“Holiness is everywhere in Creation, it is as common as the raindrops and leaves and blades of grass, but it does not sound like a newspaper.” Wendell Berry
Down through Christian history, various spiritualities have evolved. Many have been rooted in specific religious traditions such as the Benedictines, Franciscans, Carmelites, and Jesuits. Other spiritualities have arisen to meet specific historical needs such as the twelve step program of Alcohol Anonymous in our time.,
All spiritualities aim to facilitate our experience of God. They emphasize prayer, spiritual practices, the development of virtues, a transformed consciousness, and conversion at ever-increasing levels of growth.
In all spiritualities, the basic commitment starts with the heart’s search for God. We might call it happiness or the yearning for meaning. Whatever we call it, it is more than we have now. There is an emptiness we want to fill. This pursuit eventually leads to prayer.
Prayer brings us a better understanding of God’s word and a desire to embrace God’s will. This leads to an initial enlightenment. There is a change of values but also a negative reaction that resists the mounting demands for personal sacrifice. This struggle leads to a new dimension: self-knowledge. We begin to see a brokenness within ourselves and in all reality. In one parable, Jesus called it the weeds and the wheat.
Continuing faithfulness, in spite of the struggle, brings more clarity to the search for God. Likewise, personal change leads to more authenticity and purification. Ultimately, this spiritual process makes God’s goal clear. We are called to love and freedom.
The implementation of this spiritual vision has consequences in our life. We begin to buy into the upside-down world of the gospel where the first are last: to become the servant, to forgive our enemy, to take up the cross and so much more on the road to Jerusalem.
One of the gifts of Carmelite spirituality is to explain how the spiritual journey is a personal purification and transformation that leads us to the deepest possible experience of God in this life. The individual, always with God’s grace, achieves a unique harmony of the sensual and the spiritual. Not only does the person see himself or herself in God as in a mirror, they also see all things in God. (IC 7.2.8) This experience of seeing God in all things is an essential feature of any evolving ecological spirituality.
Over the centuries, the excellence of Carmelite spirituality, along with most spiritualities, became distorted. There was an excessive, and almost exclusive, emphasis on the personal component. There was a withdrawal from the world. The earthly struggles of ordinary life, and especially political life, were trivialized. This included a sweeping neglect of environmental issues.
Vatican II offered a singular challenge to this privatized deformity of the spiritual life. In the document, The Church in the Modern World, we have the clarion call for new horizons: “A new humanism is emerging in the world in which man and woman are primarily defined by their responsibility toward their brothers and sisters and toward history."
The post Vatican II Church took up the challenge of integrating the personal and social in our spiritualities. Today, any mature spirituality will treat the body and all of nature with dignity. This has led to a new appreciation of the historical and incarnational elements of spirituality. This more holistic attitude has been growing in significance in most spiritualities for the past fifty years. The social dimension of the gospel, the call for justice and peace, a new concern for the poor and marginalized, have had a growing prominence along with the personal dimension in guiding our search for God.
Now, Laudato Si is encouraging an ecological dimension for our spirituality. We are invited to see God reflected in every creature. God had put forth a plan in the natural world that Jesus celebrated in the Gospels. Pope Francis exhorts us:
“How then can we possibly mistreat them (the birds of the air: Lk 12: 6) or cause them harm: I ask all Christians to recognize and to live fully this dimension of their conversion. May the power and the light of the grace we have received also be evident in our relationship to other creatures and to the world around us. In this way, we will help nurture that sublime fraternity with all creation which Saint Francis of Assisi so radiantly embodied.” #221
Francis the Pope and Francis the saint are calling us out of a self-centered approach to creation. In today’s too common model, the natural world is seen solely as a resource for humankind’s convenience and comfort and, most often, the ever-demanding quest for profit. This view of creation is totally unrelated to any spiritual experience in the exploration for God. Creatures simply become objects disconnected from a distant divine Presence.
Moving on from this static attitude toward creation is the first step toward an authentic ecological spirituality. This transformation of consciousness is a fundamental ingredient of any long-range solution to the environmental crisis. We must cultivate a sense of mystery and beauty about creation in openness to God’s presence in all, even the smallest speck of dust.
This new awareness will help us to recognize our common origin, our mutual belonging now and in a future to be shared with everyone and everything. We need to see that creation was not some final divine declaration in some far-off past. It is, in fact, an on-going and dynamic reality in which all beings participate in the very Being of God. In creation, we experience God’s presence in every single creature. Creation offers us a pathway into the hidden Being of God.
The next step in this new development of spirituality is a new lifestyle. This will only happen by an expanding self-knowledge that exposes our enslavement to the consumer economy that engulfs us.
All spiritualities aim to facilitate our experience of God. They emphasize prayer, spiritual practices, the development of virtues, a transformed consciousness, and conversion at ever-increasing levels of growth.
In all spiritualities, the basic commitment starts with the heart’s search for God. We might call it happiness or the yearning for meaning. Whatever we call it, it is more than we have now. There is an emptiness we want to fill. This pursuit eventually leads to prayer.
Prayer brings us a better understanding of God’s word and a desire to embrace God’s will. This leads to an initial enlightenment. There is a change of values but also a negative reaction that resists the mounting demands for personal sacrifice. This struggle leads to a new dimension: self-knowledge. We begin to see a brokenness within ourselves and in all reality. In one parable, Jesus called it the weeds and the wheat.
Continuing faithfulness, in spite of the struggle, brings more clarity to the search for God. Likewise, personal change leads to more authenticity and purification. Ultimately, this spiritual process makes God’s goal clear. We are called to love and freedom.
The implementation of this spiritual vision has consequences in our life. We begin to buy into the upside-down world of the gospel where the first are last: to become the servant, to forgive our enemy, to take up the cross and so much more on the road to Jerusalem.
One of the gifts of Carmelite spirituality is to explain how the spiritual journey is a personal purification and transformation that leads us to the deepest possible experience of God in this life. The individual, always with God’s grace, achieves a unique harmony of the sensual and the spiritual. Not only does the person see himself or herself in God as in a mirror, they also see all things in God. (IC 7.2.8) This experience of seeing God in all things is an essential feature of any evolving ecological spirituality.
Over the centuries, the excellence of Carmelite spirituality, along with most spiritualities, became distorted. There was an excessive, and almost exclusive, emphasis on the personal component. There was a withdrawal from the world. The earthly struggles of ordinary life, and especially political life, were trivialized. This included a sweeping neglect of environmental issues.
Vatican II offered a singular challenge to this privatized deformity of the spiritual life. In the document, The Church in the Modern World, we have the clarion call for new horizons: “A new humanism is emerging in the world in which man and woman are primarily defined by their responsibility toward their brothers and sisters and toward history."
The post Vatican II Church took up the challenge of integrating the personal and social in our spiritualities. Today, any mature spirituality will treat the body and all of nature with dignity. This has led to a new appreciation of the historical and incarnational elements of spirituality. This more holistic attitude has been growing in significance in most spiritualities for the past fifty years. The social dimension of the gospel, the call for justice and peace, a new concern for the poor and marginalized, have had a growing prominence along with the personal dimension in guiding our search for God.
Now, Laudato Si is encouraging an ecological dimension for our spirituality. We are invited to see God reflected in every creature. God had put forth a plan in the natural world that Jesus celebrated in the Gospels. Pope Francis exhorts us:
“How then can we possibly mistreat them (the birds of the air: Lk 12: 6) or cause them harm: I ask all Christians to recognize and to live fully this dimension of their conversion. May the power and the light of the grace we have received also be evident in our relationship to other creatures and to the world around us. In this way, we will help nurture that sublime fraternity with all creation which Saint Francis of Assisi so radiantly embodied.” #221
Francis the Pope and Francis the saint are calling us out of a self-centered approach to creation. In today’s too common model, the natural world is seen solely as a resource for humankind’s convenience and comfort and, most often, the ever-demanding quest for profit. This view of creation is totally unrelated to any spiritual experience in the exploration for God. Creatures simply become objects disconnected from a distant divine Presence.
Moving on from this static attitude toward creation is the first step toward an authentic ecological spirituality. This transformation of consciousness is a fundamental ingredient of any long-range solution to the environmental crisis. We must cultivate a sense of mystery and beauty about creation in openness to God’s presence in all, even the smallest speck of dust.
This new awareness will help us to recognize our common origin, our mutual belonging now and in a future to be shared with everyone and everything. We need to see that creation was not some final divine declaration in some far-off past. It is, in fact, an on-going and dynamic reality in which all beings participate in the very Being of God. In creation, we experience God’s presence in every single creature. Creation offers us a pathway into the hidden Being of God.
The next step in this new development of spirituality is a new lifestyle. This will only happen by an expanding self-knowledge that exposes our enslavement to the consumer economy that engulfs us.
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