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SPRING
2004
Vol 38 No 3
Editorial
SPIRITUALITY FOR EARTHLINGS
Frank
Andersen MSC
THE LONG JOURNEY HOME: SEARCHING FOR EUCHARIST TODAY
Kerrie Hide
THE LONG JOURNEY HOME: SEARCHING FOR EUCHARIST TODAY
Tony
Kelly CSsR
REFLECTIONS ON SPIRITUALITY AND THE CHURCH
Michael
Trainor
ON THE RISE AGAIN: NEO-FUNDAMENTALISM IN AUSTRALIAN CATHOLICISM (PART
TWO)
Andrew
and Liz Chatelier
MARRIAGE: GROWING IN LOVE
Denis
Uhr MSC
KEEPING ALIVE THE MSC TRADITION
REVIEWS
Kevin
Mark
NEW RELIGIOUS BOOKS BY AUSTRALASIAN AUTHORS
| Reflections
on spirituality and the Church
TONY KELLY CSsR
IN THIS ARTICLE I ponder upon the separation occurring between spirituality
and ecclesial existence. In contesting generalisations such as organised
religion and institutional Church, I argue for a more
ecclesial spirituality and point to some of the pitfalls involved in a
generic spirituality, especially to the problem of it being
colonised by political ideologies. I would like to suggest a number of
talking points for the conversation between an ecclesial Christian faith
and the expanding phenomenon of spirituality.
The Expanding Phenomenon of Spirituality
Spirituality, not unlike psychology, experience
or even religion, is a catch-all word. Generally, it connotes
the fundamental self-transcending orientation inscribed into human existence.
It also refers to the ways such an orientation is actualised in human
lives. Increasingly, too, it refers to the way such a dimension is studied
and the ways in which it might be promoted.1 In fact, the word, spirituality,
up to comparatively recently times, was an all but exclusively Catholic
term. It referred to the experiential and ascetical aspects of Christian
life, above all as these were represented in various movements and religious
orders,2 and finally by the varieties of Christian experience in the world,
as in lay spirituality. Before this overture to the integrity
of the secular, spiritual theology, while it was left to academic
theology to embody the ideal of faith seeking understanding, sought to
promote the concerns of faith seeking its appropriate psychological
expression in cultivation of habits of prayer, examination of conscience,
and a humble respect for mystical gifts should they occur. With a deeper
appreciation of the secular and of the theological significance of the
laitys involvement in the world, the older meanings of spirituality
began to stretch to new proportions.
The theological origin of the word is found in the Pauline neologism,
pneumatikos, Spirit-ual , applied to any person or reality
(charisms, blessings, hymns, conduct) under the influence of the Spirit
. Paul, in 1 Cor 2:14-15, contrasts the psychikos anthroposmore
or less the natural human being limited to the predictable,
routine range and scope of anyones life. In the Middle Ages, the
word took on a more a juridical meaning, so that spiritual
was contrasted to temporal or material in matters of authority,
power, and property. But in 17th century in France, there was the golden
age of spiritualité. It manifested an intense cultivation of religious
self-consciousness at the experiential level of faith. Because, predictably,
it sometimes took on elitist and exaggerated forms (e.g., Quietism), there
arose a much more urgent need for a spiritual director to
keep the feet of aspirants to spirituality on the ground!
But now this comparatively in-house word has taken wings to enjoy a range
of reference of astonishing proportions. For example, of the twenty-five
volumes of the Crossroad project, World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic
History of the Religious Quest,3 only three volumes are devoted to Christianity.
To change the metaphor, what was formerly a theological backwater became,
in recent years, a river in flood.
Spirituality or Church?
Hence the now urgent question, How is Christianity, and especially
its ecclesial form, related to spirituality? It is not uncommon
that those studying or practising spirituality in its new
modes, to feel an almost automatic disaffection from what they term the
institutional Church, taken as an extreme example of organised
religion. No doubt the causes of this disaffection are many and
various. May one ask, is theology itself partly to blame? Especially in
the last decade or so, theology has been so ecclesiologically negative
that people could be excused for thinking that the integrity of Christian
faith was not found in an ecclesial communal setting, but despite it.
The supposedly free spirit of faith is always being compromised by the
structures, or the Curia, or this or that ecclesiastical policy
or decision: the Church appeared as an obstacle and encumbrance.
In contrast, traditional forms of Catholic ecclesiologywhich in
fact underpinned the developments of Vatican IIunderstood the Church
as the historical form of grace in, and for, the world. But high
ecclesiologies, except in Orthodox circles, have become an object of great
suspicion.4 In regard to the Church, theology has veered in the direction
of a hermeneutics of suspicion, rather than one marked by participation,
thanksgiving and conversion. By implication, the Church is located outside
the sphere of spirituality altogether, in an alien ambiguous exteriority.
Instead of the Church being theologically explored as that identifiable
part of the world that cultivates an explicit awareness of the universal
mystery at work, the ecclesial reality is subjected to a form of sociological
reduction which leaves it with only its most imperfect and limited institutional
form. When the antecedent reality of trinitarian grace as the source,
sustenance and goal of all the Churchs institutions is given little
acknowledgement, belonging to the Church can hardly appear as a field
and historical form of communion with God. With the waning of the high
ecclesiology, the distinctive Catholic (and Orthodox) tradition, there
appears a kind of fierce ecclesiological docetism which, while resolutely
stressing the human face of the Church, wont permit it to have a
wart or wrinkle. The famed triumphalism of pre-Vatican II ecclesiology
has turned into something far more diffident and uncertain.
When the Church ceases to figure as a mystery (in the theological sense)
and its eschatological bearing is dimmed, the false ultimacy of the if
only surfaces. All manner of being would be wellif only this
or that kind of policy were implemented; or if the CDF proceeded in a
more evangelical manner in its investigation of ostensibly unorthodox
views; if only Cardinal X were made pope, or the (arch)diocese had someone
else for (arch) bishop, etc., etc. The curious absoluteness of such intensely
ecclesiastical preoccupations prejudices a sense of ecclesial being in
the Spirit, as communion, not with archangels (primarily), but with other
flesh and blood believers in an always-limited historical situation. Publicity,
of course, tends to follow those who leave the Church in the name of a
more personalised spirituality. Occasionally there is some interest shown
in why well-known Christians or theologians choose to remain in the Church.
The supposition seems to be that the Church is some kind of elderly relative
that needs ones care. Classic ecclesiology in the great tradition
of East and West would ask a different question, apt to shock modern sensibilities:
Why does Church continue to have patience with us sinners, given the often
pitiful level of our Christian witness? A theology of the Church needs
a eucharistic hermeneutics in which thanksgiving, humility and conversion
play their role in the interpretation of the data.
I will not try to illustrate these impressions further since it would
need a kind of documentation that might do little good. But I do think
there is room for a communal theological examination of conscience on
such points, if being in the Church and the practice and understanding
of spirituality are not to belong to different worlds. The institutional
shape of the Church is never perfect, and never will be. But the institutional
component is necessary if Christian witness is to have a presence, a voice
and a witness in the groaning, conflictual reality of world history. The
Christian community has to confront huge antagonistic forces which have
no reservations when it comes to assuming an institutional form: capitalism,
Marxism, militarism, racism, and institutional prejudice of all kinds.
Add to these the unsleeping enterprise of the commercial and advertising
institutions that drive mass consumer culturethe opium of
the people beyond anything Marx could have imagined. Put all such
institutions in the context of the institutional mediaoften
owned and directed by any and all of the aboveand one might ask
why the Church and Christian people generally are not far more organised,
in order to have a more effective institutional presence in society. It
would serve the anti-human institutions rather well if the Church went
in for spirituality as it is often understood. Indeed, if the Johannine
counsel, Little children, keep yourselves from idols (1 John
5:21) is to lead to more than an invisible interior attitude, it must
presuppose some institutional shape in the worlda clear space where
God is adored and the People of God is formed and nourished. And it does.
In some measure, the institution of the Church gives spiritualities
a free ride. For it does what they cannot do, namely by confronting the
violent anti-human realities of the world, even if this means that the
Church itself is often wounded in the process. Moreover, the Church is
the bearer of millennial traditions, not only in regard to doctrine, theology,
liturgy and moral life, but also in regard to spirituality as well. Each
of these classic spiritualitiesBenedictine, Carmelite, Franciscan,
Jesuit, and more recently, Lay, to name but someexhibits
its own demanding ascetism. How the spirit of the Beatitudes is discernible
in the Church at the moment may be a big question. Still, the People of
God is not without its prophets, martyrs, founders and reformers. Presumably,
this is what Pope John Paul II is trying to bring home to us with the
extraordinary number of canonisations he has performed. Believers need
continuous personal conversion; and the institutional dimension of Christian
community is always in need of reform if it is to be transparent in its
witness, both in regard to its own struggling members on the inside, and
to the world beyond it, in which and for which it exists.
Snags in the Conversation: Different Concerns
Apart from a diminished theological sense of the Church and limited understanding
of the necessity of its institutional forms, there are other reasons why
conversation between the Church and the new spiritual concerns is often
awkward.
First of all, the history of Christian faith has required that it develop
an intense doctrinal specialisation which cannot but appear rather impersonal,
abstract and intolerant when contrasted with spiritual experience. This
doctrinal concern is typically evidenced in the need to define matters
of faith, usually because of disputes and confusions within the Church.
There comes a time when the teaching authority, using all the spiritual
and intellectual help it can get, must say Yes or No on a given point.
The classic instances are, of course, the Councils of Nicaea (325), defining,
against those who taught that Jesus was less than God, that the Son is
one in being with the Father. Then, very importantly for spirituality,
the Council of Constantinople (381) defined, against those who supposed
that the Spirit was merely a divine impersonal energy or a created force,
that the Holy Spirit is truly divine, coequal and coeternal with
the Father and the Son. Then Ephesus (431) proclaimed, against those
who taught that Mary was the mother of Christs human nature only,
that she was truly Theotokos, Mother of God. The Council of
Chalcedon (451) completed this early development by distancing itself
from two extremes, by defining that One and the same, our Lord Jesus
Christ, is one person in two natures, both truly divine and truly human.
The first centuries of Christian experience highlighted the necessity
of this dogmatic mode of clarification. It was continued through to the
Council of Trent (1545) in the face of the Protestant Reformation, and
in Vatican I (1870) on the particular issue of papal infallibility. Interestingly,
the Marian definitions of the Immaculate Conception (1850) and the Assumption
(1950) evidenced a more celebratory kind of declaration, exalting both
the transcendent initiative and eschatological fulfilment of the grace
of Godin regard to Mary herself, and by extension to the whole Church
whose Mother and exemplar she is. This latter type of definition is more
clearly and positively linked to spirituality, as Jung notably appreciated.
It remains, however, that the need for clear cognitive meaning tended
to make objectivity and coherence the dominant concern. Other possible
ways of promoting the meaning the faith were downplayed, with the result
that the full subjectivity of faith was not brought to expression. In
fact, from the time of the Reformation on, the objective reality of grace
was stressed against what was understood to be Protestant subjectivism
with its emphasis on personal experience and private interpretation
of the Scriptures. The fear of such subjectivism, real or imagined, unwittingly
prejudiced an appreciation of the subjectivity of faith in its interior
and experiential dimensions. That was left to the devotional life of the
faithful and mystical experience of great mystics such as Teresa of Avila
and John of the Cross, with spiritual directors keeping a wary eye on
the possibilities of delusion and self-indulgence. It is, therefore, is
not without interest that the present Pope in his very first encyclical,
Redemptor Hominis,5 sought inspiration in Vatican II to acknowledge dimensions
of human subjectivity that had not previously figured in official documents.
He began to speak of appropriating the meaning of faith in
a manner that suggests that an interior and personal experience of the
mystery of Christ was indeed inherent in Christian existence. Much later
in the long list of his encyclicals, John Paul II speaks in the first
pages of Fides et Ratio of the quest for truth unfolding within
the horizon of personal self-consciousness,6 even though he is careful
to warn against collapsing such self-transcending subjectivity into subjectivism.7
This is not the time to give an account of a Lonerganian phenomenology
of meaning, but it is pertinent to our theme to refer to the four dimensions
he distinguishes. He treats first of all of the cognitive dimension of
meaning, the objective shape of reality, the truth of things, e.g., Australia
conceived as a legal, geographical and historical entity. Then, there
is the constitutive function of meaning, directed not immediately to the
objective reality, but to the human subjectmeaning as it informs
or indwells consciousness, to form a certain identity and self-understanding,
e.g., what it means to be an Australian. Thirdly, there is meaning of
a communicative type meaning that forms, sustains and guides a
given group in its communal life, e.g., the social and cultural fields
of meaning that make Australians one national community. Lastly, there
is effective meaning. It addresses the question of how all the above-mentioned
dimensions of meaning inspire transforming conduct in regard to society,
culture, the world itself. For example, being Australian is productive
of law, culture and conscience, as it inspires commitment to issues relating
to the ecological care of the environment, indigenous peoples, refugees,
jobless and migrants. Given these four dimensions of meaning, as Australians,
we inhabit, not only a country, but a complex field of meaning, and find
in it an identity, social cohesion and common responsibilities within
the global reality of the human race.
What has this to do with the Church and spirituality? As noted above,
Christian communication, especially in the Catholic tradition, is a highly
specialised discourse when it comes to cognitive meaning, but has lagged
somewhat in the other dimensions just mentioned. It is more likely to
speak of the Holy Trinity of three divine persons in one God, rather than
these three divine persons indwelling the mind and heart of the believer.
It is more likely to speak of Christ as the truth rather than as the way
and the life. The rhetoric of spirituality, on the other hand, is very
attentive to the constitutive, consciousness-affecting types of meaning,
but often indetermined, at least in a methodological sense, about the
cognitive content. But if faith is to seek understanding and promote its
fullest appropriation in the way the Pope commends, it must
do so by employing the fully panoply of possible modes of understanding;
it must embody itself in every possible dimension of meaning.
When this does not happen, there tends to be (at least) two unrelated
modes of discourse, with (at least) two groups of people talking past
one another. Not much sense can be expected from a conversation when one
group is talking about spiritual experience often in its most exotic forms,
and hears, or overhears, the Church authorities talking in a doctrinal
mode. More to the point, Australians, especially those interested in the
new spiritual movements, will hear Church leaders saying a lot about the
sacredness of life, the integrity of marriage, the necessity of social
justice, the dignity of the human person, and the evils of abortion, euthanasia
and violence. What they tend not to hear, if only for the reason that
it is seldom expressed, is anything dealing with the experience of God,
the life of grace, the way of Christ, the practice of prayer, the Christian
mystery of suffering and death, and the promise of eternal life. When
well-intentioned people might expect the moral teaching of the Church
to be objective, definite and all-encompassing, they must wonder about
where is it coming from, and what is it leading tothe fundamental
experience out of which it all emerges.
The Spirit-ual Subjectivity of Faith
An inevitable question arises concerning the extent to which the we
of the Church appreciates itself as a Spirit-ual reality.
While the Church is an undeniable empirical presence in its social and
cultural institutional form, the theological depth and breadth of ecclesial
life is necessarily hidden. But need it be completely concealed? I am
not sure how that question should be answered, but it does seem to be
the time to emphasise the basic reality of Churchs existence in
terms of the gift of the Spirit. Preceding, accompanying and always transcending
all that makes up the conscious life, institutional forms and activities
of the Church, the Holy Spirit is the animating principle the Lord
and giver of life, as the Creed expresses it. Paul can claim,
no one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit
(1 Cor 12:3). At the other pole of Christian experience, the Spirit is
the gift that Jesus promises, The water that I will give will become
in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life (John 4:14).
In reference to the Spirit that is to be given by the glorified Christ,
those thirsting for eternal life are invited to come to him to quench
their thirst, since it has been promised that Out of his heart shall
flow rivers of living water (John 7:38-39. Cf. also 19:30, 34).
Likewise, the gift of the Spirit leads to the community of faith into
fullness of the truth revealed in Christ: When the Spirit of truth
comes, he will guide you into all truth
and he will declare to you
the things that are to come (John 16:13). Doctrinally speaking,
the Holy Spirit is the third divine person. But in the order of Christian
experience, the Spirit can be said to be the first divine person, the
indwelling personal gift through which believers recognise Jesus as the
Word, and have access to the Father.
Such references suggest that the Spirit works in the interiority of faith,
opening it to the fullness of revelation. Lonergans axiom is pertinent
here: Genuine objectivity is the fruit of authentic subjectivity.8
There is no immediate leap from subjective awareness to the objective
truth of things unless the self-transcending capacities of the subject
are involved. In the unfolding of any human consciousness, these dynamics
must include sense experience, imagination, feeling, questioning, understanding,
reflecting, judging and deciding. With the gift of grace, believers live
a Spirit-guided subjectivity which affects all their capacities to experience,
understand and love. Through the interior gift of the Spirit, faith can
appreciate the objectivity of the Word made flesh and dwelling among us,
along with the sacramental and ecclesial realities that mediate the gift
of God. Indeed, the Churchs doctrinal concern for objectivity must
also be the fruit of its authentic subjectivity residing in a communal
and individual conversion to the Gift of God. Unless the tradition, teaching
and form of the institutional Church emerge from a consciousness indwelt
by the Spirit, and unless this operates through the theological virtues
and the gifts of the Spirit in all their variety, doctrinal objectivity
degenerates into dogma in the modern, pejorative sense.
In other words, the constant pastoral imperative is to promote in the
first place, neither an articulated dogmatic clarity, nor a spirituality
of self-realisation or cosmic connectedness or ecological harmony, but
a spirituality that is genuinely a Spirit-uality. This does
not consist in a cultivation of this or that experience or attitude, but
in adoration of the Lord and giver of life, the third
divine person. The Spirits incalculable workings lead to an
ever fuller apprehension of Christ and inspire intimacy with the Father,
in this world and the next. Without that Spirit-uality, the
ecclesiastical fabric is soulless, and the Church can only appear as one
more instance of organised religion, perhaps of interest to
the sociologist or anthropologist, but with no claim on the human heart.
Admittedly, here is another side to this matter. I suspect that those
who are experiencing a spiritual awakening in a secular or non-Christian
form, cannot imagine that there is a distinctively Christian consciousnessor
Spirit-uality, as I have been calling it. Could it possibly
be, they might ask, that these dull church people actually
experiencing the truth that will set you free (John 8:32),
the joy that no one can take from you (John 16:22), the
peace that the world cannot give (John 14:27), and the love that
nothing in all creation can sunder or diminish (cf. Rom 8:37-39).
Humility and discretion make it difficult to state that those outside
the Christian experience do not share the gifted experience of those inside
it, manifest in a consciousness indwelt, not by a spirit of fear and servility,
but the Holy Spirit of freedom and intimacy with God (Rom 8:14-17). Christian
experience has a distinctive cosmic sense also, as when Paul declares
that the whole of creation is groaning in one great act of giving birth
(Rom 8:18-25), that in Christ all creation coheres and finds its goal,
that he is the at once the origin, the form and the first born of all
creation (Col 1:15-17; cf. Also John 1:1-5).
It would be a matter of lamentation, I presume, to Church leaders and
theologians alike, should those disaffected from the Church claim that
they never met with such experiences in their episodic or even protracted
encounters with Christian communities. But it would be most dispiriting
if faithful Christians themselves were to lament that such Spirit-ual
dimensions of their faith were a closed book to them. Clearly there is
room for a examination of conscience, or, better, an examination of Christian
consciousnessof which the moral dimension, conscience, is one aspect.
In pastoral communication, it would be a good experiment to re-arrange
the order of the Catechism of the Catholic Church by reversing the order
of exposition, and beginning with last section, On Christian Prayer,
and then proceeding to liturgical, doctrinal and moral considerations.
Such a move would put the whole exposition on a more experiential footing.
What Spirit?
There is an even more sensitive point to be respected if a genuine conversation
on the place of the Church in spirituality is to take place. What would
be the response if the to-all-appearances spiritually backward church
people, speaking with humility but with unaccustomed directness,
were to aver that the generalised spirituality now in vogue appeared to
them as a kind of spiritual autism, a self-enclosure incapable of the
ultimately Other-ward ecstasy of adoration, self-surrender and praise.9
What if it were urged that this whole spiritual phenomenon were nothing
more than the re-emergence of gnosticism, or at least a kind of elitist
soul-culture amongst connoisseurs of special experience? I would hope
that such questions would not stop the conversation. They arise, however,
out of a long and sobering exposure to religious illusion and self-delusion.
If religion is promoting neither a conversion beyond the idolatrous propensities
of any culture, nor a moral conversion to collaboration in bringing about
the common good, nor an intellectual conversion to the objectivity that
makes learning and discussion possible, the result can be spectacularly
self-destructive.
Jacques Derrida, in his Of Spirit,10 cites these words:
The spiritual world of a people is not the superstructure of a culture,
and no more is it an arsenal of bits of knowledge and utilitarian values,
but the deepest power of conservation of its forces of earth and blood,
as the most intimate power of emotion and the vastest power of disturbance
of its existence. Only the spiritual world guarantees the people its greatness.
For it imposes a constant decision between the will to greatness on the
one hand, and, on the other, the laissez-faire of decadence, and gives
its people to the march it has begun toward its future history.
The spirituality here referred to, contests a culture of utilitarian
values and apathy. It calls on the ties of earth and blood, and the experience
of feelings that inspire greatness of soul and energises progress into
the future. However, this quotation is from Heideggers Rectorship
Address in 1933 as he declared his allegiance to the Nazi movement. An
aberration on the part of a great philosopher can serve as a timely warning
against identifying spirituality too closely with a national identity.
In this case as in others, appealing to spirituality solves nothing. It
does however pose a question: what is the criterion by which all spirituality
is judged? What kind of spirit is involved? The Christian
experience of the Spirit is always subject to discernment, and that discernment
must always take into account the dangerous memory of the
Crucified, surrendered to death for the sake of Gods reign of peace
and justice. Recent widespread interest in spiritualities linked to particular
countries and cultures might do well to cultivate a dangerous memory
of the spirituality of Nazi Germany. Even though there is
so much to affirm and assimilate in recent studies of Australian spirituality,
it is worth entertaining the possibility that one extremist group or another
( an ultra-nationalist political party?) might annex Australian
spirituality to its purposes. While such a possibility is unlikely,
stranger and deadlier things have unfortunately happened.
Johns counsel is still pertinent: Beloved, do not believe
every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God
(1 John 4:1). The concrete focus of such discernment in the self-giving
love of Jesus is specified: By this you know the Spirit of God:
every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is
from God (1 John 4:2). In the Gospel of John, there is another aspect
of discernment relevant to our question. Jesus, speaking with the Samaritan
woman, makes it clear that the worship the Father in Spirit and truth
is not conditioned by any national, cultural and local factors: Woman,
believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither
on this mountain nor in Jerusalem (John 4:21). I am not commending
a fundamentalist reading of such a text, nor a generic spirituality uprooted
from anywhere. Worshiping God in Spirit and truth (John 4:23-24)
is related to faith in Jesus as the saviour of the world (John
4:42). But this does not mean that either such worship is outside place
and time and culture, or that the world is a homogenous reality. If the
world is to be saved and the worship is to be genuine, time and place
and culture play their part, even if they do not limit the Spirit of God
and the salvation Christ brings. But in view of the nationalism that can
invade the catholicity of faith it is as well to note that the Spirit-uality
that figures most prominently in the New Testament breaks out of the very
conditions that current contextualised theologies and spiritualities are
trying to commend (cf. the Pentecostal event as described in Ac 2:1-12).
As a result, the pastoral balance and the theological dialectic required
in this situation is most challenging. There is a point where Paul, for
example, can commend spirituality to his Philippians in the
words, Whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just,
whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there
is any excellence, and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about
these things (Phil 4:8). Yet the same Paul, just a few paragraphs
before, though uniquely proud of his share in the gifts of Israel, declares
that he has come to regard everything a loss because of the surpassing
value of knowing Christ Jesus (Phil 3:8; see the whole context,
3:7-11).11
Conclusion
This reflection ends with more questions than answers. Still I hope to
have suggested some conversation-starters on a large and crucial issue,
both for the Church and the proponents of the new spirituality. It strikes
me that the questions and angles that emerge in reflections like this
point to a need for a new dimension of interior Catholicity. It is the
need to put the -holic back into the Catholic,
so that the subjectivity of faith will be more clearly acknowledged and
promoted. It is more a question of the ecology of Church life, rather
than suddenly choosing to promote subjectivity over objectivity, interiority
over institution, consciousness over conscience, or Spirit over the Word
incarnate. There is, of course, a risk in respecting new concerns and
entering new conversations. In that case, confident surrender to the Spirit
and a deeper adoration the divine Breath of Life will be the
one thing necessary. More practically and pastorally, it will mean a second
phase of reading the ecclesial documents of Vatican II, not, as it were,
from the outside in, as objective doctrine, but from
the inside out, as an invitation into new interior ecclesiality.12
For the People of God enjoying the gift of the Spirit, spirituality
will always be too weak a word.
Tony Kelly, CSsR, is Professor of Theology at
Australian Catholic University. He was recently appointed by Pope John
Paul II to the International Theological Commission.
REFERENCES
1. See Sandra M. Schneiders, I.H.M., Spirituality in the Academy,
Theological Studies 50/4, December 1989, 676-697 for a still excellent
overview.
2. As the world was adopting spirituality as its emblematic
word for depth dimensions of human life, most religious orders began speaking
in terms of charisms, occasionally with such enthusiasm that
the charism associated with this or that founder far outweighs, in rhetoric,
at least, the reality of Christian faith and Catholic identity. Whereas
founders tended to be content with a sense of special vocation, first
particular spiritualities, and then distinctive charisms
are posing a problem for religious orders to explain their respective
distinguishing marks.
3. Ewert Cousins, ed., World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of
the Religious Quest (New York: Crossroad, 1985-).
4. For an outstanding interpretation of one of the great ecclesiological
theologians of our era, see Richard Lennan, The Ecclesiology of Karl Rahner
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), especially Chapter 3 on the Spirit in
the Church, 80-112.
5. (Sydney: Saint Paul) 1979, 30-33. See #10, but note the preceding paragraphs
for whole context, #8-9, and the sections that follow, #13-15, in which
the accent is clearly on the meaning of revelation as it informs human
consciousness. The Pope is commenting on what he terms a stupendous
text from Vatican II, namely, Gaudium et Spes #22.
6. Fides et Ratio (Sydney: Saint Pauls, 1998) #1, p.9.
7. Fides et Ratio, #5, pp. 14-16.
8. B. Lonergan, Method in Theology (London: Darton, Longman and Todd,
1972), 265, 292.
9. See Tony Kelly, An Expanding Theology. Faith in a World of Connections
(Sydney: E. J. Dwyer, 1993 and revised (2003) on the home page accessed
through Google: Anthony J. Kelly, CSsR), especially The New Age
Movement, 40-48, where I try to sketch out lines of dialogue with
new currents of secular spirituality under some nine headings.
10. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit. Heidegger and the Question. G. Bennington
and R. Bowlby (trans.), (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989), especially
page 36.
11. For an outstanding treatment of this and other issues, see Denis Edwards,
Breath of Life. A Theology of the Creator Spirit (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis,
2004), especially 158-170.
12. See first of all, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium,
in Austin Flannery, O.P., general editor, Vatican II: The Conciliar and
Post Conciliar Documents (Dublin: Dominican Publications, 1988 (Revised
Edition), 350-426. See especially chapter 5, The Call to Holiness,
396-402; and chapter 7, The Pilgrim Church, 407-413, and Pastoral
Constitution on the Church in the modern world, Gaudium et Spes
#22. I am thankful to Rev Dr David Pascoe for pointing out the possibilities
here.
This article is slightly modified for Compass and reprinted with permission
from the Australian E-Journal of Theology from the McAuley Campus of Australian
Catholic University (http://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/research/theology/ejournal).
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