Practicing Our Spirituality

Last updated on: January 5, 2015 at 1:26 pm by Michael Hardin

Practicing Our Spirituality 2015-01-05T13:26:42-04:00 Michael Hardin

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I am currently mentoring a group of 30 people who are reading together in three different books for six months and interacting with myself and each other. I thought that sharing this might be of interest as we are reading daily together (all over the world) in Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals. It was written for the group but highlights my take on spirituality.

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Our journey in this group has a component for spirituality. The reason for this is that life is lived as a whole person and when engaging the task of theology we acknowledge that while we may think, ponder, reflect, debate and discuss ideas together, we also do so in the presence of God. We talk about God before God all the while knowing that even our talk about God is provisional. In spirituality this is known as apophaticism. It is a specific way of doing theology that has its roots in the Eastern churches. Its first clear expression was given by a figure known as Dionysius the Areopagite (who is a literary creation, not the historical follower of Paul mentioned in the book of Acts) whose wrote several treatises on mystical theology in the fifth century. Following him one can turn to Maximus Confessor or Gregory Palamas. And please do not for a moment begin to confuse what these figures were doing with what goes by the title ‘mystical theology’ in some charismatic circles (which in my opinion are bowdlerized cheap versions of an authentic mystical theology).

Apophatic spirituality is a type of mysticism that recognizes the limits of language. Every statement that is made about God is provisional. Language is inadequate to comprehend the divine. Every statement made about God must be followed by its negative, even positive statements like “God is Love.” The problem is not that God isn’t love in God’s self, but that the word ‘love’ is inadequate to describe the character of God’s love. Love as a word has human definition and is thus incapable of actually attaining to the perfection of what divine love is in itself.

The opposite of apophatic spirituality is known as kataphatic spirituality. This type of spirituality views ascent to the divine as the goal of Christian mysticism and so seeks to provide a path, method, way or technique. Centering prayer, the lectio divina, using liturgical resources (like the Catholic Daily Office or the Book of Common Prayer), The Ladder of Monks (Guigo II) are all forms of kataphatic spirituality. Of course there are all of the knock-offs of this as well: the seven secrets to prayer, the ten keys to a genuine relationship with God, and all of the other fluff out there in Christian La-La land.

I have chosen the Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals as our tool for kataphatic spirituality. There are several reasons for this.

First, as you learn to do theology you will find yourself climbing the mountain and exalting in new insights and you will find yourself descending into the valleys, indeed the abyss of total and complete uncertainty. Both are part of the process of learning and unlearning, relearning and eventually coming to terms with the reality that theology is a journey, not an end in itself. Reading in Common Prayer will keep you heart focused and grounded as your mind explores unknown and sometimes frightening new territory.

There will be times over the next six months when you may despair of what it is you think you know. This is good. What you are learning is that your theology is not God. You will learn to differentiate your theology, what you believe about God from your trust in God. These are very different things. Really what you are learning is that theology is not Gnosticism, that you are not saved by correct knowledge. Almost all of us tend to defend our theology because we have been taught to believe that right theology saves us. Theology does not save, knowledge does not save. God alone is Savior. So it is, that when your own personal assumptions are questioned, when previously held precious beliefs are cracked and walls come tumbling down and you begin to despair of ever knowing God or even if God exists, knowing that you are part of a community of friends that is engaging in a common spiritual discipline will keep you grounded.

There will be days you will not feel like doing the exercises in Common Prayer. There will be days when the words will roll off your tongue into dry dusty ground. That is to be expected. We engage in these prayers and devotions together in spite of how we feel. Faith is not feeling anymore than it is rationality, it is both and beyond both. Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his Psalms: Prayerbook of the Bible wrote that we pray the psalms and their manifold expressions of feeling even if and especially when we do not feel as the psalmist in solidarity with others who may and do feel the anger, despair, joy and comfort of any particular psalmist. So when you engage the Common Prayer liturgy, even though you may not, indeed will not feel like it, you do so knowing that your brothers and sisters may indeed feel such as is being said, sung or prayed.

I selected this text for a very specific reason: it combines the inner journey of spirituality with the outer journey of what some call social justice. Even as we journey inward toward God, we also journey outward toward the world around us. We learn to see how it is we may engage our world outside of us from the depths inside of us. Thus it is that we learn to live both sides of the Great Commandment as one singular command.

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