Catholicism, holiness and spirituality

Irritation and Obedience

Earlier in this holiday weekend I was reading an article by bishop Donald W Trautman regarding the new Mass translations. What I've read of the new Mass translations has really irritated me, and his article just raised the intensity of the irritation:

All liturgy is pastoral. If translated texts are to be the authentic prayer of the people, they must be owned by the people and expressed in the contemporary language of their culture. To what extent are the new prayers of the Missal truly pastoral? Do these new texts communicate in the living language of the worshiping assembly? How will John and Mary Catholic relate to the new words of the Creed: “consubstantial to the Father” and “incarnate of the Virgin Mary”? Will they understand these words from the various new Collects: “sullied,” “unfeigned,” “ineffable,” “gibbet,” “wrought,” “thwart”? Will the assembly understand the fourth paragraph of the Blessing of Baptismal Water, which has 56 words (in 11 lines) in one sentence? In the preface of the chrism Mass, one sentence runs on for 10 lines. How pastoral are the new collects, when they all consist of a single sentence, containing a jumble of subordinate clauses and commas?

Of all the issues facing the church today – and there are plenty of big, serious ones – why in the world is... who's in charge of this thing? - why are 'they' spending precious time and resources on such a project that will further alienate and distance people from the Mass? We don't need different translations, we need better homilies and more priests! I'm irritated enough to start writing my bishop about this, for all the good that will do. I get cynical and pessimistic as I get irritated.

Tonight, I was reading Encounters With Silence by Karl Rahner, SJ. It's a great little book of prayer, and tonight I read the chapter titled 'God of Law'. It was good timing; here's a small excerpt:

Lord, you have abrogated the Old Law,”which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear” (Acts 15:10). But you have established rulers in this world, both temporal and spiritual, and sometimes it seems to me that they have diligently set about patching up all the holes that Your Spirit of freedom had torn in the fence of rules and regulations by His liberating Pentecostal storm.

There's a lot more good stuff in that chapter that I won't quote because I don't want to type it (pssst – buy the book, it's good). It is a reflection on Rahner's frustration with what he views as overburdening rules and regulations in the church, and his attempt to reconcile that with the God of Freedom: “The Lord is Spirit, and where the Lord is there is freedom” (2 Cor 3:17). If the church is of God, then how is that reconciled with burdensome and sometimes irrelevant rules and regulations? Rahner wanted to follow the rules but he needed help making sense of it all. So do I. He continues on to his conclusion:

The only answer seems to be that, whenever I obey such a law, I must keep looking directly at You, In this way I can pay homage to You, directly and exclusively, and not to the thing that is required of me, not even to the thing as the reflected splendor of Your Being. Precisely because there is in the thing itself nothing to which I can give my heart without reserve, obedience can be the expression of my seeking You alone in it.
...
If I look upon the obedience to these laws as a demonstration of homage for Your beloved free Will, which rules over me according to its own good pleasure, then I can truly find you therein. Then my whole being flows toward You, into You, into the broad, free expanse of Your unbounded Being, instead of being cramped within the narrow confines of human orders. You are the God of human laws for me, only when You are the God of my love.

That's a tall order for me. Rahner had an oath of obedience, to his order and to the church, that he had to follow. While I don't have such an oath, I do have a desire to be close to God, and for me part of that is being close to the Catholic faith. There are a couple church rules I have a seriously hard time with, and when I see foolishness like the new Mass translation and the incredibly unjust way sexual abuse has been handled, it seems like 'they' are making it even harder.

Living & Suffering

Here's another little part of Karl Rahner's work 'Encounters with Silence' that spoke to me recently:

Only knowledge gained through experience, the fruit of living and suffering, fills the heart with the wisdom of love, instead of crushing it with the disappointment of boredom and final oblivion. It is not the results of our own speculation, but the golden harvest of what we have lived through and suffered through, that has the power to enrich the heart and nourish the spirit. And all the knowledge we have acquired through study can do no more than give us some little help in meeting the problems of life with an alert and ready mind.

Karl Rahner, from Encounters with Silence

It's the experience of living - with it's ups & downs, successes and failures - that
leads to more wisdom and love. I can't 'think' my way into it, though such a safe, contained and controlled approach seems attractive. That's challenging for me, to make that jump from mental to physical, to risk putting knowledge to work.

Only in love

This reflection, a prayer I suppose, on finding God through love has caught my attention. I'm a thinking person, but no level of thinking will really get me close to God. Letting the love inside us - which is God - act in our lives is what Rahner says will get us closer to God. I like that.

Only in love can I find You, my God. In love the gates of my soul spring open, allowing me to breath a new air of freedom and forget my own petty self. In love my whole being streams forth out of the rigid confines of narrowness and anxious self-assertion, which make me a prisoner of my own poverty and emptiness. In love all the powers of my soul flow out toward You, wanting never more to return, but to lose themselves completely in You, since by Your love You are the inmost center of my heart, closer to me than I am to myself.

Karl Rahner, from Encounters with Silence

Throwing your arms around Jesus

A quote from Karl Rahner, SJ:

Once I was having a conversation with a modern Protestant theologian whose theories seemed to me rather rationalistic. At one point I put in with "Yes, you see, you're actually only dealing with Jesus when you throw your arms around him and realize right down to the bottom of your being that this is still something you can do today."

The past-all-graspness of God

In several of Rahner's essays that I read recently, he describes God and the experience of God as 'past-all-graspness.' He seems to be determined to use correct and precise terminology, so he made this one up - and I like it.

Rahner was 80 years old when he gave his last major lecture in February, 1984. In its conclusion he talks about death - much of it in a very long sentence that I'll break into sections here as I quote it. I like Rahner's attempt here to break the comfortable images that seem to surround talk about God and the experience of God.

I'm worried that the radical past-all-graspness of what 'eternal life' really refers to is being rendered innocuous, and that what we call the immediate vision of God in this eternal life is being leveled down to one among others of the pleasant occupations that fill this life. The ineffable outrageousness of the absolute Godhead in person falling stark naked into our narrow creaturehood is not being perceived authentically. I confess that it seems to me an agonizing task for today's theologian - one that hasn't been managed - to discover a better imaginative model for this eternal life that prevents these devaluings from the outset. But how? But how?

When the angels of death have swept all the worthless rubbish that we call our history out of the rooms of our consciousness (though of course the true reality of our actions in freedom will remain);
when all the stars of our ideals, with which we ourselves in our own presumption have draped the heaven of our own lived lives, have burned out and are now extinguished;
when death has built a monstrous, silent void, and we have silently accepted this in faith and hope as our true identity;
when then our life so far, however long it has been, appears only as a single, short explosion of our freedom that previously presented itself to us stretched out in slow motion, an explosion in which question has become answer, possibility reality, time eternity, and freedom offered freedom accomplished;
when then we are shown in this monstrous shock of joy beyond saying that this monstrous, silent void, which we experience as death, is in truth filled with the originating mystery that we call God, with God's light and with God's love that receives all things and gives all things;
and when then out of this pathless mystery the face of Jesus, the blessed one, appears to us and this specific reality is the divine surpassing of all that we truly assume regarding the past-all-graspness of the pathless God -
then, then I don't actually want to describe anything like this, but nevertheless, I do want to stammer out some hint of how a person can for the moment expect what is to come:
by experiencing the submergence that is death as already the rising of what is coming.

Eighty years is a long time. But for all of us, the lifetime assigned to us is the short moment in which what is meant to be comes to be.

Karl Rahner, from 'Experiences of a Catholic Theologian'

Resonance

Christians: followers of Christ. At times I've pondered just how do I follow Jesus, how do I carry out that mission? My life is so different from his, and the times certainly have changed.

I came across this quote from Karl Rahner a couple days ago. It's from his notes on a conference retreat he was giving in the 1950's:

The following of Christ is not the observance of moral rules that, although perhaps exemplified by Jesus, fundamentally derive their validity and can be known independent of him. Rather it is an actively participative resonance with precisely his life, and in that life with the inner-divine life that has been given us.

Karl Rahner, from a conference retreat in the 1950's

An 'actively participative resonance' with Christ's life and the divine life already within us... Resonance, in association with the life of Jesus, is not a popular or well-known concept. The dictionary says resonance is 'richness or significance, especially in evoking an association or strong emotion.' So then following Christ comes down to actively participating, in a very intimate, close and emotional way, with the richness and significance of his life, and through that activity with the divine life already inside us.

So this was some new insight for me, and it is leading to more pondering. Which is a good thing.

Let Him Have The Word

Reading one of Rahner's essays on prayer, this paragraph really stuck out. He's talking about what we ought to do when we feel desparate, when we don't feel God's presence and don't feel God hears our prayers. He says, first of all, just 'stay there and let go.' Let go of our activities, busy-ness, our self-concerns. And then second, he says:

Be aware the for a long time He has been waiting for you in the deepest dungeon of your blocked-up heart. Be aware that he has been listening for a long time, to see if you - after all the busy noise of your life, all the talk that you call your "illusion-free philosophy" or perhaps even your prayer, noise and talk in which you are only talking to yourself, after all the despairing, weeping and silent sighing over the need in your life - He has been listening to see if you might finally be able to be silent before Him and let Him have the word, the word that appears to the person you were up until now only as a deathly silence.

Karl Rahner, from The Need and the Blessing of Prayer

Part of being Ultimate Love must mean God is Ultimate Patience too. Always there for us, there in us, just waiting for us to let go of our concerns so we can see him living in our hearts.

More Drudge

I found a few snapshots of time yesterday to read and contemplate more on Rahner's prayer on the Daily Drudge (see previous post). Getting caught up in and bogged down by my daily drudge has been a real hassle for me lately, so I'm savoring thoughts in this prayer. Here are some snippets that spoke to me:

It's me who makes my days drudgery, not the other way around. And thus I realize, if there can ever be a way for me to you [God], then it leads through my daily drudge.

Well, it starts with honesty, I suppose. It's a drudge because I make it drudgery. My path to God goes through all this too; it's not realistic for me to shed all the hassles. And even so, if I could, I would just be trading one set of drudge for another.

But - if there is nowhere where you have given me a place to which we can just flee away in order to find you, and if everything can be the loss of you, the One, then I must be able to find you in everything. Otherwise humanity couldn't find you at all - humanity that can't exist without you. Therefore I must seek you in everything. Each day is a daily drudge, and each day is your day, the hour of your grace.

I can't escape the world, my obligations, my dreary activities and nagging hassles. But, what if I could see how God exists and is being served in all that I do during the day? After all, none of this world exists without God.

I must live out the daily drudge and the day that is yours as one reality. As I turn outward to the world, I must turn inward toward you, the only One, in everything. But how does my daily drudge become the day that is yours? My God, only through you.

This simultaneous turning outward and inward seems to me analogous to having an always-on awareness of God as I go through the day. But how? I can't do it alone, but only by opening myself to God's grace and love.

What then am I to say to you now, as I bring myself, the bedrudged, into your presence? I can only stammer a request for your most commonplace of gifts, which is also your greatest: the gift of your love. Touch my heart with your grace. Let me, as I grasp after the things of this world in joy or in pain grasp and love you through them, the primordial ground of them all. You who are love, give me love, give me yourself, so that all my days may eventually flow into the one day of your eternal life.

Amen.

My Daily Drudge

Finally, I've gotten around to reading some works by Karl Rahner, SJ. Aside from his volumes of deep theological thought, he also wrote a lot of spiritual writings. I am not equipped for his theology, but his spiritual writings are speaking to me.

One of the prayers he wrote was 'God of My Daily Drudge', which can also be found under the title 'God of My Daily Routine' and was originally published in 'Encounters With Silence'. The notes in my book say that 'drudge' is a better translation than 'routine' for the German term 'alltag' (Rahner was German). It's a long prayer, but the first few opening sentences had me hooked:

I should like to bring my daily drudge before you, O Lord - the long hours and days crammed with everything else but you. Look at this daily drudge, my gentle God, you who are merciful to us men and women for whom daily drudge is virtually all we are. Look at my soul, which is virtually nothing but a street on which the world's baggage cart rolls along with innumerable trivialities, with its gossip and fuss, with its noisiness and empty pretension.

There's much more to this, but I'm out of time. Will get back to more of this later in the weekend, I'm sure.