by Ken Trainor
Ekklesia talk, March 5, 2008
(published here with permission)
I’m honored to be here, honored to have been asked. When I covered the Dominic Crossan lecture for Wednesday Journal—way back in March of 1994—I never expected to be up here giving a talk.
Last month you had Jack Shea here, so I know you attract plenty of talent—experts, scholars, theologians, maybe even spiritual avatars.
Well, today it’s amateur hour.
Amateur, I hope, in the best sense of the word—meaning “lover,” sometimes passionately so.
I’m no expert, and I’m certainly no scholar. I’m a journalist. Our base of knowledge is said to be a mile wide and an inch deep.
I’m also a free-thinker, which doesn’t necessarily mean I’m good at thinking. It just means I do a lot of it, and I’m relatively unencumbered by orthodoxy or rigidity. I love thinking, sometimes passionately, and I’ve given a lot of thought over the years to religion and spirituality. Hence my status as an amateur.
I hope this will be a refreshing change of pace for you. You probably need a break from all those oppressively reasoned, meticulously researched points of view. I’m the antidote. As a journalist, my job is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted—unlike professional comedians and clowns like Rush Limbaugh who afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable. My particular talent has always been afflicting the comfortable though I’m trying to get better at comforting the afflicted.
I’m not here to afflict you, however. None of you would be here at 9 a.m. on a Wednesday if you were smug, comfortable and complacent about your spirituality.
But it does put me at odds with my Church. I grew up Catholic, and as you heard in my intro, I have a longstanding, committed approach-avoidance relationship with Catholicism.
There are many kinds of Catholics—orthodox Catholics, Roman Catholics, non-Roman Catholics, Call to Action Catholics, cafeteria Catholics, lapsed Catholics, practicing Catholics (practicing till we get it right), cultural Catholics, lace curtain/shanty/steam heat/Notre Dame Catholics (in other words, Irish Catholics), Vatican II Catholics, pre-Vatican II Catholics, post-Vatican II Catholics, anti-Vatican II Catholics (who sound a lot like pre-Vatican II Catholics), tattle-tale Catholics, hall-monitor Catholics, small “c” Catholics (sort of like small “d” democrats), and my favorite, hatch-match-and-dispatch Catholics (Baptism, Wedding and Funeral).
Am I missing any?
Well, here’s one more: I’ve coined a new category. I describe myself as a “free-range Catholic.”
I’m the one, out on the open range, whom the Good Shepherd leaves the 99 to go search for. Only I’m not lost. I know where the flock is. I choose to be out here. I like to imagine the good shepherd saying, “I know, but just for appearances sake, let me bring you in on my shoulders and make a big deal about your return. I’ll score big points with the 99.” Hey, why not. A man can’t live by the open range alone—at least not forever. A free-range Catholic needs to go to church regularly, just to stay connected. You can get a little squirrelly if you stay out there too long.
But the Catholic Church isn’t exactly keen about free-range Catholics.
What if everyone were a free-range Catholic? Not likely. There aren’t many of us and never will be. But the Church needs us like it needs all the other kinds of Catholics. Some will tell you that free-thinkers are natural-born heretics, but we’re not trying to undermine or subvert anything. It’s just who we are. I grew up a good, orthodox Catholic—and even a Republican, believe it or not—in this very town when it was a much more conservative place. I attended the archdiocesan seminary (Quigley North and three years at Niles College) in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s. I was on the straight and narrow. But at some point, I discovered a free-thinker inside who wouldn’t be denied. I tried suppression, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. It’s who I am.
Besides, the only thing that has ever undermined the Catholic Church isn’t heresy—it’s arrogance.
People ask me how I put up with a profoundly conservative, change-averse, obedience-oriented, top-down hierarchical, testosterone-impaired institution, and I look them squarely in the eye and tell them in no uncertain terms, “I haven’t a clue.”
I take solace in knowing that Jesus Christ himself, if he came back today, would have a tough time fitting into the modern Catholic Church, especially if he really was in love with Mary Magdalene … but we won’t go there. I really don’t care one way or the other. That’s one of the perks of being a free-range Catholic. Nothing disillusions you—except maybe if I discovered that God really is a pre-Vatican II or even a pre-New Testament God, but I’ll just have to wait for the post-life briefing like everyone else for that revelation.
As a free-ranger, I’m in a unique position in the Church. I can’t be intimidated. Unless they bar the doors, I will continue to walk right in and partake of Communion—and here’s the galling part—even find it meaningful.
That leaves me free to be a critic. And the Church needs critics—it’s just that the experts and scholars, the ones who know enough to do so more effectively, aren’t in a position to criticize without getting squashed. That leaves it up to us.
Not that the Church pays much attention to what someone like me has to say. I’m pretty easily dismissed. “You’re an undisciplined thinker with no credentials. You’re a journalist for God’s sake!” A journalist for God’s sake—I like the sound of that.
One of the perks of being a journalist is getting to interview interesting people. Some time back, I interviewed Rev. Martin Marty because we have a newspaper in Riverside, and he lives in Riverside. He was everything I’d hoped, so I asked him a more personal question—how he comes to terms with being part of a sometimes exasperating institution. He said it’s important for an individual to stay connected with his faith community because it keeps you grounded and honest. On the other hand, he said, it’s important for the individuals in that faith community to serve as critics in order to keep the institution honest.
A good, balanced assessment, but easy for him to say. He comes from the Lutheran “protest-ant” tradition. His founder hammered—what was it?—95 or 96 theses to the door of a church, setting off a firestorm—and badly needed reforms.
The Catholic Church isn’t any fonder of protest now than they were then. Obedience, yes, protest, no. But if I were to take my role seriously as a Catholic critic, I would tack a more modest three theses to the door of my church for starters.
1) Ordain women. Duh. You’ve got a severe priest shortage, and you’re wasting an incredible pool of creative talent.
2) Celibacy … optional. See comment above.
3) You can’t oppose preventive birth control (contraception) and reactive birth control (abortion) with equal moral intensity. If you want to reduce and even eliminate abortion, you have to promote responsible contraception. If you prohibit responsible contraception, you are, in effect, promoting abortion.
That’s enough for starters. There’s more, but this is an institution that took 400 years to finally, officially admit Galileo was right about the Earth orbiting the Sun. We have to be realistic about the prospects. The frustrating thing about my three theses is that they’re all … going … to happen … eventually. They have to. It’s just a shame the institution has to drag its figurative feet so long before finally doing the obvious.
(NCR column) The Church needs its critics, which is why it needs free-range Catholics.
There are a few other things I could quibble with. The Mass, for instance. Could use some revision. Take the part where the priest says, “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God” and everyone responds, “It is right to give God thanks and praise.” We sound like the old Communist Party Congress—or like extras in one of those biblical epics sputtering “idiot dialogue” because the scriptwriters felt they had to give them something to do.
“It is right to give God thanks and praise?” First of all, we’re in God’s house. Why are we referring to God in the third person? And what a stirring testimonial. If you’re going to thank and praise God, then do it, don’t tell us you’re doing it.
(e.e. cummings poem “I thank you God for most this amazing day …”)
Now that’s thanks and praise—e.e. cummings probably isn’t biblical enough for a lot of people, but that’s the real thing. There ought to be more poetry in the Mass. Probably not much chance of it though.
And isn’t this supposed to be the “Good News?” Then it should sound like good news. The only priest I’ve ever heard preach this on a consistent basis was Fr. Bill Burke. You should book him for a talk. “God loves you like a fool,” he would say, his voice filled with passion and a smile on his face. “You don’t have to earn it.”
Now that’s good news.
What can I say? I’m a progressive. I believe in Chardin’s theory of spiritual evolution. I believe we’re intended by our Creator to evolve into a higher state of being.
I was 10 when Vatican II threw open the shutters of a suffocating Church. I was 12 when the Beatles invaded New York and started the dazzling, if turbulent, ‘60s. I was 17 when we landed on the moon. You bet I got my hopes up. I was expecting to see great things in my lifetime. Neil Armstrong said, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” He didn’t mean backward, but that’s pretty much what happened. I call it “The Great Recoiling.” For 40 years we’ve been afraid to take the next step.
But I’m ranging. What a surprise. My subject today is “Sharing our spiritual journey.” I also want to talk a little about my book. Fortunately, they’re connected.
I believe we’re all on a spiritual journey—from birth through death to whatever lies beyond, if anything does. I hope it does, I believe it does, I live as if it does. But I don’t know for sure. That’s my agnostic side. None of us knows for sure. It’s honest to admit that to one another. We should admit that to one another.
That puts us in the middle of a great mystery—great as in big and great as in wonderful, wondrous, miraculous and good. Above all, good.
If there is something after death, there may also be something before life. Re-incarnation, or looking at it from our vantage point, Pre-incarnation. To be honest, I don’t really believe in reincarnation, but it gives me the opportunity to read one of my favorite poems by Rainer Maria Rilke.
(Reading “God speaks to each of us …”)
Go to the limits of your longing—now those are words to live by.
We’re all on a spiritual journey. I guess that’s not exactly breaking news. Life as a journey is such an old metaphor, it’s become a cliché. We take it for granted, but we shouldn’t.
We often use different terms to describe it—maybe that’s the real meaning of the Tower of Babel myth. The pursuit of happiness is one version. Only we’re not pursuing happiness. Happiness is just a pleasant by-product.
What a great Creator who makes sex pleasurable and happiness the by-product of actively pursuing our spiritual development. What a great Creator who seems to want us to be happy in this life.
Not everyone sees him or herself on a spiritual journey. I’m preaching to the choir here. As I said, you don’t show up for a spiritual discussion on a Wednesday morning unless you’re already deliberate and intentional about taking the journey.
But even fellow travelers may differ. Some would say taking the journey is part of being Christian. For me, being Christian is part of taking the journey.
It’s a journey that begins alone, as another of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver describes it:
(Reading, “The Journey”)
The journey is a workable metaphor for life, and existentialists tell us it’s a journey we must take alone. But are we really alone? If we’re all taking it, we can share what we’ve learned with one another. We can tell one another where we’ve been, how we got here, what works for us and what doesn’t work. I don’t think we do enough of that.
On the spiritual journey, we move at our own pace. This isn’t a competition. It’s a not a race. We go as far as we go. Some don’t go very far. Some can’t for a variety of reasons and need help (but don’t always accept it).
There are as many paths as there are journeys, but some believe the journey can only take place on their particular path. Some insist that everyone use their language to talk about the journey. They’re mono-lingual. That’s a challenge, especially for free-rangers who aren’t partial to well-defined paths at all. And we’re extremely ecumenical.
Nonetheless, I believe if we consciously see our lives as a unique spiritual journey and if we take that journey deliberately and intentionally, we’ll go further. If we generously share with one another what we’ve learned along the way—without being judgmental, offered freely as a gift—we’ll go further still.
Taking the journey is our best shot at happiness. There’s a reason, I think, the Dalai Lama is always smiling.
(Read “Insight from the Dalai Lama” calendar pages)
The spiritual journey came alive as a metaphor for me when I wrote this book, which represented a coming-out of sorts for me. It forced me to admit—in public, in places like this—that I am a spiritual person. I always have been, of course, but until this book, I kept it carefully under wraps.
And who can blame me? For one thing, look at the company you keep—salvation peddlers, sanctimonious creeps, holier-than-thou hucksters hogging the spotlight.
And how to talk about it? I’m not born again. I don’t accept Jesus as my personal savior.
I don’t reject Jesus either, but as a writer, I do reject clichéd jargon. The religious right has, in effect, held spirituality hostage for the last quarter century.
The spiritual salesmen of the world have made it difficult for the rest of us to talk openly about our spirituality. I’m not pushing any particular persuasion. I’m not trying to convert anyone. I don’t care what you believe or even if you believe. I certainly don’t expect you to believe what I believe.
I just know from talking to a lot of people over the years that most are naturally spiritual and feel the need to talk about it from time to time—especially as we reach midlife, which is probably the time when all this is supposed to take place.
The latest stage of my spiritual journey began 13 years ago when I was very unhappy and badly needed solitude and time to think, and a friend suggested I visit New Melleray Abbey, a Trappist monastery in NE Iowa, for a personal retreat. It was supposed to be a writer’s retreat, but the spirit of the place is contagious and a tonic for the harried soul, and I found myself going back each October for five days. Nothing structured. The monks are very respectful of your privacy.
Little by little over the past 13 years, I learned more and more about the contemplative life, absorbing it mostly by osmosis, and from reading and talking to the monks.
And, little by little, spirituality started creeping into my column. You may have noticed if you read it regularly.
What I learned about contemplation is this: When you create the right conditions, spirituality naturally emerges. I’m defining spiritual experience here very simply: A widening or heightening of consciousness that takes place whenever we transcend the narrow confines of the Ego and recognize that we’re all connected to something larger.
Silence, solitude and simplicity are the essential ingredients. When you reduce external noise, you begin to quiet down inside as well. When your body is relaxed and rested, you become serene. That signals the soul. You begin to hear yourself think. And you discover that, down deep, there is not only goodness but wisdom.
Well, it worked while I was there, but not when I returned to the noisy, stressful, harried and hurried environment back here.
Then my marriage failed and I found myself living alone. I also stopped watching TV. Suddenly I had as much silence and solitude as I could handle—sometimes a little more than I could handle. Be careful what you wish for.
Because I’m a journalist, I carry a notebook in my back pocket and pens in my front pocket and started recording the sentences that bobbed to the surface.
That’s how this book came about. It’s an odd book, probably not quite like anything you’ve seen. For one thing it’s mostly blank. The book is 224 pages and approximately 300 sentences long. At $14.95, that comes out to a nickel per sentence. So they’d better be good.
The book is dedicated to the proposition that we need more time for silence and creative solitude in our lives. And when we allow that, good things happen.
Now silence is a problem for a lot of people. We experience silence as emptiness, absence—a void to avoid. We fear and flee silence, surrounding ourselves with company and “culture chatter.”
A lot of people interpret silence as the death—or indifference—of God. Even Mother Theresa was troubled, we’re told, by God’s silence. And for most of us, I suspect, our primary experience of God is just that—silence.
But there’s another perspective: Native Americans—the Sioux, I think—heard the silence even more clearly than we do, but they experienced it as full, fertile, benevolent, the ground out of which all creativity springs. In fact, they called God “The Great Silence.”
I allude to that in the first sentence of my book:
“Hearing a great silence, I asked the spirit to speak through me—with wisdom, about life and love.”
A prominent pun in the book is the notion that when we’re born, we’re sentenced to life—not life imprisonment, unless we choose to see it that way—just to life. And as we live, we compose our own life sentence, word by word, and have to discern what that sentence is. This first sentence in the book is my life sentence.
“Hearing a great silence, I asked the spirit to speak through me—with wisdom about life and love.” That’s a writer’s prayer. But all of us have wisdom within, waiting to be tapped. When we take ourselves seriously as a spiritual authority—not THE spiritual authority, just one of many—then we are engaged in an act of daring. Hence the title: We Dare to Say.
Do you take yourself seriously as a spiritual authority? That’s where the word “author” comes from, and that’s what the authorities kept pestering Jesus about: “On whose authority do you speak?”
Is it presumptuous to see yourself as a spiritual authority? Is it the dreaded “sin of pride” we were terrorized with growing up? Just who do you think you are? That’s a fine question, actually. “Who do you think you are?” But it was asked rhetorically. If we had really tried to answer it, who knows what might have happened. Well, at the very least we are the foremost authority on our own spiritual journey.
This is all part of the democratization of spirituality in our era. God is no longer locked in the tabernacle. We are no longer dependent on the “experts.” We have to take ownership of, and responsibility for, our own spirituality—and that’s a good thing.
When we create the conditions, wisdom will eventually rise to the surface. But first you have to be willing to listen to a great silence. That’s what I learned, little by little, over the last 13 years.
Is there wisdom in this book? Let’s try some sentences and you can be the judge.
(Read sentences)
Aside from my sentences and the blank lines inviting you to write your own, you’ll also find Bible verses at the bottom of most pages. Bill Burke, who I mentioned earlier, and who also wrote the book’s Welcome, chose many of the verses. We don’t tell where they’re from—some Old Testament, some New Testament—but they provide a nice counterpoint, I think, to my content.
None of this was my original intent, actually. When I compiled my sentences, I threw everything in—gags, bad puns, wisecracks, if you read my column regularly, you know what I’m talking about—and sent them to ACTA Publications at Bill Burke’s suggestion. His book about battling depression, “Protect Us From All Anxiety,” was published there a few years back.
Greg Pierce, the publisher, read my original manuscript and said, “Well, we publish serious books about spirituality. If you take out the frivolous stuff, I’ll consider it.” After separating the chaff from the wheat, I discovered, to my surprise, that I had written a serious book about spirituality—my spirituality.
And after it was published, I discovered to my great dismay that you can’t just bask in the glory of authorship. You have to get your butt out there and promote the damned thing. Which led to talks like this, which in turn forced me to collect my thoughts on the subject. I’m still collecting. This is what I’ve come up with so far:
Like most people, I’m a combination of conventional and unconventional spirituality. It’s the particular blend that make us unique.
For me, spirituality falls into three categories:
1) Solitary (or personal), which we’ve already discussed and which this book encourages
2) Relational (articulated best by Martin Buber in “I and Thou,” the book that changed my life 38 years ago)
(Reading from I and Thou)
And the third category is the communal.
Most of us belong to an established faith community, a church, an institution. It is our connection to the mainstream, to conventional spirituality. According to Ronald Rohlheiser, who spoke recently at Dominican University, church affiliation has remained pretty steady for the past 50 years. People still identify with their faith community. But church attendance nationwide has fallen dramatically.
Some see that as a decline, but I’m not so sure. It might also be an indication that institutions exert less influence than they once did.
Society is changing and decentralizing. People are taking more responsibility for themselves and relying less on institutions
(Read Dalai Lama calendar page).
In the Catholic Church, I don’t think this was caused by the sex abuse scandal. I think people were already relying less on the Church to provide all of their spiritual meaning. The scandal merely gave a boost to what was already happening.
This trend isn’t anti-institutional, it’s extra-institutional—in other words, “Beyond the Walls,” which is also the title of a wonderful book I’m reading about applying monastic principles to our everyday life.
We have to do a lot of this work on our own, outside of church, and I believe that’s healthy.
But we can’t do it all on our own or we’ll spin off into sloppy solipsism and theological eccentricity. We need to find the proper balance between the personal, the relational, and the communal. As the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “Let him who cannot be alone, beware of community. Let him who is not part of a community, beware of being alone.”
I tend to err on the side of too much solitude, so I need more relationship and community connection. Most people, I find, err on the side of too much community. Balance is the key.
The kind of spirituality I’m preaching might be called “Middle Earth Spirituality” in honor of dear departed J.R.R. Tolkien. It is midlife, middle class, middle of the road, Midwest spirituality. Hobbit spirituality, nothing fancy, simple and down to earth—spirituality as a natural extension of life, not something transcendent, compartmentalized and apart from our daily lives.
We are busy people. We don’t have time to be great mystics. We can’t all be Thomas Merton. Yet we experience the same spiritual longing. Around midlife, we’re looking for more meaning in our lives, and after the kids are gone, the careers established and we aren’t so panicky about finances, we naturally begin to turn to the spiritual.
Too often we veil spirituality with a lot of mystification and mumbo-jumbo. This isn’t alchemy. It’s a natural part of life. James Joyce called it “the holiness of the ordinary.” The good news is everyone can experience it. Everyone, I believe, wants to experience it.
Middle Earth spirituality occurs in brief moments. When the conditions are right, our consciousness naturally expands, and we realize there’s more to us than our limited egos, that we belong to something greater.
Franciscan Richard Rohr writes in his book, “Adam Returns”: “Life is not about me. I am about life.” That’s become my mantra. We are more than our ego, more than the worry-wart control freak, obsessed with threats to our survival. When we realize that life is not about us, that we are about life, our consciousness expands. We no longer live by fear alone.
Rohr says the phrase Jesus used more than any other in the New Testament is “Do not be afraid.” I think we can take him at his word. If we can’t believe that much, we really can’t believe anything. The biggest step on the spiritual journey is the first step: finding a way past fear.
When we rise above fear, we begin to recognize the other phrase Jesus used so frequently: “The kingdom of heaven is upon you.” Catherine of Siena said, “The path to heaven is part of heaven.”
We may only get glimpses of heaven on earth, but those moments make life worth living. Here’s how I described it in a column published last November:
(Read column passage)
Moments of meaning, moments of expanding consciousness, brief moments of exhilaration and ecstasy. I’ve had spiritual experiences taking the garbage out at night, stopping and looking up into a starry, winter sky, recognizing my place in our true home, the universe. We need to train ourselves to pay attention to these moments. We need to create the conditions that allow them to happen.
It may mean going down to Lake Michigan and wandering around some afternoon. It may be protecting part of your Saturday and devoting it to reflection and reading or a long walk. It may be overcoming the panic that sets in at 3 a.m. and allowing our minds and souls instead to range far in the middle of the night, free of fear.
Are you a member of the 3 a.m. club? As I stare at the ceiling, fretting about all the people who are important to me, I can’t help feeling a good portion of the Oak Park population is awake with me. Talking my fears down requires an act of faith, a leap of faith. When I manage it, my soul takes flight. I’m warm, my body is relaxed, my appetites are asleep, so there aren’t any major distractions. The insights start coming, I settle into that blissful state of FLOW, and just when it’s all starting to get really interesting … I fall asleep and the next thing I know, Carl Grapentine is introducing Monday morning Mozart on WFMT on my clock radio. Well, that’s Middle Earth Spirituality.
What works for you? Meditation? Yoga? Gardening? Retreats at a Trappist monastery? Lectures like this? Spiritual discussion groups? I belong to one, five years and counting. It’s been very helpful.
We do what we can. All we get are moments. But the more we work at it, the better we get at it and those moments occur more often. I’m hoping my book will work for people. It’s meant to put you in a contemplative state.
That pretty much sums up my free-range spirituality. I don’t know if it’s of any value to you, but I offer it humbly, freely, as a gift. I still have a long way to go on my journey (we all do). I’m no expert, but I am the foremost authority on my journey—as you are the foremost authorities on yours.
I said life is not about me, but I’ve been talking about myself for almost an hour. That’s more than enough. I’d like to hear what you’ve learned, what works for you, what moments you’ve experienced, and how you share your spiritual journey.
03-09-2008 |