Where God Dwells

[[ Sister Laurel, what does it mean to say, "No hermit should get along with the temporal Church"? (I think temporal here is opposite spiritual.)]]

I'm afraid I can't really answer your question. My understanding of the Church says it is an institution that exists in space and time with dimensions that transcend these. It is spatio-temporal at the same time it participates in the life of God, and thus, it anticipates the Kingdom of God. Thus, it makes no sense to me to suggest that no hermit should get along with the temporal Church. I am aware of one person online who divides the Church into temporal and spiritual, and also speaks as though one can be spiritual without also being temporal, but to be frank, that just makes no sense. After all, the Risen (and differently embodied) Christ is present in our world and is mediated by spatio-temporal things. This is why we have sacraments, of course! It is also why we celebrate today's Feast of the Nativity of Jesus and the beginnings of a process of Incarnation wherein Jesus grows to full stature as Son of God.

In fact, one of the most important truths (and one of the most difficult) about the reality we call Christianity is that it is rooted in historical events. God comes to us in a human being and is most exhaustively revealed in Jesus' death on the cross and resurrection from the dead. Even the appearances of the risen Jesus to the scared and dispirited disciples following his death are marked by events underscoring both the historicity of the events as well as their transcendent nature. Disciples touch the wounds, Jesus cooks and eats fish on the beach, even as he is capable of walking through walls, etc. Christianity is all about God making human history his own. It is not about a devaluing of time and space, but a transfiguring of these. This is why the Scriptures speak of God making a new heaven and a new earth where all will dwell in harmony. Our ultimate hope is that the God who reveals himself as Emmanuel will remake the whole of reality in the power of the Spirit and dwell with us in this new reality.

The idea that only the spiritual counts while the realm of the spatio-temporal should (or even can) be eschewed is a Gnostic one and thus, quite old. (It is Platonic as well, and finds contemporary representative in The Catholic stress on Sacraments demonstrates that God comes to us in the things of this earth, the temporal, if you like. Bread and Wine are raised to their highest potential (made infinitely nourishing) and made capable of truly mediating Jesus and the power to be a single family to us. Sacraments are not about the spiritual alone, but the spiritual made real in the spatio-temporal and material. The Church, and here I mean the historical reality that is called the primordial sacrament, is precisely the place where human beings are transfigured and made new by the power of the Holy Spirit. God is certainly Spirit and eternal, but what is also true is that God has chosen to be Emmanuel, God With Us, here in this world with all its spatio-temporal problems and limitations. 

There is no other Church than the historical one we all know. Yes, it has different dimensions, and for that reason we speak of the Church militant, or the suffering Church, or the Church triumphant, but it is still one Church, and it is a historical (spatio-temporal) reality informed by the presence of the Trinity. Catholics embracing eremitical life do so within this historical Church. That is especially true when they do so publicly, as "Catholic Hermits" in ecclesial vocations lived in the name of the Church. Moreover, we do so as human beings who are thoroughly conditioned by space and time, even as we allow God to be Emmanuel and the Holy Spirit's transfiguration of all we are and know. As we move through Advent into Christmas, it is a good time to remember that every religion except Christianity tried to escape history to bind back (re-ligio) to God. Christianity is the only faith we know whose God assumed flesh and came to dwell with us, then made a place for us (newly embodied human beings like the risen Christ) in his own eternal life, and promises a new heaven and new earth where He will be all in all. 

The nativity of Jesus marks the coming of this God among us, and that has always been a scandal, though especially to those with a Gnostic mindset. The scandal is increased with Jesus' crucifixion and death. A God who could allow himself to be "touched" (not to say tainted) by such realities and participate in our own humanness while raising us to participate in his divinity (theosis) was and, it appears, remains a stumbling block for some. The hermits I know take God as Emmanuel seriously. They take their own call to union with God seriously as well. And while they do live a stricter separation from the world, they are very careful in the way they define this reality. When I was newly consecrated and began this blog, I wrote the following. I think it is pertinent to your question.

[[. . . First of all, "the world" does not mean "the entire physical reality except for the hermitage or cell"! Instead, the term "the world" refers to those structures, realities, things, positions, values, etc, which are antithetical to Christ and promise fulfillment or personal [dignity and] completion apart from God in Christ. Anything, including some forms of religion and piety, can represent "the world" given this definition. "The world" tends to represent escape from self and God, and also escape from the deep demands and legitimate expectations others have a right to make of us as Christians. Given this understanding, some forms of "eremitism" may not represent so much greater separation from the world as they do unusually embodied capitulations to it. (Here is one of the places an individual can fool themselves and so, needs the assistance of the church to carry out an adequate and accurate discernment of a Divine vocation to eremitical life.)]]

It seems to me that anyone who divvies reality neatly up into the temporal and the spiritual, for instance, and tries to live in this way is really fooling themselves. On this Feast of the Nativity, it is particularly important that we learn to let go of any theologies that take the embodiment of divinity and the spiritual less seriously than Christianity calls us to do. Human beings ARE embodied Spirit. We don't merely have bodies, we ARE embodied.  Pope Benedict XVI (as Joseph Ratzinger), wrote in his Eschatology, Dogmatic Theology vol 9, about the Christian sense that the human soul yearns to be embodied and, following Thomas Aquinas, is actually the form of the body -- not the other way around as when the body is thought of as a container for the soul and the soul is thought to escape the body at death with heaven conceived of as the dwelling place of disembodied spirit! Both Jesus' bodily Resurrection and Ascension counter this understanding. So does Mary's Assumption.

Thus, on this Feast, we must take time to appreciate how it is that, in Christ, we see God becoming Emmanuel as he had willed from the beginning. The Divine, the Eternal and Spiritual, makes the spatio-temporal and material its truest home. Like Jesus did exhaustively, we are each called to allow the Holy Spirit to live in us and enliven us fully. In this way, in Christ, we ourselves become Emmanuel, God With Us. If we can take Christianity seriously, and not replace its sacred materialism with neo-Platonic or Gnostic thought, which is what our thought of a disembodied heaven reflects, we will take historical (the spatio-temporal) reality seriously as the place where God wills to dwell "on earth as it is in heaven". Hermits, especially, are called to believe this foundational truth of our faith, to pray this petition, and to allow it to be realized in their lives. In this way, they become ecclesiolae, little Churches, that are both sacramental and prophetic precisely because they are simultaneously historical (embodied) and enlivened by the Holy Spirit (spiritual). Similarly, we will begin to prefigure the coming of that new heaven and new earth where all reality is sacramental, and we ourselves have "grown to full stature" as embodied Spirit, when God is all-in-all. 

All good wishes for a wonderful Christmas!!

On Mystical Experiences that Disrupt Liturgy and Alienate one From the Sacraments

[[Dear Sister, I would like to raise the question of what happens if someone’s “mystical experiences” alienate her from the sacraments and disrupt the liturgy; are they really of God?]]

Authentic Mystical experiences are generally associated with prayer. They should not alienate one from the sacraments or disrupt liturgy, which are at the heart of one's prayer. Ordinarily, one chooses the way one will pray. What I mean by this is if one occasionally wants to allow oneself to sink into quiet prayer during a liturgy, one can do that if one is practiced at doing this at other times or feels called to do so. Mystical states are something different, however. In these states, God acts to take one beyond where they are used to going in regular, practiced prayer, even quiet prayer. However, two things will remain true about these periods: 1) they should not disrupt the liturgy, which calls for appropriate participation, and 2) if one doesn't wish them to happen, they will not. God does not force us into mystical states if we are not open to them or if they are inappropriate for the setting. I think this is particularly true in a parish setting. 

You may be aware that recently a lay hermit has claimed she invariably has mystical states during liturgy (Eucharist), and she claims to no longer come to Mass because she becomes an occasion of sin for people there. I believe there are several serious problems with this analysis, and it is not sufficient to respond to these by saying "this is mystical and no one understands such things today". First, the states are said to be invariable, happening at the same place and in the same way at each liturgy. God is eternal and entirely faithful, but God is not invariable, nor are the prayer states he empowers within us. Moreover, significant prayer experiences are rich in content, and they require time to process. It is unlikely that God would have prayer experience after prayer experience in an invariable way without the time and space to process and truly appreciate them. This actually makes them less important and less revealing; in other words, it trivializes them and calls attention to the subject having the experiences, rather than to the God who is supposed to be empowering them. What some have found to be true about authentic experiences is that a single significant "mystical" prayer experience can nourish one for the rest of one's life, so I personally disagree that this daily (or every Mass) pattern is of God.

Then we have the question of what is edifying to others and to the community as a whole. While I might very occasionally drop into more extended quiet prayer during a Mass (not an ecstasy!!), I can't do that without reassuring the people seated with me ahead of time that I am okay, should I choose to do this. I also recognize that I am a member of a praying community, and for that reason, I am generally called to pray with them as we are each asked to pray together during liturgy. To do anything else (except very occasionally and in genuine need) seems to me to be a reason for staying home and praying in whatever way I feel called to. Otherwise, it is simply disedifying and potentially disturbing to my community. Finally, we have the problem of determining that these "states" are occasions of sin for someone else --- which, of course, we can never do. A person may react in a way one does not care for, especially if they are worried and don't know what is happening to us, but one does not know their motivation. One cannot know another person's heart except to the extent they reveal it to one. Even if one senses that the person is irritated or outright angry about something, one still does not know whether or not this is sinful. If the person having these "ecstatic" states is led to sin herself, then she must speak to her pastor, director, or confessor, and find a way that deals adequately with this; she can be aware of and speak of her own sin, but she cannot presume to know anyone else's.

The question of alienation from the sacraments is an important one. Personally, I find it impossible to believe that God would cause something that alienates the person from participation in and reception of the Sacraments in a general way. Why would he call one to become a member of Christ's body and then act in a way that disallows participation in that body as the Church (even minimally) requires?! Some accommodations can certainly be made in the case of illness or other extraordinary conditions, and I don't know a single pastor, priest, or other minister who would not seriously try to find such reasonable accommodations. I have a seizure disorder that is triggered by certain sounds (including some cell phone ringtones). My parish community, especially the daily Mass crew, has always been very careful to be sure and leave phones in the car or at home, or at least on vibrate once they understood the need. (Yes, sometimes there were slip-ups or someone new had not heard the caution yet, but generally speaking, people were really caring and responsive in this!) During Sunday liturgy, if seizure activity was a frequent problem, I could have stayed in the sacristy to hear Mass, whether alone or with a friend, or I might simply have needed to stay home!

In the situation raised here, I believe that this alienation from the sacraments is feeding an essentially Gnostic approach to reality that divides it too absolutely into a spiritual (eternal) and temporal duality and leads to a spirituality that unduly maligns the temporal. (This (ancient) Gnostic duality or approach to reality also feeds alienation from what is being called "the temporal Church" and its sacramentality as well.) Given the centrality of the Incarnation along with the bodiliness of both the resurrection and the Ascension (and Mary's Assumption as well), along with the theology of the new heaven and earth where creation and God's space already partly and will one day wholly interpenetrate one another, I think this is particularly dangerous.

EEMs can always bring Communion to a person who cannot attend Mass for some valid reason. Some churches with cry rooms (or unused choir lofts, etc.) can allow someone to attend Mass from there if they need to. Ecstatic prayer is ordinarily very silent (in fact, it is awesomely profound in its silence!), so I am not sure that much accommodation is necessary if one sits at the back of the church and simply prays quietly. In other words, alienation from the Sacraments is unnecessary and unlikely to be of God. Neither, however, does this need to disrupt liturgy. Of course, if someone is making noises, crying out in pain or something, or proclaiming they can read a priest's heart in the middle of Mass, then this is objectively disedifying and not of God. In such cases, I can understand why folks might be upset, and pastors might prefer the person to stay home. Still, accommodations can and will generally be made for such a person or situation. They still have rights and obligations rooted in their baptism, and the Church will (must!) help find a way for the person to meet these.