Looking back now, I realize it’s been eight months since I attended church. I never imagined I’d be writing a statement like that, but now as I contemplate the course my life has taken, I’m thankful.
Last year, my wife and I decided to take a step out in faith. We were faced with an existential crisis of sorts, a loss of meaning, of motivation…of heart. Church had become a very busy cultural experience, from Sunday services, weekly home community meetings, service projects, shifts in the children’s ministry and more. It was all becoming a chore, begging the question: why? Was this what Christ meant when he said “Follow Me” ? It felt like a club, and we were very busy fulfilling the expectations for members, like good Christians should. Then a friend pointed us toward a local Jesuit parish offering the Spirital Exercises of St. Ignatius in a nine-month retreat format. The call to action…or rather to cease all action…was clear to us both.
We set about quitting everything resembling “Church-ianity” in our lives, publicly deciding to retreat for an undetermined period of time. It immediately separated us from the community we’d been a part of for two years, prompting disdain and misunderstanding from some, and encouragement from others. In us, it birthed a renewed sense of love and devotion toward Christ…a sense of freedom, of casting off our bonds and jumping into life with Him.
The last eight months have been about loving and being present with Christ, who is with me right now. This contrasts sharply with past years, when I worked to acquire knowledge about Christ, working hard to get it right, out of fear of getting it wrong. This is a major crisis within the contemporary church, this emphasis on correct information about Jesus, rather than an unbridled relationship with Jesus.
The evangelical church in particular seems to be stuck here. So many churches I’ve been to, so many pastors I know, are caught in a pattern of providing a fast-food spirituality. We pull through the drive-through on Sunday morning, at one of the three services offered, each with a different choice of worship style and format. We order our message from God, delivered by a human with a degree of some sort, and if he or she is a dynamic enough speaker, we may have an emotional experience…might get that “Ah Ha!” moment. Or, we might simply receive the satisfaction of having done the “right” thing that week. We take the spiritual insights we’re given, the sense of correctness, and drive away happy. However, this immediate gratification spirituality easily becomes a substitute for the personal journey with Christ, who is present and already infinitely close to us. Our pastors don’t need the pressure of having to keep up with our appetites for meaning…Christ alone can meet that need.
We are meant to walk this journey in community…but we must also learn to walk alone.
Temporarily rejecting the church for Christ has changed me forever…and I don’t know how to re-engage just yet. My vision is limited to the present, but I am comforted, as always, by the knowledge that Christ sits with me as I write this…and sits with you as you read it. The call is not to set records for church attendance, scripture memorization or service work …but to surrender to the wonderful truth of the present and follow Him…wherever this may lead.
Peace be with you.
Dear brother
I perfectly understand what you mean here. I have traveled a long spiritual journey myself. If you want me to send a letter about it I wrote some time ago, go to my e-mail address.
Since some time I have contacts with what I call devotional Christians, but I have the impression that many of them are ‘spiritual bypassers’, which means that they tend to pass over unresolved emotional issues. The Benedictine monk Anselm Grün speaks of a ‘spirituality from below’ and a ‘spirituality from above’. I have been (and somehow still am) a ‘spiritual bypasser’ for most of my life. Jesus Christ is after all the Great Healer, but I have prayed and begged so much without getting an answer. I have read far too many books and I have made it myself very difficult. This has to do with a woundedness from early childhood. I am at a point at which all words, even the words of the Bible, the Psalms or rosary prayer are superficial to me. There has to be a deeper dimension of prayer and life in general! I feel with all this pain I have to start a good therapy, in which body, mind, emotions and behaviour are integrated and I have found a good Pesso therapist: http://www.pbsp.com/
The desert fathers and the monastic tradition adhere to a different spirituality from below (of every day life, living in the here and now, coping with emotions and thoughts -they don’t talk about the Trinity but about their inner demons-, introspection and self investigation, alertness and awareness (nepsis), purity of heart (puritas cordis, apatheia) and so forth …) from a ‘spirituality from above’ , which is sometimes very negative or moralistic as in evangelical but also in some catholic conservative circles (vicariously suffering with Christ, confinement, restoration, sacrifice …).
This question is analogous to the question of the so-called ‘kataphatic’ tradition versus the ‘apophatic’ tradition (f.e. Cloud of Unknowing, Eckhart, John of the Cross a.o.) (see google =) Wikipedia!). As many spiritual leaders today expose we can learn a lot from other spiritual traditions as Buddhism, Sufism, Advaita and so forth.
Father Déchanet f.e. looked at Yoga, father Lassalle at Zen and the father Griffiths, Le Saux a.o. at Hindu advaita. Since Vaticanum II a lot has changed.
However,things have to be kept in balance. The unique figure of Christ and His redemption work sometimes tends to get blurred, which is of course against orthodox faith.
You will understand what I mean.
PAX,
Fred Delameilleure
Ostend (BELGIUM)
Fred, thank you for your thoughts. Truly, a balanced life is a life rooted in Christ, who holds all things together…even our divided body, mind, emotions and behaviors. I am with you in spirit – particularly in your awareness of how our brokenness, our wounds, can drive us to pursue altered notions of who God is and how He see us. This is a part of what I’m talking about, for the moralistic, unpredictable God of many conservative circles feels appropriate to our wounded nature…we aren’t entirely sure we deserve His kind of love, we need to attach conditions. The same could be said for the blurred vision of God on the other side…we aren’t entirely sure we deserve that kind of love, so we reduce it to a subjective experience, and color it with our own brokenness.
I am convinced that despite the swaying pendulum of human spirituality, Christ is the center…the apex, from which even our moralism or our relativism, our graspings at truth, derive their meaning. At the cross, suspended between worlds, between God and man, Christ bridges all divides, even those within me. Of course, our path to realizing this in day-to-day life is as difficult as Christ’s path to the cross…His Passion is our Passion. There are no easy answers, are there? Heaven can seem so painfully silent…yet, God is God, and I can learn to accept, even embrace silence, and within that silence, God speaks…on His terms, not mine.
Your response has stirred my thinking, and I find within this exchange a call for me to return yet again to the Center. Its interesting how easily I can become distracted by the periphery.