Six Neo-Christian Myths: Exiting the Arc of Christian History

February 5, 2014 By K. Mulhern

Today I ran across a post by Donald Miller of Blue Like Jazz fame and more. I do not follow Donald Miller much or read his work—not out of any protest or high-minded posture, but, well, you have to pick and choose. I don’t have anything much to say about Donald Miller at all, really, nor should I pick on this singular post as representative of the man’s full contribution to Christian spirituality. After all, he’s clearly successful: multiple books, a much sought after speaker, a chosen public pray-er at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, a member of one of Obama’s task forces. He must be very important—he has his own Wiki page (where I obviously found much of this. Does that make it all true?)

Nevertheless, the post, which you can read here, caught my attention, because in it Miller seems to embrace many of the misconceptions we have today about “church” and many of the myths that so painfully gut our Christian spirituality of the deepest practices and purposes that have sustained faith over the last 2000 years.

Two things happen when you spend a lot of time studying the history of Christianity. First, you get depressed. Abuses, violence, confusion, faithlessness, more violence, pride, bad theology, lack of compassion, divisiveness, and on and on. For sure, studying Church history can be disturbing. But then, after a while, amidst the muck, the grace begins to shine through with a gentle, pervasive, even relentless certainty. The darknesses remain, but they are merely long shadows cast by a great light shining on small things.

For example, you read about the religious, political, and cultural chaos of the 14^th century in the European arena—ongoing war, failures in spiritual leadership—and you begin to wonder, where are the believers? Where is the demonstration of faith? Where is the good God in all this? And then you read about Julian of Norwich or Walter Hilton or Gerard de Groote or Richard Rolle or a dozen other quiet people of prayer and great love for Jesus. They were there, singular witnesses standing in the light.

And then, the next step in studying Church history, once you’ve shouldered the melancholy and treasured the light, is to ask: what sustained these people in faith? What, in fact, has enable believers over the centuries to believe, to trust, to hope—to stand?

Each of them has his or her own story and unique experiences and practices that nourished faith, but they also all share some common experiences and practices. One such practice is worship, and yes, they all worshipped outside Church walls—in their work and writing and thinking and praying—but they also recognized that the regular gathering to worship in community was a vital part of their faith. Sometimes I don’t think they would recognize us in our freewheeling, independent, me-centered spiritual lives.

So, as a mini-series of posts for this new year, I thought I’d address one of these neo-Christian myths each week. Each of them, when understood as a commentary on worship within a church setting (I’m not talking about the building, of course, but of the community), leads us far afield from the rich, resilient faith of Christians who have preceded us and, I believe, will ultimately fail to sustain faith, both individual and corporate. They exit the great arc of Christian history.

Myth #1: Connecting with God has “feelings” attached to it.

Miller writes of going to a stellar worship service with awesome music, but disappointingly admits it left him cold. He says, “As far as connecting with God goes, I wasn’t feeling much of anything.” Perhaps this myth should be nuanced a bit. Maybe I should have written: “Myth #1: Connecting with God has good (warm, wonderful, exhilarating, jazzy) feelings attached to it.” Miller’s brief account has overtones of detachment and ambivalence, for sure not feelings you really want to cultivate in a worship service.

This was troubling to him. And if I thought that “connecting with God” should entail some sort of spiritual soul-rumbling, then yes indeedy a lot of the worship services I have attended have been much worse than mere disappointments. They’ve been a colossal waste of time. Lots and lots of time. I bet I’ve been to more church services than most of you readers all put together. (PK, remember?) Clearly I have not connected with God if I measure this by the boredom, restlessness, and frustration that I’ve felt at times in church services.

But anyone who has loved a spouse, parented children, or had a job knows that the work involved in each of these kindles a vast array of feelings—some painfully joyful and others just plain old painful. If we leave a relationship, give up on a task, shirk a responsibility because we’re just not feeling the love—because we have bouts of boredom, restlessness, and frustration—then there is no love, no commitment, no givingness. We do the work, care for the children, serve the spouse faithfully no matter the roller coaster of emotions that may assault us through the course of a day, a week, a month, or years.

In fact, I do believe this is one of the deepest and most powerful of spiritual disciplines: Let nothing distract you, nothing—not another’s faults, not confusion or anxiety or fear, not lack of fervor or coldness of heart, not even your own faults—from the constant turning to God in trust and repentance. None of it matters, press on, press on. This unremitting movement of the heart means patting those feelings (or lack of them) on the head, acknowledging their presence, and then moving again toward Jesus.

To go to church, gather with the community in worship, celebrate Christ, and expect to “connect with God” in ways that mollycoddle my emotions is to cultivate a rather shortsighted perspective of both connecting with God and the purpose of church at all. We connect with God through faith, through mutual love and service, through adoration, and all of that can be done without one iota of sensing his presence. Just ask Mother Teresa, whose posthumously published private writings, Come Be My Light, paint a picture of a woman whose “connection with God” was both shockingly bereft of the feelings we might expect and shockingly faithful in her trust in God and her desire to do his will.

Miller writes, “I worship God every day through my work. It’s a blast.”

I write, I worship God every day through my work too. Sometimes it’s not a blast. That doesn’t make it “not worship.” In fact, the saints tell us that when we can relinquish the need for pleasure as the price of our obedience, God might indeed be honored more highly.

So back to church. Myth #1 presumes that we go to church to “connect with God.” We don’t. We are already and always connected with God. (Another irksome contemporary phrase: “God showed up!” Really.) We go to church because we are connected with God and with one another, and there we express that connection through worship—song, word, Eucharist, greetings, prayers. We bring our feelings—whatever they are—to worship rather than expect to find them there. We baptize them in the truth to which we belong, and we cart them out of there to the work he has called us to do.

A Spirit of Tranquility: Benedict

May 29, 2018 By Kathleen Mulhern

The English soul, according to Thornton, is Benedictine. Not Jesuit or Franciscan or Carmelite or Carthusian or even Cistercian. Benedictine. It goes with the homeliness of English spirituality, for Benedict’s charism was the way he created a home for the brothers, a place where they could work out their salvation, serve one another and the world, and grow in prayer and love. It has structure, but it isn’t crafted as rigorously as an Ignatian approach; it is rich in mysticism, but doesn’t pursue the ecstatic as the Carmelite way might; it invites passion, but embeds it more deeply in theological formation than the Franciscans.

Of course, even Benedict had to learn homeliness. His first experience leading a community didn’t go so well. His zeal for the spiritual life exceeded the expectations and interests of the brothers who had begged him to lead them. His spiritual rigor annoyed them to the point they felt they had only one option: poison the man. (Surely there were other options, but apparently early 6^th-century exasperation had fewer restraints. Perhaps we should think of it as some primitive form of road rage.)

But Benedict, unlike many holy sorts, didn’t stomp off into the sacred oblivion of some dark cave to nurse his loftier way and let his weaker brothers fend for themselves. He learned from these fraternal would-be assassins about the frailty of the human will, the need for kindness and patience, the value of simple practices, and the reality of reasonable expectations. And thus he writes the Rule, a Rule designed to strengthen and support the reality of good intentions in weak human nature. (Check out Benedict’s Rule here. “To you, therefore, my words are now addressed, whoever you may be, who are renouncing your own will to do battle under the Lord Christ, the true King, and are taking up the strong, bright weapons of obedience.”)

Benedict’s genius was his (hard-won) wisdom about the imperfections of our nature and the powerful balm of rhythms and rituals. He combined work and prayer in a humming cadence of quiet, humble, and deeply human activities, articulated in his Rule, and thus changed the history and trajectory of European culture.

Thornton argues that the Rule established the threefold approach to prayer that is essential to all Christian living. This consists of the Office (praying through the liturgical prayers of the set hours), private prayer and devotions, and Mass (Holy Communion). Thornton makes some quite extraordinary (and debatable) statements when he argues that without the solid incorporation of these three habits, spiritual disaster is inevitable.

“Amongst all the tests of Catholicity or orthodoxy, it is curious that this infallible and living test, is so seldom applied. We write and argue endlessly about the apostolic tradition, about episcopacy, sacramentalism, creeds, doctrine, the Bible—all very important things—yet we fail to see that no group of Christians is true to orthodoxy if it fails to live by this Rule of trinity-in-unity: Mass-Office-devotion.” (76)

This may sound a bit draconian, for we all know faithful Christians and communities who have never heard of the Office and have never used liturgical prayers. Nevertheless, there are still angles on this Benedictine genius that we should consider, and there are many ways this Benedictine DNA has infused the heirs of English spirituality. Here are a few ways to think of our Benedictine heritage:

First, the Mass-Office-devotion trilogy could be reinterpreted as Church-devotion-awareness. Think of it this way. First of all, our spiritual lives must be Church-ordered. This does not mean that all our spiritual lives revolve around Church, Church activities, Church budgets, Church programs and projects. God forbid. Truly, God forbid. But it does mean that Church—the regular gathering for common worship, the celebration of sacraments, the ordered, expansive hearing of God’s Word, and the relationships and commitments that unfold within that community—is indeed the central engine of our formation. The Christian spiritual life is not an individual sport; it’s a team sport. And when we think or act as though we’re above the need for common worship, or we begin to believe it has no real value for our lives in Christ, we are exiting the arc of Christian history. Simon Chan argues that, “The church precedes creation in that it is what God has in view from all eternity and creation is the means by which God fulfills his eternal purpose in time. The church does not exist in order to fix a broken creation, rather creation exists to realize the church.” (Liturgical Theology)

Second, the work of the Office—that is, the regular reading of the prescribed prayers and scriptures for certain hours of the day (in Catholic tradition, Matins and Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline, bedtime)—was derived from the Jewish pattern of prayer (think of Daniel praying three times a day). The Christian monastic Daily Office, with prayers or hours at seven times in each day, was based on the Jewish pattern of daily prayer at sunrise and at other times. The Anglican Reformation reduced the Office to morning and evening prayers. So leaving aside the recitation of specific prayers from the Book of Common Prayer, let’s just commend the rhythm of morning and evening prayer. Regular devotions. Quiet times, if that’s what you prefer to call them. The Benedictines took on a daily tempo of prayer, then work, then prayer, then work, then prayer. We, too, can take up the prayer-work-prayer tempo—a rigorous attention to a routine that sometimes rubs you raw, sometimes elates you, and sometimes puts you to sleep, and all the while shapes your soul in its responsiveness to the invitation of God.

Third, devotion then can refer to the moment-by-moment return, the quiet arrow prayers, the lifting of the eyes of the heart, the effort to be aware of the Presence throughout the day. Thus the weekly practice diffuses into daily practices, which reverberate in a steady act of yearning toward the Lord.

Mass = Liturgy/Worship

Office =Daily Devotions

Devotion = Practicing the Presence

That, I could argue, really is the foundation of healthy Christian spirituality.

The Benedictine Way has other riches that we could recover. Its three vows could provide some solid ground amidst the shifting foundations of contemporary life. Benedictine monks promised obedience—to an abbot, yes, which doesn’t help most of us, but the abbot was merely the embodiment of the Rule. We too need to turn our hearts in the direction of obedience, a most counterculture idea today, obedience to the Rule of Life. Benedictine monks promised stability—the steadfastness and grit of commitment to community, worship, and faith. Benedictine monks promised conversion—ah, this wonderful work of a lifetime of repentance, turning, turning, turning, and being healed.

A last Benedictine value, again, one that would be so powerful in these days: “All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ, for he himself will say: I was a stranger and you welcomed me (Mt 25:35).” All guests. Welcomed as Christ. The stranger, the traveler, the foreigner—welcomed as Christ. We may immediately want to translate that into public policy, but just take it personally right now. What would it look like for you to welcome others as Christ?

Next up: Bernard of Clairvaux.

NOTE: Navigate the series on English spirituality here.

Image: Saint Benedict, Saint Meinrad Archabbey.