William Barry and religious experience
I noticed that Ron Rolheiser has a column on Mother Teresa and her "dark night of the soul". When I posted about her a while ago, one of the things I mentioned was how much that lack of religious experience would have bothered me (and of course it bothered her too), and thinking of both MT's dryyness and Cura's mention of becoming a spiritual director, I was reminded of a book - The Practice of Spiritual Direction by William Barry SJ and William Connolly SJ. I bought it a few years ago, thinking that if I could understand the concepts, I could be my own spiritual director. Well, that hope was forlorn, but the book was still a good read, and it dwelt much on the importance to Ignatian spirituality of religious experience. Here are a few excerpts ......
************************************
[...] religious experience is to spiritual direction what foodstuff is to cooking. Without religious experience there can be no spiritual direction. We define Christian spiritual direction, then, as help given by one Christian to another which enables that person to pay attention to God's personal communication with him or her, to respond to this personally communicating God, to grow in intimacy with this God, and to live out the consequences of the relationship. The focus of this type of spiritual direction is on experience, not ideas, and specifically on religious experience .....
The focus on religious experience which we see as helpful, and even necessary for spiritual growth in our time is not a new phenomenon in the history of spirituality ..... The apostles came to believe in Jesus and to trust in him through their experience of him ..... They came to know him, they observed him, joined his company, watched the way he acted, and listened to him speak. Their experience of him led them to raise questions about him and then enabled them to answer these questions. They saw him touch a leper before he healed him, speak words of forgiveness to the paralyzed man, challenge the Pharisees to say whether they wanted him to kill of give life on the Sabbath, respond with sympathy and power to the widow of Naim, invite the hemorrhaging woman to speak to him. They experienced him in these actions and many others. And their conviction about him and allegiance to him resulted from their experience .....
Spirituality at the end of the Middle Ages shows many signs of the conflict between the emphasis on rational knowledge of God and the emphasis on loving experience of God. Ignatius of Loyola, as a late medieval person, had a choice between these different emphases. His works show that he chose to put trust in his experience ......
A particular religious experience is an experience of explicit communication on both God's and the receiver's part ... there can be two different kinds of events that we call religious experience. One is spontaneous and can occur when a person is praying as well as when he is not praying. It brings about a reaction to God and a desire to respond to him in some way. But it seems to end there. A man is walking along a country road in winter at sunset and is struck with awe at the lavish beauty around him. He is elated and shouts aloud a thank you to God. He then goes home and tells his wife about the experience. He recalls the event at times, but it remains a relatively isolated experience of God.
The other kind of event is a similar experience that is not isolated from the fabric of the person's life but begins or is part of an ongoing conscious relationship with God. For instance, the awe at the sunset might remind the man how much he has taken God for granted lately and prod him to take up again his practice of spending some time each day in prayer to deepen his relationship with God. It is this latter experience that we want to focus on ..... because it is this more purposeful pursuit of the relationship with God that makes spiritual direction most profitable .....
[...] the Church has traditionally been wary of private revelation. How then can anyone know whether he is hearing God or is suffering delusion? ..... Such decisions are made frequently in prayer and in spiritual direction, and people seem able to make them with relative ease ..... these people are "discerning the spirits". How do they do it? .....
****************************
To find the answer to that last question, you'll have to read the book :-) or you could read Fr. Rob Marsh's post, Theology and Experience @ Liverpool Living Theology, or John Veltri's page on Guidelines for Discerning Spirits
************************************
[...] religious experience is to spiritual direction what foodstuff is to cooking. Without religious experience there can be no spiritual direction. We define Christian spiritual direction, then, as help given by one Christian to another which enables that person to pay attention to God's personal communication with him or her, to respond to this personally communicating God, to grow in intimacy with this God, and to live out the consequences of the relationship. The focus of this type of spiritual direction is on experience, not ideas, and specifically on religious experience .....
The focus on religious experience which we see as helpful, and even necessary for spiritual growth in our time is not a new phenomenon in the history of spirituality ..... The apostles came to believe in Jesus and to trust in him through their experience of him ..... They came to know him, they observed him, joined his company, watched the way he acted, and listened to him speak. Their experience of him led them to raise questions about him and then enabled them to answer these questions. They saw him touch a leper before he healed him, speak words of forgiveness to the paralyzed man, challenge the Pharisees to say whether they wanted him to kill of give life on the Sabbath, respond with sympathy and power to the widow of Naim, invite the hemorrhaging woman to speak to him. They experienced him in these actions and many others. And their conviction about him and allegiance to him resulted from their experience .....
Spirituality at the end of the Middle Ages shows many signs of the conflict between the emphasis on rational knowledge of God and the emphasis on loving experience of God. Ignatius of Loyola, as a late medieval person, had a choice between these different emphases. His works show that he chose to put trust in his experience ......
A particular religious experience is an experience of explicit communication on both God's and the receiver's part ... there can be two different kinds of events that we call religious experience. One is spontaneous and can occur when a person is praying as well as when he is not praying. It brings about a reaction to God and a desire to respond to him in some way. But it seems to end there. A man is walking along a country road in winter at sunset and is struck with awe at the lavish beauty around him. He is elated and shouts aloud a thank you to God. He then goes home and tells his wife about the experience. He recalls the event at times, but it remains a relatively isolated experience of God.
The other kind of event is a similar experience that is not isolated from the fabric of the person's life but begins or is part of an ongoing conscious relationship with God. For instance, the awe at the sunset might remind the man how much he has taken God for granted lately and prod him to take up again his practice of spending some time each day in prayer to deepen his relationship with God. It is this latter experience that we want to focus on ..... because it is this more purposeful pursuit of the relationship with God that makes spiritual direction most profitable .....
[...] the Church has traditionally been wary of private revelation. How then can anyone know whether he is hearing God or is suffering delusion? ..... Such decisions are made frequently in prayer and in spiritual direction, and people seem able to make them with relative ease ..... these people are "discerning the spirits". How do they do it? .....
****************************
To find the answer to that last question, you'll have to read the book :-) or you could read Fr. Rob Marsh's post, Theology and Experience @ Liverpool Living Theology, or John Veltri's page on Guidelines for Discerning Spirits
posted by crystal | 7:55 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home