Winter Books:
Bookshelf
Interior Paths
By WILLIAM C. GRAHAM
Spirituality is enduringly popular,
and authentic Christian spirituality will promote renewed appreciation of
gospel invitations and mandates. As a colleague of mine pointed out in a recent
missive, we can read the gospel all we want. But if we hear it as Jesus
and me and not as Jesus and us, we have missed the entire
gospel message. Indeed, we have never heard it.
How to get people into a communal mindset so they can filter this
correctly when most everything in our culture is antagonistic to communalism
seems the task of the modern writer in spirituality.
That said, here follows consideration of some books on
spirituality that came in this months box. And one change in
Bookshelf: For over a decade, I have looked at about 20 books in
each column, some with just a sentence or two, and others at greater length.
Now Ill consider fewer books in one general area.
Visions: The Souls Path to the Sacred, by Eddie
Ensley (Loyola Press, 285 pages, $17.95 hardbound), begins Beneath the
clutter of our everyday busyness is a yearning. The reader might hope she
or he has come across a latter day seeker in the manner of Augustine, whose
Confessions begin with the famous reference to his restless heart that
will find rest only in God.
Ensleys visions include everything from a mellow
warmth we feel when singing a hymn or looking out over Gods ocean to the
ecstatic meetings that seers at Lourdes or Fátima are said to have
experienced. All these encounters with the holy, either subdued or vivid,
are calls to transformation, he says.
Ensley asserts -- perhaps incorrectly -- that we have all
been trained to think that a chasm separates the natural and
supernatural worlds. Writing in his new book, The Catholic
Imagination, Andrew Greeley suggests instead that ordinary Catholics tend
to picture God, creation, the world, society, and themselves the way great
artists do -- as drenched with grace, with Gods passionately forgiving
love.
Ensley looks to dialogue with other traditions, confessing that
his own 30-year quest has resulted in making him more solidly Christian. He
also asserts that both Christianity and Judaism contain wisdom that can enrich
people everywhere, not just Christians and Jews.
While there may be much to admire in his attention to the
immanence of God, I am not convinced that such eclecticism will serve to
promote holiness and steadfastness in the long run. Why would it not be better
to plumb the depths of ones own tradition, or one other way that could
become ones own, rather than setting out as seeker with a boundless
horizon and no particular notion of being at home?
Rabbi Niles Elliot Goldsteins
search for God is not mundane: It has included dogsledding above the Arctic
circle, going down the Silk Road into China without a visa, being chased by a
grizzly bear, cruising the South Bronx with drug agents, and spending a night
in the Tombs, New York Citys much feared jail. In God at the Edge:
Searching for the Divine in Uncomfortable and Unexpected Places (Bell
Tower, Crown Publishing Group, 204 pages, $22 hardbound), he writes of his
powerful and difficult experiences.
He charges that much of what passes for spirituality is comforting
and clean, with 12 steps for this and seven rules for that and guardian angels
to help along the way. He finds that such messages, while helpful to some, do
not deal adequately with the reality of struggle, pain and messy reality. He
seeks alternative religious expression, wisely pointing out that authentic
works on spirituality have never feared the journey to the frontiers of human
experience: The dark forest of the inner spirit may be murky in places,
but buried in its soil are the seeds of our salvation.
He acknowledges that the alternative paths to God to which he
points, at times uncomfortable and unexpected, are not the only conduits to
spirituality, or even the best ones. But he knows that encounters with the
divine do not always happen in synagogues and churches, but can occur in
unsettling places, in agitation and in suffering. He confesses that he
will always hear the call of the wild. Those who hear it also may
find an apt guide and a newly discovered frontier here.
In Ordinary Graces: Christian
Teachings on the Interior Life (Bell Tower, Crown Publishing Group, 263
pages, $22 hardbound), editor Lorraine Kisly has gathered what she terms cycles
of passages that center in the teachings of Christ. They span centuries, and
include the voices of the ancient fathers of the church, modern Catholic,
Orthodox and Protestant artists, writers, saints and teachers.
I love books like this that search the tradition, find gems that
have been buried in tomes often untouched by modern seekers, gathering prompts
to prayer that can be read day by day or chapter by chapter. Kisly wisely
cautions that what she has chosen represents but a fraction of what might have
been included, and no attempt has been made to be either comprehensive or
representative. Good! Maybe these collected insights will prompt readers to go
again to the gospels and epistles, reading with newly opened eyes.
A publisher who would no doubt prefer to remain unnamed told me in
a recent note, Im convinced that every book should be titled How
To Be Happy. This book could have had that title. It begins with an
invitation from the Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart, Let us pray to our
dear Lord God that he help us to mount a life undivided to a life unified.
Amen. And continues both with snippets and lengthier pericopes from
Tertullian to Simone Weil to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. This is surely the
path to happiness: seeking Gods good face as it is revealed day by day,
soul by soul.
I was put off when I read Jim
Marions introduction to his Putting on the Mind of Christ: The Inner
Work of Christian Spirituality (Hampton Roads Publishing Co., 324 pages,
$21.95). He refers to himself as a mystic, by which he means one who has been
blessed with as certain amount of psychic ability to see, feel and sometimes
hear beyond the spacetime world we ordinarily perceive with physical
senses.
I am by no means an expert in mysticism, but it seems to me that
mystics have usually been so involved in mystical activity and perhaps
recording or describing or preserving that experience, that they would not be
so bold or so vain as to call themselves mystics. Marions publisher,
though, calls him a rare combination of Christian mystic and public
policy lawyer. It is, I think, a rare combination indeed.
Marion also bills his work as the first book to clearly
describe the entire Christian spiritual path. He writes of entering an
unnamed monastery in the 1960s where he was swept up into a highly
altered and exalted stage of consciousness for several days at age 15.
His existence there, he reports, was idyllic, until God lowered the
boom and he was plunged into what John of the Cross calls the Dark
Night of the Senses.
His trials include being deprived of a holiday other students had,
his best friend leaving the monastery, interpersonal conflicts and exclusion
from choir though I had a very good voice. These memories, so vivid
and painful at so late a date, might suggest the need for a healing of memories
and making peace with the troubles of adolescence.
Marion took two years to heal, during which time he worked for a
Wall Street investment bank, which somehow seems an odder place for a mystic
than the Whitehorse Tavern in Greenwich Village where the mystical Thomas
Merton and insightful Dylan Thomas both tipped the odd pint.
In his chapter on What Jesus Taught About the Kingdom of
Heaven Marion points out that Christians of many denominational
persuasions think instead that the kingdom is a place, not here, that one
enters after a virtuous life. Such a vision disparages the world and promotes
individualism rather than a concern for the Body of Christ. He could have
worked more on the communal model. If, indeed, we are putting on the same
mind that Jesus had, we will not only come into a no-separation
vision of the Kingdom of Heaven, but get busy transforming the world as
it is into the world as it ought to be.
Marion suggests that we are already perfect in Gods
eyes. Indeed we are the sons and daughters of the most high God, and that
status is not for nothing. But that dignity is not to be confused with
perfection. Where is the sense of sin and conversion in an approach that finds
us already at perfection? This Christian paradox is masterfully treated in
Flannery OConnors story Revelation. OConnor (who
may have well been a mystic) considers the problem of Mrs. Turpin, a decidedly
imperfect soul, who ponders her troubling situation of being redeemed but
standing yet in need of redemption.
Marions work has interesting and valuable features, but it
would be hard, I think, to consider it a clear description of the entire
Christian path.
Fr. William C. Graham is the editor of Sacred Adventure:
Beginning Theological Study. His e-mail address is
NCRBkshelf@aol.com
National Catholic Reporter, November 3,
2000
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