upon this solid foundation, we in the modern world have the opportunity to build with the added benefit of the growing corpus of psychological knowledge. Our sense of ourselves is quite different from that in the Middle Ages, for example, because of our understanding of the human psyche. We need not belabor the point that psychology is no replacement for spirituality, and perhaps we need to be wary at times of its encroachment beyond what it can do, but the language and tools of psychology and human development can be of immense help to us as we journey toward union with God. The profound insights into the human psyche of our ancestors in the faith can be transformed into a new key that can provide enormous assistance to us today.
COMMUNITY
From one perspective it can be said that the spirituality we have inherited is markedly individualistic. But here again, some historical caveats are in order. In some cases, community existence was so taken for granted that it was rarely mentioned. And then language about the individual spiritual journey was often taken over into late historical contexts in which community existence had changed in significant ways. But in most cases, spiritual treatises are written for others -- often for beginners who are asking for help in the spiritual life. Saints are encouraged to share their experience so that others in the community might be helped. But too often the monk in the desert or the anchoress in her hermitage became central to our idea of holiness and eclipsed a broader view.
Today, we desire to understand and live out our spiritual lives in the context of many kinds of community. The communal aspect of our existence has been moved to the center of the stage -- not only family, professional, and ecclesial communities, but indeed, our vision now reaches out to embrace the whole cosmos. Our awareness of systemic evil has alerted us to new understandings of the milieux in which we live out the redemptive process. And we no longer look at charity as an affair between oneself and God, divorced from the demands of justice. In fact, none of the saints did either, but their efforts to help others were different in significant ways. Global awareness and social analysis have become key to our spirituality today.
PAST GLORIES REDISCOVERED
The more time one spends with the classics of spirituality, the more one appreciates the depth and breadth of their context. Of the many pearls of wisdom found there, I would like to single out four. The first is the awareness of so many spiritual writers of the human potential for God. Teresa of Avila says:
I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in heaven there are many mansions .... The soul of the righteous person is nothing but a paradise, in which, as God tells us, He takes delight .... I can find nothing with which to compare the great beauty of a soul and its great capacity.(9)Because we are made in the image and likeness of God, there is no way for us to comprehend the depths of the soul. Teresa says we can hardly form any conception of the soul's great dignity and beauty. The saints seem to be in a state of constant awe at their experience of God. They are able to tell us that we can't even imagine what is possible to God, and in doing so, they invite us to open ourselves further to grace.
Related to this, secondly, is the saints' awareness of the nearness of God. One gets the sense that there is no greater obstacle to the spiritual life than thinking that God is far away. This can manifest itself in a false sense of unworthiness, or in the attitude that the height of holiness is for someone else. As a result, I may become the last person in the world for whom I desire sainthood. In part, this may be due to our fears about what we are bound to encounter on the way.
What kind of life would I have to live if I accepted the unconditional love of God? The safety of self-protection and the familiar ruts of sin would have to be abandoned forever! Meister Eckhart speaks about persons who feel they are not up to the heroic deeds of the saints:
...when people find themselves unequal to this, they think that they are far away from God, and that they cannot follow God. No one ought to think this. No one ought ever under any circumstances to think himself far away from God, not because of his sins or weakness or anything else. For one does himself great harm in considering that God is far away from him; wherever a person may go, far or near, God never goes far off. God is always close at hand, and even if God cannot remain under your roof, still God goes no further away than outside the door, where he stands.(10)Francis de Sales stands out as one who was firmly convinced that people in every walk of life are called to holiness, and his life's effort, truly innovative in his day, was to help people find God in their particular life calling. "True devotion," he says, "adorns and beautifies any vocation or employment."(11) He constantly opposed the tendency, frequently found among those who want to live a spiritual life, of seeking to practice the virtues of another state in life while neglecting those proper to one's own vocation.(12) The home is not a convent and the virtues of the monastic life are not the virtues of family life:
Know that God wishes nothing else of you save that he sends at the moment and do not be on the look-out for other things... What is the use of building castles in Spain when you have to live in France?(13) You should arrange the length of your prayer according to the number of things you have to do; and since it has pleased Our Lord to give you the sort of life which involves constant distractions, you must get used to making your prayers short, but also so habitual that you will never omit them except for some great necessity.(14)Thirdly, the classical writers have an extraordinary grasp of the human condition. They have paid close attention to the human psyche and know its geography well. Alongside the human capacity for God run the wily and subtle tendencies toward self-deception, pride, and evasion. They know because they have been there and they are able to warn others against some of the pitfalls encountered along the way. Teresa warns her sisters against zeal that can turn into nitpicking at the minor faults of others.(15) Francis de Sales cautions against fretting over our own imperfections. He faults persons who get angry and then become angry at being angry, or disturbed at being disturbed or vexed at being vexed.(16) I have found myself repeatedly smiling at how well these holy men and women know and speak about the petty tricks and rationalizations that I know I indulge in to escape the rigors of the spiritual life. For all their eccentricities -- and they are many -- most saints are paragons of common sense in the world of virtue and vice.A fourth characteristic is the ability of so many of these masters and mistresses to trust their experience of God. We may talk often and blithely of trusting our experience, but actually doing so is often another story. Lay persons especially may be prone to act out of unconscious attitudes and structures of meaning inherited from the past -- attitudes and meanings that may not be adequate or may not accurately reflect one's true experience.
After the decision is made to get on the road of the spiritual life, or after one become conscious that she or he has been on the road all along, the challenge of trusting what God is doing in one's life becomes central. The courage to open oneself to grace and to trust that God will work great things in us is a hallmark of the spiritual life. We are blessed with scores of role models here -- from Origen and Augustine to Pseudo-Dionysius, Bernard, Catherine, Julian, Teresa, John Woolman, Dorothy Day, Dag Hammarskjold -- the list goes on and on.
NEW HORIZONS
The lives and writings of our forbears can move and inspire us. With a bit of know-how, attention, and desire for God's love, we can experience the record of the past as a powerful motivating factor in our own journeys. No individual will be moved by every text, and a text that leaves me dry in my twenties may leave me weeping in my fifties. Personalities and styles from the past need to be matched with those in the present. But as long as the classics continue to touch us and to mediate the change from hearts of stone to hearts of flesh, they will survive into the future as they have survived in the past.
The challenge to the laity to enter fully into the spiritual life is not new. The early church was very successful at recognizing and celebrating a wide variety of charisms in the community. In the Middle Ages, the movement of lay persons called Beguines and Beghards had an often splendid though short-lived existence. The Reformation strove to correct the abuses of a clericalized and narrowly conceived church. Vatican II and the experience of American Roman Catholics today are yet another chapter in this history. However, what is needed today in Roman Catholicism and what was lacking in the past are social support structures for lay persons who want to take the spiritual life seriously in all its dimensions.
I suggest that past lay movements were short lived in part because "ordinary" lay persons lacked the kind of personal, ecclesial, or societal supports that expected them to be saints, provided guidance for the journey, and offered a community of faith which mediated and nurtured the graces of mystical union. It is hard to overestimate the importance of these factors, and perhaps even harder to envision what they would look like and to take action to bring them about.
The task before us is not an easy one. Courage, intense desire, and imagination will be needed in large doses. Not only must we know, critique, and make use of the past, but we must also envision and create new words and new categories that will reflect the experience of more black and yellow and female and married saints; plumber saints and teacher saints, secretary saints and mother and father saints, etc. This vision is grounded in the reality of a God who loves without limit, a God who desires nothing more than to come near, a God who lives in the most intimate recesses of our being, a God who awaits with unbounded graces if we but listen for the knock and open the door.
NOTES
- J.G. Droysen, in Owen Barfield, History, Guilt and Habit, (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), frontispiece.
- Interior Castle, I.2.6.
- See Matthew Fox, Original Blessing (Santa Fe, NM: Bear, 1983). Many texts today are aimed at correcting an anti-material bias, e.g., P. Campbell and E.M. McMahon, Bio-Spirituality (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1985); Dody Donnelly, Radical Love: An Approach to Sexual Spirituality (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1984); Joan Timmerman, The Mardi Gras Syndrome: Rethinking Christian Sexuality (New York: Crossroad, 1984); William Stringfellow, The Politics of Spirituality (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984); and Dolores Lecky, The Ordinary Way: A Family Spirituality (New York: Crossroad, 1982).
- Confessions, trans. John K. Ryan, (New York: Image Books, 1960); Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness (New York: Harper & Row, 1952).
- See Margaret Miles, Augustine on the Body (Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1979; and Fullness of Life: Historical Foundations for a New Asceticism (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1981).
- "Towards A Fundamental Theological Interpretation of Vatican II," Theological Studies (December, 1979): 716-727.
- Interior Castle, I.1.2.
- The Dialogue (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), pp. 29, 88, 118, etc.
- Interior Castle, I.1.1.
- "Counsels on Discernment;" 17. In Meister Eckhart, E. Colledge and B. McGinn, eds., (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), p. 266.
- Introduction to the Devout Life, I.3., trans. John K. Ryan (New York: Harper & Row, 1950).
- Jean Pierre Camus, The Spirit of St. Francois de Sales (New York: Harper & Row, 1952), p. 206.
- St Francis de Sales in His Letters, edited by the Sisters of the Visitation (London: Sands & Co., 1933), p. 76.
- Selected Letters, trans. Elizabeth Stopp (London: Faber & Faber, 1960), p. 204.
- Interior Castle, I.2.16.
- Introduction, III.9.
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