Spirituality in ferment
Swain, Bernard F.
CHARTING A COURSE: FROM THE COUNCIL TO THE SYNOD Spirituality in ferment BERNARD F. SWAIN ANY ATTEMPT to trace the course of Catholic spirituality and prayer in the wake of Vatican II is...
...undistracted by the drives and demands of sexual partnership...
...But in the twenty years since Vatican II the new models required to create such a process have not yet been established...
...This realization sheds light as well on people's concerns about quality and beauty...
...separated from the tensions and energies of multi-generational family life...
...4 October 1985: 521 For some Catholics, though, this success has involved a series of tradeoffs...
...Yet there was virtue as well in such devotional habits...
...Just when preached retreats seemed ready to die out in the early 1970s, directed one-on-one retreats (especially along the lines of Ignatian spirituality) exploded into a whole new movement soon followed by a bewildering array of retreat programs (Search, Cursillo, Better World, Marriage Encounter, etc...
...The empty lot suggests how hollow such rote performance can become, until it signifies an intention the believer no longer has, an attention the believer no longer gives, and even addresses a reality which is no longer present...
...Practically speaking, the success of these models depends on people being: rested...
...These ideas of church had the related effect of altering the focus of Catholic spirituality...
...To my mind, any adequate understanding of these concerns must take the long historical view of the council's work...
...En route the train passes the site of St...
...THE issue of formation in ministry is the concern of a relative minority of lay people...
...Some will argue, in favor of this vacuum, that the sacraments are (or should be) sufficient focus for Catholic spiritual life...
...For every evidence that our weddings, baptisms, and funerals are more pastorally effective than before the reforms, alert observers can offer equally persuasive evidence that church attendance, penance, and confirmation are in decline...
...But the depth of this habit became truly clear when, two years ago, the church burnt down...
...In my work in parish renewal over the last ten years, I have observed the issue of popular devotions raised by group after group, in parish after parish, particularly among those of middle age or older who remember devotional patterns dominated by seasonal feasts, by sacramentals, by non-liturgical ceremonies (Benediction, novenas, throat blessings, forty hours devotions, etc...
...The emphasis on personal journey, combined with the universal call to holiness, leads many to believe, rightly, that spiritual growth is for everybody, not just for contemplatives...
...Ambrose Church, and each time the older Catholic passengers identity themselves by tipping their hats or marking the cross on their foreheads...
...This aspect of the council's ecclesiology has had the practical effect of making Catholic liturgical and sacramental life not only the central focus but, for many Catholics, the exclusive focus of their prayer and spirituality...
...COINCIDING WITH rising interest in spiritual development has been a similar interest in lay ministry...
...Reflection and support groups multiply as people share their journeys...
...This movement toward lay ministry has raised a new question in schools and training programs across the country: "what kind of spiritual formation process can provide an adequate foundation for these new lay roles...
...Furthermore, this ecclesiology suggested that the key context for spiritual life is not a private relationship "Jesus and me" but the worshipping community itself: "It is especially in the sacred liturgy that our union with the heavenly church is realized" {Lumen Gentium, 50...
...The first generation since the council has already sorted its way through a great many transitional experiments, separating chaff from wheat...
...Yet people passing by train continue to pay their respects out of devotion, and out of habit...
...But the fact is that the decline in popular devotions leads to deeper effects than a mere shift in the schedule of parish activities from devotions to liturgies...
...For these habits accumulated many of the small details of daily life into a pattern of behavior that linked the person one was in church and sacraments with the person one was in the rest of one's life...
...To a great extent, then, the council's success in renewing Catholic spiritual life can be measured by its success at liturgical reform...
...First, especially in religious communities, they created a sense of belonging to a particular community with a particular identity as Jesuit, Benedictine, Franciscan, etc...
...by the cult of saints, and especially by the cult of Mary...
...On the one hand, the council did not legislate a consistent program of reforms for spiritual life...
...Thomas Merton's engaged spirituality, contemplating an active world, is even more popular now than it was during his lifetime as a best-selling writer...
...Much of this, of course, was accomplished blindly, by rote, and especially by a system of obligation that depended on motivating people with fear and guilt...
...8:19-22...
...The emphasis on liturgy, community, sacraments, and Scripture further undermined support for private, non-sacramental practices (thus the rosary at Mass was discredited as non-liturgical, while missal reading was discouraged as non-communitarian...
...Spiritual journal-keeping has become as popular as scapulars once were...
...The first was a sense, largely rooted in the American religious heritage, of history as the pursuit and exploration of new frontiers especially spiritual frontiers...
...So Catholics in parishes across America struggle to learn how to pray with Scripture, to join with others in daily prayer, to practice the "centering prayer" popularized by Thomas Merton and the Trappists of St...
...We must go on...
...First, the old devotions will not do...
...On the other hand, the council's impact has profoundly altered Catholic prayer and spiritual life over the last twenty years...
...More than anything else, it is the ecclesiology of Vatican II that has shaped our spirituality in the last generation...
...Modern lay people, by contrast, generally experience a distressing degree of fragmentation between work, family, worship, and social life which makes the development of an integrating spirituality more urgent and more difficult...
...unencumbered by the responsibilities of spouse and children...
...Two things seem clear...
...In the council's wake, this chord struck American Catholics with a new sense of the spiritual life of the church as open, subject to discovery, Commonweal: 522 change, and growth...
...For every gain in intelligibility, biblical orientation, or community participation accomplished by liturgical reform, they perceive a loss in universality, in aesthetic beauty, in a sense of mystery...
...CHARTING A COURSE: FROM THE COUNCIL TO THE SYNOD Spirituality in ferment BERNARD F. SWAIN ANY ATTEMPT to trace the course of Catholic spirituality and prayer in the wake of Vatican II is confronted by a troubling paradox...
...One former priest, now a husband and father, overheard lay people mention the need for a distinctively lay model of spirituality and said, "I could use some help with that, too...
...Joseph Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts...
...Yet mere emerges again a concern about the appropriateness of traditional models...
...The council itself recognized the laity's need for a distinctive spirituality (Apostolkam Actuositatem, 4...
...To me this symbolizes both the great virtue and the great defect of the old devotional life...
...In this broad historical sense, then, the development of our sacramental life since the council is on course, but the destination (a sacramental system capable of simultaneously conveying community and mystery, for example) remains ahead of us...
...Authors such as Dolores Leckey and Ernest Boyerhave begun to experiment with such new models, whether by adapting traditional (e.g...
...If people feel plagued by "crummy music" at folk Masses, for example, they should note that the style of folk liturgy (unlike Gregorian or Gothic liturgy or the liturgical music of Palestrina, Haydn, or Mozart) is a popular style...
...Rather than centering the spiritual life on a particular discipline, lifestyle, or devotional pattern specific to certain religious communities, the council centered spirituality on the sacraments themselves on liturgy as prayer and therefore on a pattern of behavior which is, in principle at least, accessible to all Catholics...
...The only test for quality in popular art is the test of time...
...The net result of the devaluing and discrediting of older popular devotions in the absence of any conciliar reforms a result not intended but nonetheless effected by Vatican II is a kind of vacuum in the devotional life of most parish communities and families...
...In parish devotions as in other aspects of spirituality, the course may be straight but the journey is not yet finished...
...In this historical view, the challenge to refocus the spiritual life on liturgy and sacraments is obviously the work of more than twenty years...
...Moreover, the devotional patterns themselves often reflected an indifference or even hostility to modern life that neutralized their integrating potential...
...Henri Nouwen has become a superstar of spirituality (even during his recent tenure at Harvard, his classes and retreats were consistently overenrolled...
...linked only by a common focus on spiritual conversion, transformation, and growth...
...The council's intentions were, rather, historical: to chart a course for the survival of the Christian church in a post-Christian culture...
...Clearly a sense of community, belonging, support, and identity are critical to the spirituality lay people hunger for and need, and the urgent need for a formation process that can provide these is equally clear...
...The traditional models of spiritual formation served two functions...
...The next generation will reap the benefits...
...I should note that in my experience as trainer and consultant to clergy I have observed that for many diocesan clergy this problem is equally acute, since religious models of spirituality are often not successful in the context of rectory life (especially if the rectory now houses only one priest...
...somewhat free from concerns about survival and material security...
...Here is an important focus for much of the ongoing work in parish renewal: to develop new habits of devotional life for parish groups and families habits that are less cyclic, less rote, less dependent on obligation but more related to liturgy, sacraments, and Scripture, more open to the experience of modern life and to the experience of church as community and pilgrim...
...So the emerging RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) challenges parishes everywhere to retrieve the older devotional rhythms reflected in the movement from initiation, to conversion, to transformation and renewal...
...Lay Catholics who once sought out confessors now seek instead a spiritual director (hitherto available only to seminarians and religious...
...This STRESS on liturgy and sacrament does not exhaust, however, the ecclesiological shift of spirituality accomplished by Vatican II...
...They helped resist the very dichotomy between church and world that the council observed, lamented, and sought to redress as its major task...
...Benedictine) spirituality, or by creating new forms...
...Faced with the growing narcissism of the "me decade," many Catholics decided, logically enough, to transcend the preoccupation with self by engaging in an inward exploration of "my journey" toward God...
...The new styles should be regarded not as better or worse, but simply as more timely (particularly if they retrieved older traditions from the early church, which first learned to thrive and grow in a pre-Christian culture more like our own time than Christendom was...
...Such models are of questionable value to lay ministers, who generally do not belong to religious communities, and whose institutional loyalty depends more on the sacramental bonds of baptism, confirmation, and (for some) matrimony than on the responsibilities incurred by orders or religious vows...
...3:13), the pilgrim church, in its sacraments and institutions, which belong to the present age, carries the mark of this world which will pass, and she herself takes her place among the creatures which groan and travail yet and await the revelation of the children of God (cf.Rom...
...They were the products of the Christendom era, when the church dominated the secular and social as well as the religious dimensions of people's lives an era rapidly passing away if not already gone...
...Here again the current state is one of creative tension: in the midst of the explosive interest in a more universal practice of spirituality and prayer, there emerges an impatient frustration at how much work remains to be done...
...So programs like Renew in Newark and The Paulist Project in Boston assist parishes in developing small faith-sharing groups and in introducing new forms of spirituality into the existing routines of parish life...
...As I have noted above, Vatican II promulgated no systematic reform of these devotions (though it suggested that a life modeled on the saints was more important than devotional acts Lumen Gentium, 51) but shifted the emphasis with a new ecclesiology and the related stress on sacraments and Scripture...
...This image of the church as unfinished, as en route, struck two resonant chords in contemporary American culture...
...The ^^^^^mm^^mmmm^^^m^^^ notion of church as' 'people of God'' {Lumen Gentium, 2) and as "priestly people," along with the "universal call to holiness" {Lumen Gentium, 5), created the strong sense that the spiritual life was no longer to be regarded as the particular responsibility of a small minority of full-time contemplatives, praying on behalf of everyone else...
...In short, these models assume and require a life of relative peace and quiet, of security and serenity whereas for most lay people peace, quiet, security, and serenity are the products, not the premise, of spiritual 4 October 1985: 523 growth...
...The much wider concern, especially in parishes, regards the impact of the council's shift in spirituality on the devotional life of American Catholics in general...
...The fact is that professional lay ministers occupy a new role in the church, for which the old role-models offer little relevance...
...In this light, the documents on liturgy {Sacrosanctum Concilium, 1963) and Sacred Scripture {Dei Verbum, 1965), along with their implementation, served to facilitate this change of focus by rendering the sacramental signs and rituals more intelligible, more biblically oriented, and more communitarian...
...2 Pet...
...But it also brings the disadvantage of any popular art: inconsistent quality (as Dwight Macdonald once observed of popular art: "Eighty percent of anything will be junk...
...We must respect this paradox and the tension it creates: since many concihar documents addressed issues which produced deep yet indirect effects on Catholic spirituality, it is important to note these effects and assess their current status and significance...
...the solution is to develop our new styles so that they convey a sense of the mysterious, the numinous, the transcendent for twentieth-century people just as effectively as the styles of the Renaissance and medieval church did for the people of their time...
...But since these effects were not the intentional design of a single document, we should not be surprised if the overall impact is inconsistent, even piecemeal...
...All of us brought up before the council can remember how specific one's identity as Catholic could become in the pre-conciliar style of Catholic living...
...Vatican II did not promote a new style of liturgical and sacramental life on dogmatic or aesthetic grounds (as if, for example, there were something wrong with the Latin texts, or no beauty in Gregorian chant, or anything intrinsically inappropriate with incense and bells...
...So if people feel a lack of mystery in current liturgy, for example, the solution is not to reinstall the customs of Catholic Christendom (which by now would risk conveying a false sense of mystery simply because they are so alien to us...
...Spirituality was to be understood, rather, as a universal responsibility flowing from the baptismal and sacramental life of all Catholics: "All Christians in any state or walk of life are called to the fullness of Christian life and to the perfection of love, and by this holiness BERNARD F. SWAIN is coordinator of the Paulist Leadership and Renewal Project in Boston, advisor to Roman Catholic students at Harvard Divinity School, and the author of Liberating Leadership: Emerging Options in Pastoral Ministry (Winston-Seabury...
...Moreover, the inadaptability of religious community models of spirituality is rooted in a deeper, more historical reality: the ecclesiastical structure of religious life has allowed some religious communities to sustain an integration of workplace, living space, social relations, and worship well into a modern age in which such integration is virtually unknown...
...These are the things they seek to find inside themselves in prayer, not something their daily existence already provides as a starting point for prayer...
...For all these reasons, the more universal stress on spiritual development promoted by the council remains an unfinished agenda...
...4 October 1985: 525...
...So parishes and families work to retrieve the long-neglected seasons of Advent and Pentecost...
...The combined effect of these two chords has been to make spirituality a hot item in American Catholicism for more than ten years...
...Many lay people who seek to practice Ignatian exercises or to pray the Office trouble themselves and their spiritual directors with their lack of success...
...Single Catholics lack the support that religious community provides, while those living in families particularly parents know firsthand that family life offers as much distraction as discipline...
...The Orthodox priest Anthony Bloom acknowledged the same need in his Beginning to Pray by suggesting that lay people set an alarm clock to a surprise setting so that when it sounded they could practice putting aside five minutes at random for quiet reflection...
...and therefore much of its benefit was lost on its own practitioners...
...The relatively less central position of Mary in the documents (at the end of Lumen Gentium instead of in a separate document) favored the decline of popular dependence on Marian devotions, such as May processions and the rosary...
...For the practical reality touched by this shift is the threat all these changes in spiritual life pose to the future of American Catholicism as a distinctive way of life...
...But this alliance raises as many problems as prospects...
...And certainly Catholicism, among all religious traditions, is blessed with a wealth of models for the spiritual life and prayer (to which the hunger of Harvard Protestants for Catholic spirituality attests...
...This brings the advantage of music which is more accessible to people, and thus invites their participation as a community, in line with the council's ecclesiology...
...Equally seminal was the notion of the church as a "pilgrim people" {Lumen Gentium, 48): The renewal of the world is irrevocably under way...
...a more human manner of life is fostered also in earthly society" {Lumen Gentium, 40...
...There now remains only a flat plot of earth...
...The rapid success of the Charismatic ReCommonweal: 524 newal, of course, provided an important outlet for much of the devotional fervor of millions of American Catholics, but we should not regard this as a true alternative to popular devotions, for two reasons: First, many were attracted to charismatic prayer groups as much by their strong sense of community as by their devotional qualities...
...Second, they developed a sense of loyalty to the institutional church and specifically to one's superior (for diocesan clergy: the bishop...
...Thus, many clergy as well as lay people seek alternative models, yet to be developed...
...I found this remarkable enough in the past, when people gestured even with their backs to the church, reading the morning paper...
...The second chord was the secular tide of the "human potential" movement of the 1970s...
...The church is w^^m^mmm^^^^^mtt not merely an institutional structure whose sacraments mediate an individual's relationship with God, but a people whose sharing of the sacraments makes it (and therefore its members) graced, priestly, holy, and thus in touch with God...
...If the old ways had to be altered it was not because they were inherently flawed but because they had become ill-suited to the needs of the modern world...
...The contemporary hunger for inner awareness and wholeness born in the 1970s has thus proved-a powerful ally for the council's impetus to view the spiritual life, not as a polished cyclic routine, but as a pilgrimage...
...Prompted by the council's decree on the apostolate of the laity (Apostolicam Actuositatem, 10): "the laity have an active part of their own in the life and action of die church"), lay people have assumed more prominent roles, both as volunteers and as professionals, in religious education, campus ministry, counseling, family and social ministry, and music and liturgy...
...The generation since Vatican II has witnessed an extraordinary transformation of the church's prayer and spiritual life, but the council's work from its first vision of a renewed church to its final completion in our parishesdemands more than one generation...
...Second, the high level of turnover in most charismatic groups suggests that for many the prayer group is not a permanent place of devotion but a way-station on one's spiritual journey...
...They offered the promise of an integrated way of life in a rapidly fragmenting world...
...The problem is that nearly all of these models emerged from, and were built upon, the disciplines of celibacy and community, and do not translate easily or well into the ordinary experience of laypeople...
...I think of the train I ride to work each day through one of Boston's Irish Catholic neighborhoods...
...Second, their pastoral function may well be indispensable to Catholicism as a way of life: that function must be retrieved, although in some new form...
...Thus prayer and spirituality are intrinsically public and communitarian...
...no council document makes spirituality its primary focus...
...I picture my grandparents, kneeling nightly on the front hall floor before a votive-lit Virgin to recite the radio rosary with Cardinal Cushing...
...However, until there be realized new heavens and a new earth in which justice dwells (cf...
...Lay people in training want such formation themselves...
...The effect in American parish life has been far-reaching, nonetheless: namely, the de facto devaluing and even discrediting of many previously popular devotions...
...In the last ten years, American bishops in particular have been highly vocal about the need for the "formation" of people training for lay ministry...
...In the council's view, the primary institutional locus of spiritual life is the parish and even the world, not the monastery...
...In this respect, charismatic groups often reflected the council's spirituality better than local parishes...
Vol. 112 • October 1985 • No. 17
