ARTICLES --- VOLUME 65, 2006 --- REVIEW FOR RELIGIOUS

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Coda to the Creed: An Appreciation by Brendan Kneale FSC (65.4 RFR)

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Ripeness Is Everything: Wise Discipleship by Thomas G. Casey SJ (65.4 RFR)

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Sexuality and Celibate Chastity: Friends Not Foes by Sean D. Sammon FMS (65.4 RFR)

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The 2004 Consecrated-Life Congress: A Retrospective by Karen M. Kennelly CSJ, OFM (65.3 RFR)
Aspiratory Prayer, a Welcome Addition toContemplative Prayerby Ernest E. Larkin OCarm (65.3 RFR)
These Strawberries Are Divine! Sisters and a Spirituality of Living on Earth by Colleen Carpenter Cullinan ( 65.3 RFR)

Custodians of Franciscan Households by Michael Blastic, OFM (65.2 RFR)
Imitation of Mary and the Religious Vocation by Julius D. Leloczky OCist (65.2 RFR)
Just Because I Said So by Mary Joseph Schultz SCCC ( 65.2 RFR)

Religious Life in the Third World —a Shangri-La? by Anthony Malaviaratchi CSSR (65.1 RFR)
Truth: Religious Simplicity Revisited by Robert P. Maloney CM (65.1 RFR)
Sharing God the Ignatian Way by David L. Fleming S.J. ( 65.1 RFR)

The 2004 Consecrated-Life Congress: A Retrospective

by Karen M. Kennelly CSJ
From the 65.3 issue of Review for Religious

A myriad of thoughts and images come to mind as I look back at the Congress on Consecrated Life held in Rome in November 2004: hundreds of faces, a babble of languages, colorful multinational garb, and icons of the Woman at the Well and the Good Samaritan focusing us on the congress theme, “Passion for Christ, Passion for Humanity.” The mixed composition of the congress made it unique. For the first time, leadership from both women’s and men’s congregations met in an international con-vocation to address a common agenda. Representatives of the national and international conferences of religious, groups of young religious and theologians, and editors of religious journals joined religious superiors as full participants.

A further note of uniqueness lay in the process used to prepare for, carry out, and follow up on the meeting. Preparation spanned a four-year period involving “envisioning” and “theological summary” groups. The first group sought to achieve consensus on the actual reality of religious life today by eliciting facts and testimonials from around the world. The second analyzed the collected information from a theological perspective and summarized it in a working paper sent in advance to all congress participants. We all had an opportunity to express our preferences for small-group discussions on topics drawn from the working paper. Theologians responsible for composing the paper came from Norway, Spain, France, Italy, the United States, the Philippines, and Burkina Faso. Others, from Mexico, Germany, and Peru, collaborated via the Internet.

During the congress a third or “Listeners” group gathered impressions and ideas as they were expressed in papers presented by the major speakers, in written reports from groups, and in comments from the floor. This group’s work culminated in a synthesis presented to the congress on the last day.

My experience as a member of the Listeners group made me aware of the congress planners’ painstaking efforts to be as pluralistic and inclusive as possible, achieving active participation by those present to the extent that numbers, languages, and time permitted. As with the other groups, our membership comprised about equal numbers of women and men, drawn from every continent. From day to day our dialogue grew in intensity as we listened, exchanged impressions and observations, and began identifying common threads among the multiplicity of ideas brought to the floor.

The principal speakers brought unique perspectives to the assessment of contemporary religious life, beginning with a joint paper by two Italians, Bruno Secondin and Diana Papa, a Carmelite and a Poor Clare. They invited the 847 participants, gathered at some ninety round tables and aided by simultaneous translations into six languages, to begin the adventure of immersing themselves in the themes articulated in the working paper.

Dolores Aleixandre, of Spain, a Religious of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and a theologian, brought scriptural exegesis to the congress’s theme, religious life as passion for Christ and for humanity. She saw in the icons of the Samaritan Woman and the Good Samaritan “a call to center ourselves on the essential, to a different way of relating to each other, of supporting each other intercongregationally, of making room for the laity” (cited from her paper as published in Passion for Christ, Passion for Humanity, Pauline Books and Media, 2005, pp. 91-125)—insights that were to be echoed frequently by congress participants in the days to come.

The Brazilian Jesuit João Batista Libânio brought a sociological and liberation-theology perspective to religious life at the beginning of the third millennium. He spoke of the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience as having significance today only in relation to three elements: an experience of God, community life, and mission. He challenged us to rethink consecrated life from the bottom up in the light of contemporary reality with all its “ambiguity, perplexity, and paradox” (PCPH, pp. 127-171).

The British Dominican Timothy Radcliffe asked “what signs religious life offers” in the wake of the World Trade Towers’ destruction on 11 September 2001, an event he views as symbolic of the world in which religious life exists today, paradoxically bound ever more tightly together by instant communication and ever more deeply divided by violence (PCPH, pp. 173-189). How, he asked, can religious be a “sign of humanity’s common home in God” in a world suffering a crisis of homelessness? What future awaits religious life in a world seemingly offering only a future of violence? What has religious life to offer as the culture of control and the struggle for hegemony intensify?

A North American voice was heard in the person of an Immaculate Heart of Mary sister, Sandra M. Schneiders. She picked up on a topic Radcliffe had noted as fundamental but had not explored, namely, the culture of consumerism and our witness to poverty. Her reflections involved a discussion of how religious incarnate renunciation of the “world” and go about creating “the alternate world generated by the profession of the vows” (PCPH, pp. 191-218). Characterizing the religious lifestyle as one rooted in the “public, lifelong commitment of the members, as individuals and as communities, to a characteristic approach to material goods, power, and sexuality,” she caught the assembly’s imagination early in her talk with her arresting statement that she would discuss, not “the future of religious life,” but rather “religious life of the future.”

Schneiders’s imaginative and theologically profound exploration of evangelical poverty as the “economy of the reign of God,” and of prophetic obedience as the “politics of the reign of God,” gave us much to think about as Vincentian Franc Rodé, prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life (ciclsal), brought the series of formal presentations to a close with a recapitulation of major themes in recent papal documents such as Vita consecrata and Novo millennio ineunte (PCPH, pp. 219-236).

Participants next divided into continental groups to look at sociological factors touching upon consecrated life in their own continents, noting both positive and negative effects these factors were thought to have on the capacity of religious to be passionate for Christ and for humanity. Some of the most acute observations expressed in the congress — whether from the floor during open-microphone time or in the hastily written reports — flowed from these gatherings.

As Listeners striving to perceive the essence of group contributions, we constantly had to make allowances for the great diversity within the somewhat artificial continental categories. The Europeans prefaced their report by describing it as a “communion of intentions” and “truly an exercise in European communion,” given the different languages and situations in which Europe finds itself. Asians noted the vastness of their continent and its diversity of languages, cultures, religions, and political and economic systems before commenting on their many shared concerns.

The Africans’ preface included this in bold type: “Note: in Africa it is not possible to generalize. There is great diversity in the situations.” Those from Oceania, the smallest segment of the congress, nevertheless noted the extremes they represented: countries with predominantly Western European lifestyles and countries where the lifestyles are indigenous to Melanesia and the Pacific. Only the North American and Latin American groups dispensed with such cautions and addressed directly their shared task of identifying the impact of sociological factors on religious life as they experienced it.

Themes from the continental groups that seem worthy of special attention, whether for their singularity or their commonality, include gender issues; war, violence, and disease; globalization; aging, institution-alization, and rigid structures; and clear signs of new life among religious.

Religious from every continent saw gender issues as adversely affecting contemporary religious life. Europeans referred to “the open question of gender” and felt that, “because of the sexual abuse and the impact on the mass media, consecrated life is reduced in energy and its ability to witness: a sense of desolation pervades and passion is suppressed.” Asians underscored “male domination in society and church” and “machismo and male domination” as sociological factors adversely affecting them. The African report alluded to the problem in rather oblique fashion by noting that “the idea of relations between men and women continues to be very much determined by the culture.”

North Americans were succinct in their assertion that “the sociology within the church is an obstacle to the passion for Christ and for humanity. The lack of inclusivity . . . results in feelings of displacement in the church, a sense of being marginalized by many, particularly in women’s communities.” Those from the Latin American (and Caribbean) continental group cited as important values “awareness of the processes of exclusion and the greater involvement of women.” They felt they were being called to “generate a feminine religious life with more involvement and responsibility for the building of a new history and a feminine consciousness-raising that challenges the machismo in society and in the church.” The Oceania report minced no words in seeing as a problem the “public face of the church: powerful, antiwomen, and hypocritical.”

It came as no surprise that Europeans were the most forceful in pointing out the “aging of the population, the generation gap in religious life,” and “rigidity in structures, even of consecrated life” as sociological factors with negative effects on religious life. In other words, they asserted that the passion of religious for humanity is blocked by the “way in which our structures are closed and in which we are closed towards the world of the laity.” Less predictable was the echoing of this view by other groups. The Asians, for example, felt that institutionalization in their region had created a gap between them and the people, “especially the poor, who identify us with the rich,” and that “religious structures have stifled the spirit and dynamism of religious life. The young feel restricted and their freedom hindered by structures the old always lean on.”

A similar concern shows up in the African report; it lists as negative aspects “the weight of tradition” and “a way of seeing authority at the level of leaders, a traditional conception which still dominates both society and religious life.” This report speaks urgently of a need for reflection on consecrated life that is distinctly African, a need to find an African way of following Christ. Such thoughts question the worth of structures inherited from a colonial past. These concerns surfaced also in the Asian group, which considered it deplorable that “Asian religious have been uprooted from their rich culture.” The report from Oceania, too, alluded to rigid structures when it asserted that “restorationism” in the church, while attracting people looking for security, has caused consecrated life to lose credibility as a radical commitment to justice.

The Latin Americans saw sociological factors to be causes or occasions of religious being “tamed by the institution [of religious life], tired, with little hope, disenchanted, adapting, living in indifference, [possessing] little consciousness of [consecrated life’s] own identity, of its own ability to search, [experiencing] great difficulty in having deep interpersonal relationships with others and with God.” They offered the intriguing possibility of countering this loss of the prophetic and mystic elements of religious life by working with the “small utopias which act in favor of humanity and in collaboration with other ecclesial, intercongregational, and extraecclesial groups that search for the same reality/values/things.”

The impact had on contemporary religious life by war, other forms of violence, and disease was noted by every group but particularly by the Africans, who noted the prevalence of aids, malaria, and other diseases and the instability resulting from wars and ethnic and religious conflicts in that continent.

“Violence is growing: it questions us,” said the Europeans. Asians expressed serious concern over effects of war and violence, especially in the Middle East, and over the “rise of religious fundamentalism, resulting in communal violence.” North Americans deplored the “normalization of violence” and what they perceived as its causes
.
All groups saw globalization as exerting a great influence on society and on consecrated life today.

The Africans saw it—along with urbanization, unemployment, and migration — as contributing to poverty at various levels. They blamed it for “hindering a deep form of communication” and for contributing to a lack of reflection specifically on African consecrated life. Asians saw “elitist globalization” as having destructive effects on the poor and marginalized, on families, and especially on youth.

Latin Americans described “neoliberal globalization” as destroying “what is particular to/in our countries,” as especially damaging to young people, and as a spur to migration, with its multiple social dislocations. Oceania observed globalization as affecting the entire region — countries indigenous in character and countries predominantly Western European — by widening the gap between rich and poor and “elevating greed to the status of a virtue.”

This summary of the continental group reports, brief though it is, suggests a major accomplishment and a major flaw of the congress. Those present heard the voices of religious from every corner of the world with a wonderful immediacy and force. On the other hand, we simply did not have time for much dialogue of a more personal kind. Each of the continental reports, however, concluded with a very provocative section on signs of hope and of new life. Groups cited a growing sense of communion among congregations and between laypersons and religious, of the importance of personal relationships, of commitment, of community and of belonging, of greater interiority along with a lessened grip of institutionalism.

Europeans made the arresting statement that secularization, despite its negative consequences, is also “causing us to love the world as it is with hope.” Asians remarked that our times are ripe with opportunity: “As Asians in Asia, we have our own experience of God. By this, perhaps, we can contribute to the vitality of religious life. It is time for rebirthing our institutes with our Asian identity.” Africans saw themselves as bringing to religious life the gifts of a deep sense of God and of the family which leads to sharing and attentiveness to one another. One young African, during the all-too-brief open microphone time in a plenary session, good-naturedly scolded his European elders for perceiving death for religious life in the future, whereas their “children” from other parts of the world, hoisted on the shoulders of their European parents, can see farther ahead to future life! North Americans ventured the opinion that aging could be looked upon as “saging,” an opportunity to draw new life from the wisdom of the elderly. Diminishment, they thought, provides “a freedom to reshape religious life.”

Participants barely had the continental group reports in hand before moving on to topical discussions in groups ranging in size from six to over a hundred, depending on people’s interests:

• Justice, peace, and the suffering of humanity.
• Inculturation—the embodiment of consecrated life in a culturally pluralistic world.
• Interreligious dialogue.
• The arts: imaging and expressing a new song.
• Mass media and the communication of values.
• Liberating the prophetic: solidarity in a world of exclusion.
• Liberating the prophetic: celibacy and life-giving relationships.
• Tilling the soil of Sacred Scripture.
• Thirst for God and the search for meaning.
• Ongoing formation for personal conversion and corporate transformation.
• Congregational culture.
• Community as mission.
• Partnership with the laity.
• Leadership and authority.
• The ecclesial dimensions of consecrated life.

Although the time allocated for these discussions was brief, each topic was based on material in the working paper distributed well in advance of the meeting. Participants came prepared and were assigned their first choice among the three topics in which they had indicated interest before coming. As a result, they shared many thoughtful insights with one another; a summary appears in Passion for Christ, Passion for Humanity (pp. 237-241). Those of us present for the congress received the somewhat longer reports composed by group reporters on site.

Some Conclusions

For me, the challenge posed by the congress was at the time and remains today one of assimilation and communication. The rich papers presented by speakers, along with participants’ voices as reflected in reports by the continental and topical groups, left our table of Listeners with the nearly impossible task of assimilating content and shaping it into a synthesis at the final session. Our summary, “What the Spirit Says Today to Consecrated Life,” compressed into an hour’s oral delivery the reflection and discernment that had absorbed us during the entire congress.

Rather than repeat that synthesis (see PCPH, pp. 243-255), I want to share what stand out for me a year later as the two most significant messages conveyed by this unique gathering. The first is that the Spirit is at work among us today, regardless of how old or young we are as religious, no matter how old or young our congregations, and no matter whether we come from north, south, east, or west. The second is that a contemplative approach is required of the members of our congregations if we are to discern what the Spirit is saying to us at this critical moment of our history, some forty years since Vatican Council ii invited religious to renew their lives in the light of the gospel, their foundational charisms, and the signs of the times.

The Spirit calls us to revive the enchantment, the passion, we had when we first responded, as congregations and as individuals, to Jesus’ call to love God and our neighbor with all our heart. The Spirit calls us to personal and institutional renewal, to inculturation and to interreligious dialogue. The Spirit calls us to an inclusive attitude toward the laity, and this, in turn, calls for new structures and a new language expressive of the inner reality of our consecrated life. The Spirit calls us to esteem personal relations over structure, and to develop ourselves as religious capable of loving human relationships. We are called by Jesus to be passionate and to exercise compassion toward others, particularly toward all who suffer the indignities of poverty, discrimination, and alienation of any kind.

The congress experience brought home to me anew that we are living through a period of vast and deep change in consecrated life — a sort of gestation period heavy with the promise of new birth. The seeds have been planted in good ground and are being warmed and watered by the life-bearing winds of the Spirit. We have only to tend the garden and pay attention with a discerning eye to the sprouts of new life lest we uproot them as noxious weeds before they have a chance to flower and bear fruit.

Our congregations are being called to collaborate with the Spirit in bringing to birth the consecrated life of the future. It was apparent at the congress—its participants a cross section of more than six hundred congregations of women and men from all over the world—that the vision, the hopes, and the sense of urgency are widely shared. The modes of discernment and dialogue will necessarily differ from country to country, depending on culture and opportunity, but the desire for intra - and intercongregational reflection and collaboration is present among religious in every continent.

As a practical matter, I would urge congregations to take advantage of their forthcoming chapters to follow up on major themes explored at the congress. Chapters are periodically convened by every congregation; agendas and processes can readily be shaped to facilitate the kind of individual and corporate reflection we need and desire. Although successful use of this option is not without difficulties, it would seem to offer the best chance for congregations to address the congress message in a timely way, and to seek the implications of that message for themselves.

Clearly there are a few obstacles to surmount if we are to facilitate contemplative chapters that make good use of the theological and sociological perspectives offered at the congress. International congregations, whose members often constitute a microcosm of the multicultural 2004 gathering in Rome, in many cases still experience subtle Western attitudes that prevent the kind of dialogue modeled by the congress. Smaller local congregations may need to push beyond parochial concerns to help members achieve a broader vision and seek greater goals. But all must beware of a tendency toward activism, the preoccupation with doing rather than being that marks our contemporary world.

Whether we come from large or small congregations, from apostolic, monastic, or contemplative “families” of religious; whether we can trace our history back for centuries or only a few years; and whether we are Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans, or Oceanians, we are all called by the Spirit to use the congress and our own experience as a springboard to dive into the deep pool of Holy Mystery in which we religious live and move and have our being. It is for us at this crucial point in our history to delve deeper, to listen, to reflect, to dialogue, and to discern the spiritual realities of the life and mission we share as religious, to ask ourselves how we need to be if we are to do the works of persons passionate for Christ and passionate for humanity.

Suggested Reading

Passion for Christ, Passion for Humanity, Pauline Books and Media, 2005.

Reflection/Discussion Questions

1. As I/we read the responses from the different continental groups regarding the future of religious life, which response gave me/us new insight and which response would I/we want to discuss further?
2. How can we take advantage of the “aging” of religious life members in our country to draw upon their wisdom (“saging”) for our apostolic life and direction?
3. What practical steps do I/we need to take in order to adopt a more contemplative approach to listen to and follow the movements of the Spirit within our religious life context?

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by Ernest E. Larkin OCarm
From the 65.3 issue of Review for Religious

Aspirations (aspiratory prayer) were a treasure in European Christianity in the late Middle Ages and one of the great legacies of the Touraine Reform in 17th-century France. This reform took place in “les Grands Carmes,” the popular name in France for the Carmelites of the Ancient Observance (OCarm). The style of prayer that goes by the name of aspirative or aspiratory prayer, or simply aspiration, is almost unknown in contemporary spirituality. The present article is a move to fill this lacuna and to suggest how the prayer of aspirations can contribute to the contemplative renewal of our times. I will first give an overview of the prayer in tradition and highlight its three outstanding proponents: the 13th-century Carthusian Hugh of Balma, the Franciscan Henry Herp (+1477), and the Carmelite John of St. Samson (1571-1636). Finally I shall make some suggestions on how to revive the practice.

What Is Aspiratory Prayer?

Aspiratory prayer is a warm, human approach to God that is inexorably affective. It proceeds by way of fervent desires of the heart. It was considered a shortcut, a direct route, to intimacy and oneness with God. Its structure is simple: frequent and intense desires breathed out to God. It has only one goal, union with God, so it ceases to have a role when mystical union is achieved.
Aspirations are not the same as ejaculations, though they are like each other. Ejaculatory prayer describes any and all brief prayers sent like darts to heaven for help, thanksgiving, adoration, or any other good motive. “My Jesus, mercy” is an ejaculation. Aspira-tions are only and always passionate desires or fervent acts of love of God. They are expressed in words or sighs or silence. “My God, I love you” is an aspiration. To aspire means to breathe out, with the connotation of breathing hard after something. In aspiratory prayer one breathes out heartfelt desires for God. It is yearning for God, like gasping for God.

Aspiratory prayer is simple and focused, though in the beginning it may cover a wide sweep of emotions and feelings. Practice simplifies and unifies the faculties to give them a single thrust, much as the prayer of simplicity consolidates the multiple affections of affective prayer into a single attitude of loving presence. Aspiratory prayer sets the heart on one goal, divine union, and is a positive step in that direction. Not everybody can use it. It is not for beginners, but for those who have come to know God and themselves through Bible reading, reflection, and loving conversations with God. When a person has put her house in order and has come to love God in truth, she is ready for this prayer. For those who love God, it will become as natural as breathing.

Catholic teachers in the past were sticklers in assigning different prayer forms to different stages of growth. The prayer of beginners was discursive meditation and affective prayer, that is, first much thinking and then many affections. The next stage was contemplative, and it featured forms like simply looking at the tabernacle as in the Curé d’Ars’ “I look at him and he looks at me,” or today’s resting in God in centering prayer, or saying the mantra as in Christian Meditation. Today we probably pay less attention to the degrees of prayer, though we still honor them. Centering prayer and Christian Meditation have democratized contemplative prayer. Certainly some knowledge and love of the Lord is presupposed for contemplative prayer, but a little knowledge and love go a long way. Those who are comfortable with centering prayer and Christian Meditation will be at home with aspirations.

Who, then, are called to this prayer? Those who are fervent and serious about their relationship with God and have a great desire for intimacy with God. They are looking for the “more.” The classical teaching placed the prayer in the illuminative way as part of the contemplative life. Two categories are involved here, and both are second stages: the illuminative comes between the purgative and the unitive way, and the contemplative life between the active and the mystical life. The three divisions correspond to beginners, the proficient, and the perfect. Active life has to do with external behavior, contemplative with inner prayer, and the mystical life with high sanctity. The purgative way is concerned with conversion and purification, the illuminative way with enlightenment, and the unitive with union with God.

The three ways and their content are criticized today for being too dependent on Neoplatonic philosophy, the system that canonized the immaterial and denigrated the bodily. (1) Aspirative prayer rises above this controversy and in fact is a corrective against exaggerated spiritualism and minimizing the physical and bodily in the spiritual life. Aspirations welcome and embrace the emotional and the sensible; these human qualities lead to the highest realms of the spirit. They move the experience of God away from the intellectual and into the realm of affection and love. (2)

Aspiratory prayer comes out of the same tradition as centering prayer and Christian Meditation. The latter two are contemporary constructions from that contemplative tradition, a development that aspiratory prayer has yet to find. But all three systems appeal to the same sources, the same authors, and even the same texts for their grounding and justification. (3) This fact and their constant location in the middle stage of spiritual development argue to their commonality.

Centering prayer and Christian Meditation seek silent presence and quiet resting in God. At the same time they are active prayer, rightly called meditation of a nondiscursive or contemplative type. They are not classical contemplation in the sense of infused prayer, but are products of human effort and ordinary grace. Aspiratory prayer is obviously active in the same sense. It uses the language of intense, passionate love and expresses the yearning of the heart and delights to rest in the Lord.

Aspiratory prayer is more than loving conversation with God. It expresses a strong act of the will that desires to experience God. So it is more than a tête-à-tête, even in the loving language of affective colloquy. The difference is intensity. Affective prayer engages the feelings but in a diffuse way, whereas a strong will and urgent longings for intimacy dominate aspiratory prayer.
Aspirations fit nicely into the perspectives and practice of “love mysticism,” which is a form of relating to God in spousal love. The language of spousal love is very human, amorous, and passionate. Its biblical source is the Song of Songs or St. John’s Gospel, and it is a frequent feature in medieval women mystics and also in writers like St. Bernard or St. John of the Cross. Janet K. Ruffing has written a guide for the spiritual direction of those called to this way. She gives many examples of its language, one of which is the following conversation in Mechthild of Magdeburg, who says to God: “God, you are my lover, / my longing, / my flowing stream, / my sun, / and I am your reflection.” And God replies: “It is my nature that makes me love you often, / for I am love itself. / It is my longing that makes me love you intensely, / for I yearn to be loved from the heart. / It is my eternity that makes me love you long, / for I have no end.” (4)

Aspirative prayer is not limited to spousal love. It is at home with a nonspousal love of God, which Janet Ruffing calls simply apophatic. The mysticism of the more matter-of-fact Cloud of Unknowing features wholehearted love, often without obvious passion. In this latter case the love is sublimated into disinterested love in a style of relationship that is reserved and controlled. Mystics in this pattern will practice their own brand of aspirations.

Aspiratory prayer is thus a technical term, but it is not “one size fits all.” Its normal form is sensible-spiritual love. For Henry Herp only this love qualifies as aspiration. For him its follow-up, which is pure spiritual love, is not aspiration, but unitive love. John of St. Samson, however, treats pure spiritual love as a form of aspiration, and for him this higher aspiration leads one into the furnace of God’s love in transforming union. For both authors the will is the driving force for aspirations and for unitive love. In sensible-spiritual love the sensibility is the carrier, but the momentum comes from the will, which makes the love truly spiritual.

Do not think that the practitioner lives on a perpetual high. The expression of loving desires for God continues in down days and dryness as much as in times of sweetness and sensible consolation. The feeling element is still there. It must be genuine, not faked or pretended or forced. Thérèse of Lisieux is a perfect example of the expression of passionate desires of love for God in the darkest moments of life. (5)

There are degrees of the practice corresponding to the person’s habitual love of God and the grace of the moment. John of St. Samson sees it as leading directly into a mystical expression, in which the Holy Spirit breathes out enflamed desires for God. His conditions for practicing this prayer are demanding. Persons who take up the practice must be mortified, humble, and self-effacing as well as robust in health. In his view aspirations go beyond the enthusiasm of a newly baptized Pentecostal or charismatic and belong to persons advanced in the love of God and on fire for the summit.

The History and Theology of Aspiratory Prayer

Aspiratory prayer flourished in the late Middle Ages in northern Europe, especially the Rhineland and France, from the 13th to the 17th century. At the time of the Touraine Reform, the practice was common in popular religious culture. Aspirative prayer appealed to the architects of Touraine because they saw the practice as dovetailing with their view of the goal of the Carmelite order, which was to live continuously in the loving presence of God. (6)

Intimations of aspiratory prayer are found in the New Testament, in St. Augustine and John Cassian, who were contemporaries, in St. Benedict and Guigo II, and in other early authors. The first to give aspirative prayer a central place in the spiritual life was Hugh of Balma, whose Theologia Mystica exerted wide influence, partly because it was thought to be the work of St. Bonaventure. Hugh of Balina taught the way of the heart, and aspiratory prayer was its chief expression. First one must know one’s weak self and the goodness of God, since anyone filled with self is unable to yearn for God. This knowledge prepares one to rise up to God in “anagogic contemplation.”

Anagogic contemplation means moving from creature to Creator, from the text of Scripture to the living God, enflamed with desire and love. Such is aspiratory prayer. The love is both natural-spiritual and purely spiritual, and God is the direct object. The love increases with the simplification and unification of the faculties until ultimately there is mystical union with the Trinity in the high point of the soul called the apex mentis. Henry Herp and John of St. Samson will pick up on these perspectives and expand them with the help of Jan van Ruusbroec’s theology (1293-1381).

Hugh had many imitators, especially among the Carthusians, who promoted and developed this teaching so effectively that Everard Mercurian, an early general of the Jesuits, warned the Society about “the Carthusian method of prayer” for fear that its popularity would marginalize Ignatian prayer in Spain. (7) The 14th-century anonymous English text The Cloud of Unknowing is likely a Carthusian document, both because it can easily be interpreted as a full exposition of aspiratory prayer and because its anonymous author may well be a Carthusian. (8) A number of familiar quotations from the book are obviously formulas of aspiratory prayer.

Henry Herp OFM (+1447)

Henry Herp wrote the first synthesis of the whole spiritual journey around the topic of aspirative prayer. His map is the structure of the soul as delineated by the great Flemish mystical writer Jan van Ruusbroec. The soul is three concentric circles, each of them representing a different level of human activity. Herp offers a detailed plan for moving through the outer two levels and arriving at the inner circle of highest union with the Holy Trinity. He lays down instructions for each of the phases of the journey, but his chief contribution is to show how aspirative prayer moves one through the middle circle.

Ruusbroec calls the three circles “spheres” or “unities,” whereas Herp names them mansions or dwelling places like Teresa of Avila. The first is the region of the senses, the second that of the spirit, and the third the “fond” or ground, the dwelling place of the Holy Trinity.

One must traverse each level to get to the center, and the way is introversion, a concept that goes back to St. Augustine. Herp calls it “ascension.” Persons “ascend,” that is, they are lifted up by a sweeping action that carries them through the given circle and toward the center; the searcher for God leaves behind the lesser level or part of it in favor of the higher one. This process of introversion means making the powers on each level converge toward the center. The activity of each level is collapsed into the next step. In this imagery the outer circle of exterior behavior is introverted into the middle circle, and in the middle the lower faculties of the irascible and concupiscible appetites, and of reason and free will, are introverted into the spiritual faculties of intellect, memory, and will. These latter will finish the task and bring the soul into mystical union in the center.

The introversion or ascension starts with the outer or exterior circle, which represents the active life. The means set down by Herp for this first introversion are “truth and compassion.” Truth means understanding the goodness of God and the bankruptcy of the human, and compassion is appreciating God’s love and attractiveness.

The middle level is the field for aspiratory prayer and unitive love. Aspirations address the “interior inferior powers,” especially the concupiscible appetite, which in Herp’s view has a spiritual quality about it. Unitive love is exercised by the spiritual faculties. Understanding guides the process: hence the importance of regular meditation and of the use of prepared ejaculations that recall the supreme attraction of God and serve to inflame the soul with love. The awakened will moves the sensory faculties to yearn for God, progressively spiritualizing the person for the work of unitive love. For Herp, unitive love takes over the task begun in the lower interior faculties. The acts of pure, unitive love finish the task of the introversion of the spirit level and open the way to the center. In the center the love is fruitive love. The contemplative way is left behind, and the soul now lives the “super-essential life” of oneness with the Trinity, a union that is not ontological but psychological.

Herp offers some good pastoral advice. The stages are to be addressed in order and none can be skipped. Basic conversion is presupposed for undertaking aspiratory prayer, and that means an adult knowledge of God and one’s self and the acquisition of the moral virtues. Aspiratory prayer begins with rote expressions of love and fervor. According to Herp, these feelings crescendo into what he calls an explosion of love, which has its own danger of entrapping the person in the delightful, sensible sweetness. The love is gradually purified and becomes the unitive love that will lead the soul into the center. Unitive love, too, undergoes its own purifications, and the follow-up experiences may be as dark and dry as the initial entry was exalted. The challenge at this point, as at every point in the spiritual life, is marginalizing the self, that is, letting go of everything that is not God. The holy soul practicing spiritual love will continue to work at the total gift of self to God, and its tasks are listed by Herp as self-offering, searching for God’s will, letting God’s love destroy all defects, and being united with God.

John of St. Samson (1571-1636)

John of St. Samson is an immensely important figure in the Carmel of the Ancient Observance. He was a mystic of profound experience, and, in spite of the blindness that afflicted him from the age of three, he was well educated and well read, keeping in touch with currents of spirituality in the very rich 17th century. He has been called the French John of the Cross and is highly esteemed by religious historians like Henri Bremond and Louis Cognet.

John of St. Samson lived a century and a half after Herp, but Herp’s work was well known to him in the numerous Latin and French translations and in the plethora of spiritual writings that popularized aspiratory prayer. John of St. Samson became expert in the teaching of this way, building on Herp but adding his own points of view. There had been a lot of writing, but little development since Herp. After a careful comparison of the two authors, Canisius Janssen concludes that John’s doctrine is Herp in a new packaging. “Certain things have been left out,” he writes, “others developed; in short the whole has acquire
a new face.” (9)

John belongs to the same Dutch school of mysticism as Herp, both of them appropriating the worldview of Ruusbroec. We come from God as created images in the Uncreated Word, and our life goal is to return to our place in the Word in full consciousness of our unity in God. The goal is put rather abstractly as “the state of consummation of the subject in the Object” in a “union without difference or distinction.” Such is the transforming union, in which the soul is caught up in the fire of the divine life. The way to the goal is introversion according to the same divisions as in Henry Herp, but with the adaptations in nomenclature.

John is particularly eloquent is explaining how spiritual love guides the whole process of introversion once aspirations become the way. Spiritual love is at the heart of sensible-spiritual aspirations, and it constitutes the spiritual aspirations that lead one into the center itself. Aspirations have the genius of putting our full humanity to work by engaging our feelings and emotions as well as our spirit. Sensible love is the starter, and it houses the spiritual love in sensible-spiritual aspirations. When the aspirations become “more vigorous, more on fire, and more detached from sense,” they are pure spiritual love. This spiritual love, with or without a sensible component, is the engine that drives the introversion process into the furnace that is God.

Aspiration thus has a mystical quality in John, as is clear from the following quotation:

Aspiration is not only an affectionate colloquy. . . ; that is what aspiration is born of and comes forth from. Aspiration, then, is an outpouring of the whole heart and spirit on fire with love. By it the soul quickly transcends itself and all of creation, becoming intimately united with God in the intensity of its loving expression. Expressing itself quintessentially in this way, the soul transcends all tender, sensible, cerebral, and comprehensible love, reaching by the vehemence of God’s spirit and its own effort, not just any divine union, but a sudden transformation of its spirit into God. In the abounding and ineffable sweetness of God himself lovingly embracing one’s spirit, it transcends, I say, all familiar and intelligible love. This is the essence of aspiration, in itself, in its cause, and in its effect. (10)

Note

1. Philip Sheldrake, Spirituality and History (New York: Orbis Books, 1995), pp.186-189.
2. Aspiratory prayer is more at home with the language of love than with the Greek categories of contemplation. The literature of the Touraine Reform seems to prefer the evangelical language. One of my esteemed Carmelite teachers and mentors over a lifetime, whose life and studies were dominated by Touraine, frequently showed annoyance at the ambiguities of the vocabulary of contemplation. He preferred to speak of “love” and “loving” as the true measure of prayer rather than different forms of “contemplation” or “contemplative.” Instead of describing Carmelite life as “contemplative,” he preferred the simple word “prayerful.” I interpreted his attitude as a reflection of the viewpoint of Touraine.
3. Canisius Janssen OCarm surveys the sources of aspiratory prayer in the first of two excellent articles on the history and theology of aspiratory prayer, “Oraison aspirative chez Herp et chez ses prédécesseurs,” Carmelus 3 (1956): 19-48. It lists the sources of this prayer in earlier times before its first major exponent, Henry Herp. These sources turn out to be the same texts cited in studies on the roots of centering prayer and Christian Meditation. An example of the latter is Robert W. Ginn’s defense against critics, “Centering Prayer: Reviving the Ancient Christian Tradition in Modern Times,” a manuscript dated 5/26/05 and circulated by Contemplative Outreach. Janssen’s second article is titled “L’oraison aspirative chez Jean de Saint Samson,” Carmelus 3 (1956): 185-216. I wish to express my gratitude for these two studies and my indebtedness to them in the formation of the present paper.
4. Spiritual Direction: Beyond the Beginnings (New York: Paulist, 2000), pp. 9-10. Christian mystics from Origen on applied the imagery of the Song of Songs to their relationship with God. St. Thérèse of Lisieux belongs to this group, and a dominant feature of her prayer was aspiration. See Romero de Lima Gouvea OCarm, “Vivre d’amour: la prière aspirative chez Thérèse de l’Enfant Jesus (l873-1897),” Carmelus 47 (2000): 19-40.
5. See Ernest E. Larkin OCarm, “The Little Way of St. Thérèse of Lisieux,” Review for Religious 59 (September-October 2000): 507-517, at 514-515.
6. The Touraine Reform is not as well known as its counterpart, the Discalced Reform begun by St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross in 16th-century Spain. Touraine began in Brittany in northwest France in the next century. Like the Discalced Reform, it was a radical return to the primitive spirit of the order. Unlike the Discalced Reform, Touraine did not become juridically separated from the old order, but remained in the trunk and spread to every province as the “strictior observantia.” See Kilian J. Healy OCarm, Methods of Prayer in the Directory of the Carmelite Reform of Touraine (Rome: Institutum Carmelitanum, 1956), pp. 15-21.
7. Janssen, Carmelus 3, p. 27.
8. This is the conclusion of James Walsh SJ in his introduction to the Classics of Western Spirituality edition of The Cloud of Unknowing (New York: Paulist, 1981).
9. Janssen, Carmelus 3, p. 210.
10. Jean de St. Samson, L’éguillon, les flammes, les flèches, et le miroir de l’amour de Dieu, in Oeuvres complètes I, edition critique par Hein Blommestijn (Rome: Institutum Carmelitanum, 1992), p. 98. Aspiration donc n’est pas seulement un colloque affectueux. . . ; c’est d’icelui que nait et procede l’aspiration. Aspiration donc est un poussement amoureux, enflammé de tout le coeur et l’esprit; par lequel l’ame surpasse prontement elle mesme et toute chose creée, s’unissant étroitement à Dieu en la vivacité de son expression amoureuse; laquelle ainsi Essentiellement exprimée, surpasse tout amour sensible, raisonnable, intellectuel et conprehensible; arrivant par l’impetuosité de l’esprit de Dieu et de son effort, à l’union de Dieu, non tellement quellement, mais par une soudaine transformation de l’esprit en Dieu. L’esprit, dis-ie, surpasse en lui même tout l’amour connessable et intelligible en l’abondante et ineffable suavité de Dieu mesme, auquel il est amoureusement englouti. Voilà que c’est que l’aspiration Essentielle en elle même, sa cause et son effet. (The passage is cited by Janssen in the article on John of St. Samson, p. 195. The translation has been made from the text in the critical edition cited above.)
11. Janssen, Carmelus 3, p. 204.
12. The translation of the Directorium Carmelitanum was made from the Latin by Leo J. Walter ocarm (Chicago: Carmelite Press, 1951). See also Kilian J. Healy, Walking with God (New York: Declan X. McMullen, 1948), reprinted as Awakening Your Soul to the Presence of God (Manchester, New Hampshire: Sophia Institute Press, 1999); see also his chapter in Methods of Prayer, pp. 60-75.

Reflection Questions

1. What have I learned about aspiratory prayer as I have read Larkin's article?
2. How might I begin to make aspiratory prayer a daily part of my prayer life?

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These Strawberries Are Divine! Sisters and a Spirituality of Living on Earth

by Colleen Carpenter Cullinan
From the 65.3 issue of Review for Religious

I live in rural western Minnesota, three hours west of the Twin Cities. Three hours is a good long drive. Once you get about forty minutes out, you are past the suburbs, and Highway 7 is a pretty empty stretch of road. Small towns pop up here and there, but mostly it is a sea of corn, soybeans, and sugar beets for miles on end. Occasionally, strangely, you will see a long, low building on the horizon-windowless, enormous, oddly isolated. Signs nearby will say, “Keep Out! Disease Control Area.” I wondered for the longest time what on earth these buildings were, and then one hot summer day I found out. Sections of the walls of these buildings are louvered, and on this day they were raised up and you could see in, and what you could see was this: turkeys, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, a veritable sea of turkey heads. This is, of course, modern industrial agriculture: confinement production. I know it would be an anthropomorphism to suggest that the turkeys longed for the freedom of the great outdoors, but I do know that they were clustered by the openings — for the fresh air, I suspect, and the light.

I will not torment you with the details of a turkey’s life on a factory farm, but I will say that it is amazing how far technology, medication, and standardization can push living beings, and how easy it then becomes to see them as “products” or “units of output” instead of animals. This is, I think, a great loss. Animals are not people; I do not believe they have human rights or turkey rights. I know, though, that they are animals, not machines or inert materials. They breathe and smell and taste and see; they are connected to the earth. To deprive them of that is a symptom of our own refusal to understand ourselves as part of creation.

Factory farming is “normal” in the United States. Small farms with a few cows, some pigs, a few hundred acres of this and that, a big garden, and a henhouse do not really exist anymore — though the change has come about so quickly that many living people in America grew up on farms like that. In a little over a generation, farming has been completely transformed — and rural life with it. “Get big or get out” became the rule, and many farmers left rural America. My town, Montevideo, is typical. People remember when there were three women’s dress stores on Main Street, but now the only place to buy clothes in town is Wal-Mart. The Hollywood theater is grand, glorious, and has been shuttered for years. The town is shrinking, and struggling. The Catholic school closed years ago, and our parish shares a priest with two other towns. We are not bustling. We are not growing. And we are, for the most part, invisible, even or perhaps especially to most mainstream environmentalists and conservationists.

It is easy to ignore farming communities. From an enviromnentalist’s standpoint, it is easy to drop us down to the bottom of the list. Cities have far more people, more pollution, more egregious examples of destruction. Wilderness — unpopulated, undefended — clearly needs friends and defenders. But farms? In fact, we ignore the countryside at our peril. Farming affects all of us — or at least all of us who eat and drink. The way we raise our food has polluted our rivers, devastated our soil, and saddled us with food that we must always treat as if it has been contaminated or is diseased, because too often it has been, and is. Mothers are warned not to let their children taste raw cookie dough — you never know about the eggs. Instructions about how to kill the E. coli that your ground beef may well contain are printed on every package. Raw chicken is treated almost as if it is radioactive. Do you have a separate cutting board? Don’t cut your vegetables with the same knife you used on the chicken! The growing popularity of and interest in organic food is directly tied to these warnings, and these dangers.

It is true that I live in the land of confinement agriculture, but I am also lucky enough to be in an area populated by small organic farms. I get my beef and butter from Audrey at Moonstone Farm, my bacon and pork chops from Cindy at Pastures A Plenty, my vegetables from a lovely place called the Easy Bean. And Sister Annette Fernholz ssnd brings me eggs every other Friday. Sister Annette has a hundred chickens running free at EarthRise Farm, a wonderful organic farm about a half hour west of me. Annette’s chickens have names. When you drive up to the farm, they scatter and squawk and glare at the car. There are several different breeds; they are many marvelous colors; some lay green eggs, some brown. They wander the gardens; they flap awkwardly up to the top of hay bales; they run from me when I try to see what exactly they are up to. No one has removed their upper beaks or their toenails. They are not fed antibiotics to keep them healthy, nor are they confined to a small area covered in their own waste. They are not egg-producing machines; they are not widgets. They are Annette’s chickens. Annette’s sister, Kay — also an SSND — runs the vegetable garden, which provides everything from broccoli and spinach to strawberries and potatoes for about forty families who buy a summer subscription to the farm’s produce. What on earth, you may ask, are two School Sisters of Notre Dame doing running a farm? Shouldn’t school sisters be teaching? In fact, Kay and Annette are doing what Catholic sisters have always done: getting out in front of the rest of us and showing us where we need to be going.

We should not be surprised, of course, to find Catholic sisters out on the leading edge of a justice issue — and our relationship to creation (to the land, water, and other animals) is a central justice issue for our time. Religious life, Sister Joan Chittister reminds us, was always meant to be “a searing presence, a paradigm of search, a mark of human soul, and a catalyst to conscience in the society in which it emerged.” (1) From the challenging form of equality in community and the generous hospitality modeled by the Benedictines to the poverty embraced by the Franciscans and the practical service given to the poor and the sick by later apostolic congregations, religious orders have cultivated virtues much needed in the ill and ill-functioning societies around them. Today is no different. And while religious hospitality, community, and poverty continue to challenge our individualistic and materialistic society, and religious service to the poor continues to witness to the human dignity our consumer society dismisses and denies, the most startling, searing, prophetic activity in our world today is that which brings love of God and love of God’s creation together in a new model of living humanly on earth. This is happening on farms and retreat centers and at motherhouses of Catholic religious women throughout the country (and, indeed, the world). It is by no means limited to Catholics or women or vowed religious, but the contribution of Catholic sisters to eco-justice and eco-spirituality cannot be ignored. They have not only begun a great work that more and more of us need to participate in; they have also shown that it is part of the human quest for God, that it addresses the questions our age has about who God is and can be in our lives.

EarthRise Farm, then, is not the startling anomaly it might at first appear to be. In fact, it is one of dozens of earth centers and ecology centers run by Catholic women religious. In Ohio the Sisters of St. Dominic of Akron farm at the Crown Point Ecology Center, whose mission is to “reconnect humans to the sacredness of Earth and challenge society to live simply, mindful of the disenfranchised, including the natural world.” The four principles of community, spirituality, sustainability, and justice guide their work. In Pennsylvania the Sisters of the Humility of Mary support EverGreen, a ministry that “fosters a spirituality of humility, simplicity, nonviolence, and justice and promotes a sustainable future for the whole Earth community.” The ministry of EverGreen incorporates gardening, education, prayer, ritual, and networking for global environmental action. It is similar to Prairiewoods, a ministry of the Franciscan sisters in Hiawatha, Iowa. “Prairiewoods is a sacred place in which people of all faiths can join together to explore relationships with God, the Earth, themselves, and others. Located on seventy acres of natural beauty, the center combines spirituality with care for the Earth.” Sisters are raising alpacas, sheep, cattle, and beefalo (3/8 bison); they are working in partnership with local communities and state and national governments in restoring wetlands and prairie lands and tending woodlands; they are growing organic food for subscribers, soup kitchens, and food banks; they are experimenting with alternative waste management, energy generation, and building construction; and they are opening their farms, prairies, and woods for the education and spiritual development of those who would visit. Many seek out ways to connect with the children of their community. One year EarthRise set aside space for a children’s pizza garden, in which the children grew their own basil, tomatoes, and peppers. EarthRise also works with local social services so that adolescents performing “community service” for various infractions can serve on the farm.

The educational aspect of these earth centers and eco-spirituality centers is central to their mission. The sisters are not creating tiny Edens and walling the rest of us out, but rather inviting the rest of us in to learn, to share, and, most important, to seek God in a new and unexpected way. For we live in a secular and very urban culture, one that cuts us off from the land and the sources of our food, and one that compartmentalizes religion into “something done on Sunday mornings.” The idea of perhaps finding God while digging in the dirt on a hot summer afternoon is not a familiar one. And, though we still give lip service to the idea of the goodness of creation, we also keep striving to mechanize and domesticate and control it — like the turkeys in the windowless buildings near me, bred to fulfill the American desire for white meat to the point that the animals are so deformed as to be unable to mate naturally; they exist only through artificial insemination. In a world where meat comes from the grocery store, hygienically wrapped in plastic, and where vegetables, too, come in plastic bags — prewashed, prechopped, uniform in size and color — it is a surprising and sometimes disconcerting thing to visit a farm. Sisters who invite children to their farms know this. Their curriculums take advantage of the surprise and wonder it is so easy to elicit, and then they raise that wonder to new levels. The Sisters of St. Francis at Michaela Farm in Indiana offer classes titled Incredible Insects, Farmyard Adventures, and, perhaps most important,
Developing a Sense of Wonder.

It is this wonder that most of these farms and earth centers are most eager to share. It is a sense of wonder and awe directed at God, at the beauty and mystery of God — directed, that is, where our human wonder and worship must be directed. But it is a wonder and an awe that springs from contemplation of the Earth and its gifts. The sisters at Crown Point speak of the sacredness of creation, and at Genesis Farm their ecological and agricultural work “is rooted in a belief that the universe, Earth, and all reality are permeated by the presence and power of that ultimate Holy Mystery that has been so deeply and richly expressed in the world’s spiritual traditions.” To help alter the regrettable fact that Christians have often thought of God “up there” and us stuck “down here,” these remarkable women are emphasizing Christianity’s incarnational truth. “Creation is a revelation of God, a home for God, a temple of God,” Meister Eckhardt tells us. “All creatures are words of God. My mouth expresses and reveals God, but the existence of a stone does the same.” (2) Sharon Therese Zayac, a Dominican sister at Jubilee Farm, cites Eckhardt and others as she explores the Dominican roots of Earth spirituality in the first volume of a series titled Dominican Women on Earth, published by Sor Juana Press. (Sor Juana is a project of Santuario Sisterfarm, yet another Earth center, this one in Texas.) The recognition that Earth spirituality is indeed part of the Catholic heritage is an important one. Even more important is the recognition that that tradition, in combination with the specific problems and gifts of our day, is opening up for us in new ways.

One of the marks of the newness of this Earth spirituality is its embrace of modern science. After the various difficulties that science and Christian theology have had with each other for several centuries, this turn to modern astronomy, biology, and ecology as necessary sources for the spiritual life may seem shocking. Yet the conviction that science can feed our sense of wonder, and our understanding of our place in creation, is apparent in the educational mission of all of these Earth centers. Many offer classes or retreats based on The New Universe Story, which is a shorthand way of talking about the creation story as scientists and astronomers know it. There is a strong conviction that knowing and living consciously within a new creation story can and should change people’s lives; this is what differentiates what the sisters are doing from simple environmental activism. This is why I see them as doing far more than raising chickens and vegetables; they also present us with a lived, practical spirituality for living on Earth. The key here is that they are rooting their actions in a new creation story. Creation stories are only nominally about creation-in-the-past; they are far more about what is today: what society is supposed to be like, what our relationship with God should be, what the human place in the created order is. So to adopt a new creation story is not just to adopt a new understanding of the past; it is also to embrace a new understanding of the present, of God, of what it is to be human. It is a huge move.

Let us explore it in more detail. The idea that the Genesis account of creation is accurate science has been under assault for generations now, even though many still think it is, and that it intends to be. For those who see it as myth or metaphor, or as a quaint but misguided ancient attempt to fathom the depths of reality, science offers an alternative account of the origins of the universe and the place of human beings in it. Scientific knowledge, especially about the stars and the universe beyond our Earth, has been growing at a wild and head-spinning pace in the past few decades — and yet there is still much we do not know. What is generally agreed upon, however, is this: The universe is a little less than fourteen billion years old. To give us a sense of that time scale, and our place in it, John Haught of Georgetown set it out in terms that book lovers like ourselves can grasp. Imagine that the history of the universe is written in a series of books. It would take 30 volumes of 450 pages apiece, with each page accounting for a million years, to cover the full scope from the beginning until today. Now, on that scale, the Earth does not come into being until volume 21, two-thirds of the way through the story. Life begins in volume 22. The dinosaurs show up in volume 30, the last volume, about halfway through, and are extinct by page 385. Modern humans show up on the bottom fifth of the last page of the last volume. (3) In other words, our entire history as human beings rates a short paragraph at the tail end of the concluding volume of a set of encyclopedias. If nothing else, that thought is rather disconcerting — so why do the sisters not see it as threatening, overwhelming, and disorienting? Why instead do they see it as powerful, exciting, and one of the most important revelations of the truth of God that we have ever confronted?

I chose the word revelation deliberately. The age of the universe and the long story of its unfolding reveals God to us in ways we never imagined, and never could have imagined before now. A Biblical history of the created universe, once thought of as encompassing about 6000 years, is graspable by the human mind; it is big, but it is not staggering. My little rural town has almost 6000 people in it, and it is a small town, barely a neighborhood by the standards of the big cities of the world. Fourteen billion years, on the other hand, is staggering. And then the slow — achingly slow, unimaginably slow — movement towards the universe as we know it: the emergence of hydrogen and helium, the gradual formation of stars, their life and death, and in their deaths, by supernova, the creation of complex, heavier elements . . . eventually the formation of our own star, the sun, and the aggregation of enough rocky debris nearby to form our own planet. Recently scientists announced that the formation of planets is much like the formation of dust bunnies under your bed. Scott Kenyon, a planet-formation theorist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachussetts, notes that planet formation begins with dust particles about the size of sand grains. “These collide and merge into rocks a mile or so across,” he says. “The dust bunnies under your bed grow in a similar way — and after a million years or so, a dust bunny could get pretty big.” (4)

Once the “dust bunny” we now know as the Earth reached its present size, about four billion years ago, there was still quite a long and strange journey before Earth became hospitable to life — and then many different forms of life began, changed, died out, and began anew before human beings finally made their debut on the cosmic stage. This incredibly long story, full of chaos, full of accidents, undirected and violent, showing a shocking lack of design, order, and control — a story in which life is both fantastically powerful and terribly fragile — this is the story of evolution, the story of creation, the story of (in Sallie McFague’s thought-provoking phrase) God’s body.

As John Haught argues in God after Darwin, the evolutionary story of the universe is, in the end, the story of the humble, vulnerable, self-emptying God we first met in Jesus. As we learned in Jesus that God’s humility and vulnerable, suffering love were powerful enough to conquer evil, death, and sin, so we find the universe showing us a God humble enough to share creation with human beings, not coercing them. Haught says:

[If we think] of nature in terms of how it might appear if the creator of all things is, in essence, suffering love . . . then we should already anticipate that nature will give every appearance of being, in some sense, autonomously creative. Since it is the nature of love, even at the human level, to refrain from coercive manipulation of others, we should not expect the world that a generous God calls into being to be instantaneously ordered to perfection. Instead, in the presence of the self-restraint befitting an absolutely self-giving love, the world would unfold by responding to the divine allurement at its own pace and in its own particular way. The universe would then be spontaneously self-creative and self-ordering. And its responsiveness to the possibilities for new being offered to it by God would require time, perhaps immense amounts of it .(5)

Notes

1. Joan Chittister OSB, The Fire in These Ashes: A Spirituality of Contemporary Religious Life (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1995), pp. 2 and 8-11.
2. Sharon Therese Zayac OP, Earth Spirituality: In the Catholic and Dominican Traditions, No. 1 (June 2003) of Conversatio: Dominican Women on Earth series (Boerne, Texas: Sor Juana Press, 2003), p. 50.
3. John Haught, “God after Darwin: Evolution and Divine Providence,” lecture given at Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minnesota, 21 April 2004.
4. Robert Burnham, “Building Planets Is a Slam-Bang Art,” Astronomy magazine, 21 October 2004. Available on the web at astronomy.com.
5. John Haught, God after Darwin: A Theology of Evolution (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), p. 53.
6. Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York: Bell Tower Press), p. 16.

A Prayer

I kneel, Lord, before the universe that has inperceptibly, under the influence of the host, become your adorable body and your divine blood.

I prostrate myself in it presence, or better — much better — I recollect myself in that universe.

The world is filled by you!

O, universal Christ, true foundation of the world, you who find your consummation in the fulfillment of all that your power has raised up from nothingness, I worship you, and am lost in the consciousness of your plentitude permeating all things.

Teilhard de Chardin, "The Priest," Writings In Time Of War

Reflection Questions / Group Discussion

1. How does my Christian spirituality touch into my care and concern for the Earth and its resources?
2. "God so loved the world that ... (Jn. 3:16) What actins do I take to express my love for God's world?

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Custodians of Franciscan Households

By Michael Blastic OFM

From the 65.2 issue of Review for Religious

In a Newsweek web article posted on MSNBC, Melinda Henneberger wrote that “Katrina has reminded us that Christian morality should be about responding to the wretched and loving the unlovable—not about other people's sex lives” (14 September 2005). While the United States describes itself as a Christian nation, in the aftermath of Katrina we have seen that this label is deceptive. Citing Bill McKibben, “The Christian Paradox” (Harper's, August 2005), who pointed this out, she wrote that American practice really rewards dependency, and so it is better to hold on to your cash. McKibben himself reported on a poll concerning religious practice in the United States . He noted that only four in ten Americans can list more than four of the Ten Commandments, and only five in ten can name the four Gospels. He said that these statistics really do not matter, but what does matter is that three out of four think the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves” (actually a proverb of Ben Franklin's). Approximately 85 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christian, with about 75 percent claiming they pray to God daily and 33 percent going to church weekly.

McKibben points out a number of paradoxes. We are second to last among developed countries in government foreign aid; nearly 18 percent of American children live in poverty—here we come in last among the rich nations—and 26 percent of households lack sufficient food. We are the most violent rich nation on earth, with a murder rate of four or five times that of Europe . We have prison populations five or six times Europe 's rate. We are the only Western democracy that executes its citizens; our marriage breakup rate is more than half, and higher than Europe 's. If one measures Christian identity by Jesus' teaching of helping the less fortunate, we come off poorly indeed.

Given these statistics, McKibben argues that Americans have replaced the Christianity of the Bible with another creed which ignores Jesus' radical and demanding focus on the other—“Love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus made it clear who the neighbor is—the poor person, the sick person, the naked person, the hungry person. “On and on and on—a call for nothing less than a radical, voluntary, and effective reordering of power relationships, based on the principle of love,” to quote McKibben.

I know I am not reporting something you do not already know. But I believe that this social context of North America as described by McKibben, visible in the unjust social reality revealed in Katrina's aftermath, is important for reflecting on our Franciscan life. In fact, such a social context was the occasion for Francis of Assisi's conversion. Here I want to be very clear. Francis of Assisi's conversion was not explicitly and primarily religious. It was a movement from a social order based on the creed “God helps them who help themselves” to a social order based on sharing and sacrifice and “Love your neighbor as yourself”—in other words the creed of Jesus. In his conversion Francis first and foremost experienced what it means to be human, and what it implies for social life. The Franciscan movement results from Francis and the brothers learning what is required for human beings to flourish as God intends. From the opposite perspective, it is the medium of fraternity that is the message. A Franciscan fraternity evangelizes to the extent that it embodies human flourishing on the personal, social, and ecclesial levels.

First I will describe briefly the early Franciscan experience and vision of fraternal life, and then I will suggest how this may help all of us live our lives as brothers.

A Place for Human Flourishing

I would describe Franciscan fraternity in this way. It is (1) a life lived in brotherhood, (2) experienced in a household, and (3) qualified with patience. I deduce these elements from the Rule of 1223, the Rule that we profess as our form of life.

(1) It was the Italian scholar Raoul Manselli who identified Francis's encounter with lepers as the turning point in his conversion. As Francis records in his Testament, that encounter radically rearranged his values and led him to leave the commune of Assisi in order to live with those lepers. He was drawn out of himself so that he could see, perhaps for the first time in his life, the reality of human beings who according to the definitions of life in the commune of Assisi simply did not exist. There was no place in Assisi for the unclean, the unworthy, the unholy, the unbearable, the unlucky, the untouchable, and the unloved. Encountering these suffering human beings, the lepers, Francis showed them a merciful heart. He looked at them and touched them, he stayed with them and shared life with them, he comforted them and served their needs. And Francis tells us he did not do this for himself. He did not go to the lepers to make himself better. He did not use them as objects in an ascetical exercise to overcome himself (though this is how hagiographers will understand it). Francis gives the credit for this experiential truth to God: “The Lord led me among them, and I showed them a merciful heart” (Test 2).1 With God's nudge, Francis recognized the lepers as brothers and sisters, as creatures of the same God, as having equal dignity in the eyes of God the Creator. While Assisi 's values and practice denied this truth, Francis was led into it by God's grace (what was bitter became sweet), and he left Assisi to live among these newly discovered brothers and sisters. Leaving the world of Assisi , Francis thus stepped into God's world—creation—where everything was estab-lished by the Creator in relationship. This is the truth that he would later celebrate in the Canticle of the Creatures. Creation sings, creation flourishes, simply by being what it was created to be, by being in relationship with all that exists.

In his Testament Francis says, “The Lord gave me some brothers” (Test 14). Experienced as the reality of relationship as established by the Creator, brotherhood is embodied in the rule in terms of obedience. According to chapter 2 of the Earlier Rule, after those who come have given everything to the poor as they were able, and after the year of probation has ended for them, “they may be received into obedience” (LR II:11). Once received into obedience they may not wander “outside obedience” (ER II:10). The rule speaks of obedience as a place, the space into which the brothers are received. While monks are received into a monastery after their novitiate probation, Francis's brothers are received into obedience. Obedience becomes a synonym for the space in which the brothers live. What characterizes obedience then is that it is the space of relationship. One could substitute the term relationship for the term obedience throughout the early Franciscan writings and not change the meaning of the texts. The relationships of brotherhood define the space in which the brothers live. This is especially significant given that the rule understands the brothers to be itinerant, even though by 1223 this was beginning to change somewhat. Brothers began living in convents in cities. Brotherhood, then, or better our relationships as brothers, is what defines the space in which to live our life according to the Rule. And, as Francis makes clear, brotherhood is only possible if one turns toward the other, only if one gets out of oneself and willingly places oneself in relationship to the other. This turning toward others is the basis for contemplation in the tradition; it does not imply separation or solitude, but rather engagement and an ecstatic way of being in the world.

A second defining element of Franciscan fraternity is Franciscan mission. After lepers, probably the most recognized symbol of Franciscan life is San Damiano and the speaking crucifix. While this story appears rather late in the hagiographical tradition (1246), it expresses a fundamental purpose of Franciscan life. Francis received a mission to repair God's house, which was being destroyed: “Francis, don't you see that my house is being destroyed? Go, then, and rebuild it for me” (L3C 13). While in the past we translated those words from the Legend of the Three Companions too simplistically as “Rebuild my church,” the hagiographical tradition consistently uses the term house in accounts of this event. And, while Francis initially understood that invitation from the cross to mean the broken-down building of San Damiano, he would come to understand that the mission was rather one of repairing a space in which the lives of men and women who have been broken and destroyed as human beings can be rebuilt and flourish.

House and family are central to the brothers' experience of the Christian life. Their relationship to God is expressed in terms of the household. For instance, in the Second Version of the Letter to the Faithful, we read:

And the Spirit of the Lord will rest upon all those men and women who have done and persevered in these things, and it will make a home and dwelling place in them. And they will be the children of the heavenly Father, whose works they do. And they are spouses, brothers, and mothers of our Lord Jesus Christ. We are spouses when the faithful soul is united by the Holy Spirit to our Lord Jesus Christ. We are brothers, moreover, when we do the will of his Father who is in heaven; mothers when we carry him in our heart and body through love and a pure and sincere conscience; and give him birth through a holy activity, which must shine before others by example. (2LtF 48-53)

How does Francis envision rebuilding God's house? Bonaventure's insight in his Major Legend of St. Francis is right on the mark here. He comments that, after receiving this mission in San Damiano, he eventually moved to St. Mary of the Angels; he “lived there in order to repair it” (LMj II:8). The repair of God's house is not so much the action of preaching or teaching. The repair is accomplished by life in brotherhood itself, by living among and with brothers and sisters. The term conversatio is used to describe this “living among” in two places in the Early Rule. Francis encourages the brothers to rejoice when they “live among ( quando conversantur inter viles . . .) people considered of little value and looked down upon” (ER IX:2); and “they can live spiritually ( possunt duobus modis spiritualiter inter eos conversari ) among the Saracens” (ER XVI:5). Using the Latin word conversatio , the root of the term conversation, the Rule envisages life as a conversation, and depends on the monastic sense of conversatio as manner of life. The brothers' manner of life is thus to be conversational—sharing life with brothers and sisters in this conversational manner rebuilds the house of God.

In another text of the Later Rule, this conversation is described more concretely:

I counsel, admonish, and exhort my brothers in the Lord Jesus Christ not to quarrel or argue or judge others when they go about in the world; but let them be meek, peaceful, modest, gentle, and humble, speaking courteously to everyone, as is becoming. . . . Into whatever house they enter, let them first say: 'Peace to this house!' According to the holy gospel let them eat whatever food is set before them. (LR III:10-12, 14)

Here we see how for the brothers the manner of being with others is the primary means for accomplishing the mission, and is itself the message. The gospel is about life, a way of life, a way of being with and relating to others with the peace that is God's gift freely given in Jesus. The brothers simply speak the gospel honestly with everyone, beginning with one another. But, before the brothers can speak the word of the gospel, they must live the word of the gospel. Here recall the emphasis Celano gives to this fact in his Life of St. Francis, “[Francis] was no deaf hearer of the gospel” (1C 22). Coherence of life and message is the norm. The brothers' honest conversation and engagement with the world and people invites recognition of the presence of the kingdom already in their midst. Conversation, though, is a skill that must be learned, and many of the prescriptions of the rule that describe behavior in a negative way can be read as impediments to the quality of conversation that the brothers engage in as part of their mission.

This understanding of household and conversation can be seen in chapter 6 of the Later Rule. There poverty is described as “not making anything one's own” and living as “pilgrims and strangers in this world” and “never seeking anything else under heaven.” After describing the brothers' poverty this way as modeled on Jesus Christ, “who made himself poor for us in this world” (LR VI:3), the Rule spells out the implication of this poverty for the life of brotherhood:

Wherever the brothers may be and meet one another, let them show that they are members of the same family. Let each one confidently make known his need to the other, for if a mother loves and cares for her son according to the flesh, how much more diligently must someone love and care for his brother according to the Spirit! (LR VI:7-8)

Literally the Rule suggests here that the brothers should demonstrate that they come from the same “household,” the same family (ostendunt se domesticos invicem inter se). Thus, having nothing, living itinerantly, and desiring only this, the brothers can be at home in their relationships. The brothers should feel at home in the love and care they have and express for one another.

Poverty is the condition for brotherhood. This is an important consideration because poverty can dehumanize. Rebuilding God's house implies offering an alternative to the dehumanizing effects of poverty. Today we can include everything from forms of work, to abuse, to social structures. The life of brotherhood should provide for humanizing relationships, expressed in turning toward others in their real needs, and their responding with real and mature care. This house is built by God's Spirit as a place where human beings can flourish. Our fraternal life is meant to help human beings prosper, grow, and thrive as “human persons fully alive” and thus to fulfill our mission to repair God's house.

A third dimension of fraternal life has to do with what it means to be human. For me, this knowledge comes with the stigmata of Francis. The stigmata involves unanswered questions. Thomas of Celano in his Life of St. Francis supplied the time, place, and context for the event of the stigmata, but while doing that he was much more interested in unraveling its meaning. Celano recounts that, while at La Verna two years before his death, Francis “saw in the vision of God a man having six wings like a seraph, standing above him, arms extended and feet joined, fixed to a cross” (2C 94). Celano's words suggest that Francis's vision was of a human person taken up into God, burning with desire (like a seraph), and crucified. They suggest the divinization of the human person. Celano is not describing history here. He is interpreting an event whose full meaning was beyond history . He understands the stigmata as demonstrating the fullest potential of being human embraced by God in the incarnation. In Jesus, God embraced the human condition with all of its limitation, fragility, weakness, and vulnerability and, in this embrace of the human condition, revealed God's own divine nature. In other words, the crucified flesh of Christ revealed the nature of God. The event of the stigmata reveals both the meaning of God and the meaning of Jesus Christ's human nature. The humanity embraced by Jesus is the same as Francis lived, to the point of knowing it in his own wounds. Marked with the wounds of Jesus, Francis becomes the leper, an icon of the crucified Jesus. Celano says: “While he was unable to perceive anything clearly understandable from the vision, its newness very much pressed upon his heart. Signs of the nails began to appear on his hands and feet, just as he had seen them a little while earlier on the crucified man hovering above him” (2C 94). Francis becomes what he sees, that is, what he has been seeing from the moment God turned him to the lepers to contemplate humanity there as a living icon of Jesus Christ, crucified and fixed to a cross.

What does it mean to be human, then, for the early Franciscans? It means to embrace the full reality of the human condition as frail, weak, fragile, and vulnerable, and even scarred and wounded. The human person is an image of the Lamb who was slain, who carries even now in glory the scars of the passion. Being scarred and wounded like Jesus is not about imitating Jesus' suffering and pain on the cross. Rather, it is the consequence of self-sacrificing love, of being totally for others, without holding anything back. To be truly human means to bear patiently the human condition of weakness, fragility, and vulnerability. In the stigmata Francis demonstrates that it is possible for a human being to be Godlike, to love as God loved, to be totally and completely for the other, and in addition he demonstrates that human persons are capable of compassion, human persons are capable of bearing the pain of the other.

This, it seems to me, is what the Rule describes as the action of the Spirit of the Lord in one's life:

I admonish and exhort the brothers in the Lord Jesus Christ to beware of all pride, vainglory, envy and greed, of care and solicitude for the things of this world, of detraction and murmuring. Let those who are illiterate not be anxious to learn, but let them pay attention to what they must desire above all else: to have the Spirit of the Lord and its holy activity, to pray always to him with a pure heart, to have humility and patience in persecution and infirmity, and to love those who persecute, rebuke, and find fault with us. (LR X:7-10)

The eight vices that are listed at the beginning of this text are social vices; they have to do with how one relates to others and to the things of this world. These vices describe one who is living “from the outside in,” that is, one whose meaning and behavior are determined by things, by social position, by prestige, power, and clout, all of which lie outside a person. The Rule admonishes the brothers to a life of poverty, having nothing of one's own and desiring nothing more than the action of God's Spirit. They are not to live from the outside in, but from the inside out, by expressing the Spirit of the Lord in outward behavior. The Spirit transforms us flesh and blood into an image of Jesus, the suffering servant of God.

Another way of expressing the action of the Spirit here is in our bearing with everyone and everything in patience and humility. The Saying on True and Perfect Joy, recorded as a conversation between Francis and Leo, says that, as they arrive back at the Portiuncola one night, they are refused entrance because of the time of day and because they are stupid and not needed. They are told to go to the Crosiers for lodging. Francis says that, “if I had patience and did not become upset, true joy as well as true virtue and the salvation of my soul would consist in this” (TPJ 15). The experience of the presence of God so transforms human existence that even persecution and sickness become ways to follow Christ. The experience of the Spirit of the Lord thus expresses itself in patience. The Latin term patiens indicates a willingness to endure or undergo something, to be capable of bearing hardship; it implies that one is vulnerable, able to be wounded. For Francis, patience is an attribute of God. In the Praises of God, written shortly after he experienced the stigmata on Mount La Verna, he says to God: “You are love, charity; you are wisdom, you are humility, you are patience, you are beauty, you are meekness, you are security, you are rest” (PrG 4).

Francis sees Jesus as the face of God, who made himself vulnerable in this world, who exercised patience through life and death. But it is the incarnation even more than the passion and death that Francis looks to, because in the incarnation Jesus put himself into the position of weakness, frailty, vulnerability, and limitation and in this revealed the full potential of being human, showing that the acceptance of human vulnerability is salvific. Here the Rule gets to the heart of Franciscan fraternity because it challenges the brothers to be simply human, to live from the inside out, to be patient in suffering and sickness, to be vulnerable and open to the other, in short, to follow the footsteps of Jesus Christ. Authentic human life can flourish in Franciscan households that are built by brothers who turn toward each other, who engage in honest conversation as a way of life, and who patiently embrace their humanness in weakness, fragility, and vulnerability.

Guarding the Franciscan Household

The term “guardian” does not appear in the text of the Rule of 1223. It will appear in later writings such as the Letter to the Entire Order and the Testament. No job description can be found in the early Franciscan writings, but it is understood that as guardian a brother exercises a ministry among brothers on the local level. What the Rule says about the ministry of “those brothers who are the ministers and servants of the others” (LR X:1) certainly applies to guardians. They are to “receive [the brothers] charitably and kindly and have sufficient familiarity with them that these same brothers may speak and deal with them as masters with the servants, for so it must be that the ministers are servants of all the brothers” (LR X:5-6). The ministers must deal with the brothers as family. While this quality of service must characterize the ministers, those who are subjects must also live the sacrificial nature of obedience in their relationships with the ministers and others. This sacrificial quality of obedience Francis learned from Jesus, especially in his agony in the garden as described in the Second Version of the Letter to the Faithful:

Then he prayed to his father saying, Father, if it can be done, let this cup pass from me. And his sweat became as drops of blood falling on the ground. Nevertheless, he placed his will in the will of his father saying: Father, let your will be done; not as I will, but as you will. His father’s will was such that his blessed and glorious son, whom he gave to us and who was born for us, should offer himself through his own blood as a sacrifice and oblation on the altar of the cross: not for himself, through whom all things were made, but for our sins, leaving us an example that we might follow his footprints. (2LtF 8-13)