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Andrew Hudgins. Half-answered prayers. - volver índice -
The American Scholar, Washington, Spring 1999
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Volume: 68, Issue: 2, Pagination: 101-114, ISSN: 00030937

Subject Terms: Prayer // Spirituality //God

Abstract:
Hudgins admits that, although he has learned to pray mostly for his own moral and spiritual betterment, not for things, the hunger for God-knowledge has persisted and grown. The God he prays to is an external God, one who exists, if God exists, outside of him.
Copyright American Scholar Spring 1999

Full Text:
When I was a child, I longed to hear the voice of God. I prayed and prayed, begging to be heard, begging to be answered. I prayed not to die. I prayed that I wouldn't be whipped for kicking my brother. And I prayed to get things I wanted. A dog. A Cub Scout uniform. A baseball glove. A radio.

In bed at night, I spent uncountable hours in an almost mindless orgy of greed, pleading and whining for a transistor radio. Every night for months, I troubled "deaf heaven with my bootless cries," as Shakespeare phrases it. I wanted the radio so I could huddle beneath the covers after I was sent to bed, and listen to baseball games and country music. Even then, years before I could envision terminal cancer patients praying frantically for a miracle cure and years before I read of Jews in Nazi death camps beseeching God for justice, I knew that asking for a radio, a thing, was ignoble-a vulgar abuse of my Protestant right to address the godhead directly. But I wanted the radio so much I persisted in my supplication.

Though I've never doubted that the impulse behind the two was pretty much the same, my childhood avarice, over time, changed into spiritual longing. In either case, I've wanted something I didn't have-- whether it was a radio when I was ten, world peace when I was twenty, homes for the homeless when I was thirty, a job that offered personal fulfillment when I was forty, or spiritual serenity as I near fifty. I now scorn my youthful avarice and materialism, but at least, after months of bootless crying, I got the radio.

That answered prayer may have owed more to my earthly father's growing tired of my badgering than to my heavenly father's finally extending his grace. Or perhaps, as I was taught to think at church, my father was God's agent on earth. However I came by the radio, I was not allowed to take it to bed with me. My mother said, "Your bed is for sleeping in and nothing else, young man. You have no need for a radio there." And neither was I allowed to listen to country music. Songs about drinking, loving, and cheating were too adult for a young boy like me, my parents gravely informed me, putting their fingers precisely on the reason I was fascinated by them.

This was how prayers seemed to go. When I did get what I wanted, I got it in a way that was almost exactly like not getting it. Every child learns these lessons about the gap between expectation and reality, but in a Baptist family they are so tied to God, the giver of all blessings, that I came to understand him as an especially cunning lawyer who parsed every prayer, looking for loopholes, looking for perverse ways of answering the letter of my request while frustrating the spirit of it. Into the familiar Christian dialectic of the Old Testament God of wrath and the New Testament God of mercy, I insinuated a malicious, mocking figure-a Loki, a Coyote, a Pan, a Reynard the Fox. But I prayed to him anyway. I was expected to pray to him, and besides, who else had the power to give me the things I desired?

Except for trying to wheedle things out of God, I prayed hesitantly because, as a matter of principle, I'd never been taught how to pray. For Baptists, prayer was simply opening your soul to God, and how can that be taught? the preachers asked scornfully. Just talk to God, they said. From the grace we said before meals, I knew to offer thanks for food, and because it was the one thing always mentioned by the laymen who self-consciously and haltingly offered the public prayers during the Sunday services, I knew to be thankful for my health. My parents, grandparents, and the preachers also emphasized the importance of health. If you've got your health, they intoned, you've got everything. But even as I thanked God, I thought: But I've always had good health. Aren't you supposed to have good health? Isn't it something you should take for granted, and when you age and you no longer have it, isn't it like God is taking it away? I took these questions as evidence that I didn't have much aptitude for the more spiritual side of prayer. And the response I was getting from God-none-reinforced that sense. But I kept praying anyway.

Like 90 percent of Americans, I pray regularly. But unlike 96 percent of my fellow citizens, I'm not sure that I believe in God. It's an awkward, if not entirely untenable, position. The God I pray to is an external God, one who exists, if he exists, outside of me. I resist the idea of an internal God simply because it seems to me a slightly camouflaged way of worshiping myself, solipsism magnified to its most repulsive level. But of course, as I pray to the external God that I'm not sure is there, I'm also talking to myself, clarifying my own thoughts, trying to place myself in the spiritual tradition that I have inherited, trying to understand things that resist understanding. My prayers are then, despite my discomfort with an interior God, both centripetal and centrifugal, directed both inward and outward. And even if the external God does not exist, I benefit from the exercise of trying to put what is beyond words into words. In "East Coker," T. S. Eliot writes about words, speech, writing, but he might just as well be talking about prayer when he says that each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer By strength and submission, has already been discovered Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope To emulate-but there is no competition-- There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

I pray to reach outside myself, to position and understand myself against, beside, parallel to, and perhaps even at one with a God who very well may not exist, and in doing that I push, against my will sometimes, into self-understanding

Though I've learned to pray mostly for my own moral and spiritual betterment, not for things, the hunger for God-knowledge has persisted and grown. The prayer I've prayed since I could see my way clear to formulate it when I was ten, eleven, twelve is "Let me hear a word from you. Let me know you are there." By the time I was fifteen I didn't even mind much if God said no to my petitions; I just wanted to hear the no. I'd have settled, I told myself, for the harsh response Job provoked from God. After God strips him of everything-health, fortune, family-Job finally cries out for justice, for an explanation: "Let the Almighty answer me!" The audacity of the demand thrills me as much now as it did when I was a teenager.

The King James Version tells us contemptuously that Job is "righteous in his own eyes," and God answers Job's perfectly reasonable questions with more questions, and trumps his bafflement with scorn:

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said, Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?

Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare if thou hast understanding.

Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?

Three chapters later God is still berating poor Job:

Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?

Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn?

Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee? . . .

None is so fierce that dare stir him up: who then is able to stand before me?

Who hath prevented me, that I should repay him? whatsoever is under the whole heaven is mine. Job's response to such hectoring is to "repent in dust and ashes":

I know that thou canst do every thing, and that no thought can be withholden from thee.

Who is he that hideth counsel without knowledge? therefore have

I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.

I understood as a boy that God was pulling rank on Job. He was overwhelming Job with his magnificence, his realms of divine knowledge that left puny human understanding so far behind as to render it meaningless. Putting myself in Job's place, I resented God's tone of voice. I felt the way I did when my parents dismissed my questions by telling me that I wasn't supposed to understand, say, the lyrics of a country song about drinking and slipping around. Those were adult concerns and I would understand them when I was an adult. End of discussion.

Nonetheless, I was as thrilled by God's answer as I was by Job's question, just because it was an answer. Job was persuaded, as I was not, by the thunderously poetic non sequitur of God's reply, but at least Job knew for certain that he was struggling with a God who existed, and I envied him his certainty.

Certain or not, I've continued to pray, and as I've aged, I've taken more and more comfort in the idea of prayer as a way to help those who are beyond my help. One of my students is waiting to hear the results of her spinal tap. Does she have multiple sclerosis? She'll find out next week. Please, Lord, do not let this young woman have MS. Does it help? Or is praying merely a primitive denial of my own helplessness? I don't know. I hope for the former and fear the latter. But at the very least, I can say to her the next time I see her, "I'm praying for you," and that speaks to her, I hope, of a deeper level of human concern and connectedness than "Hey, Patty, I'm keeping my fingers crossed!"

Twenty years ago, while I was taking classes to prepare me for confirmation in the Episcopal Church (a process I decided not to go through with), I was taught a simple form of prayer: Adoration, Contrition, Thanksgiving, Supplication. The rector teaching the class helpfully pointed out that we could remember this because the first letters spelled out "Acts-as in the Acts of the Apostles." Though I cringed in embarrassment and then cringed again at my aesthetic response to the mnemonic device, I've used it virtually every night of my life since then.

The last three parts of the prayer give me no trouble. Contrition is useful. It's humbling to spend a few minutes every night reviewing and evaluating my day, trying to understand how I have failed to do right by others and by my own sense of myself. But I also try to look from what I take to be God's perspective at how I've lived my last twenty-four hours. And for a pessimist like me, a person too apt to get caught up in the pleasures of self-excoriation, remembering to move on and enumerate my blessings with gratitude is just as useful as contrition. Supplication, though I still occasionally lunge at it with my old transistor-radio greed, is starting to lose some of its grip on me. I am always slightly pleased when I wake up in the morning and realize that I've fallen asleep before I get to my list of desires.

But adoration flummoxes me. What possible gratification does an omnipotent being derive from my telling him how great he is? Flattering God with a list of his attributes seems like a primitive, even anachronistic, exercise. The few times I've tried it I've felt like an especially obsequious minor official from Bactria who, with his mouth hanging open, has entered Babylon through the gold and ivory of the Ishtar Gate. Ushered into the presence of Xerxes, the Great King, he mumbles his way through a memorized list of superlatives in a language he barely understands, and the Great King, who hears his own titles recited to him a hundred times a week, still listens closely, making sure the satraps pay him due reverence.

In trying to praise God, I also feel most strongly the troubling historical connections of Christianity to the worship of Baal and Mithras, and all the cults of the sacrificed god. Though I know the real purpose of praise is not to flatter God but to help me understand my proper relation to him, I balk at praising the presence who, if he exists, has presided in this century alone over two world wars, the Holocaust, the murder of the kulaks, the rape of Nanking, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Chinese cultural revolution, the killing fields of Cambodia, and the influenza pandemic of 1918. The problem of theodicy-why does God allow evil in the world?-leads all too quickly to asking how, given all the evil in the world, there can be a God. I confess to, thank, and ask for help from a God whose existence I doubt, but to praise him without confidence in his existence and his goodness twists my tongue into baffled silence. Not knowing what else to do, I repeat by rote the opening words of the Lord's Prayer, trying to find some way to inhabit them.

My desire for the mystic took some non-Christian turns when, in high school, I began to read about occult practices. I'd lie on my bed for hours, trying to project my soul out of my body, up through the roof. I imagined my soul-me!-wafting through the Sheetrock and roof joists, through the pink fiberglass insulation, through the plywood sheathing, through the asphalt shingles, and up into the night sky. Still rising, I'd look down on my house and my neighborhood dwindling beneath me. It was always the night sky I rose into, even if I was attempting my astral projection as the Alabama sun pounded through the window. The sky was always full of stars, and I always floated with my arms held out from my sides, my hands and fingers feeling the wind that I knew I wouldn't feel if I were really pure soul.

And there I lost my grip on the vision that I was trying to make real. I couldn't truly imagine what it would be like to be a soul free in the air. Where would I go? What would I want to see? I could, I supposed, float into the houses of my friends and spy on them-or waft into the Statehouse and spy on government officials. I could even watch people make love, a subject about which I had much interest and no knowledge. But these seemed base uses of the gift I hoped to acquire, and in truth, I wasn't really interested in being a mystical Peeping Tom. Plus, I could never quite conceive of my soul as a free agent in the sky. Even in my best imaginings, my incorporeal soul was still subject to the vagaries of the wind, like a balloon or a kite. And like a kite, my imagined soul seemed anchored to the ground, to my body, to the house in which I lay on the bed, imagining-solid, earthbound, leaden. This was not astral projection. Even as a teenager, I suspected that my loving attention to Sheetrock and fiberglass kept me from slipping effortlessly through them. A real mystic, I thought, would know that all was maya, illusion. He wouldn't even think "roof' as he rose though an undifferentiated mass of material to swoop and gambol in midair, at play in the fields of the sky, freed of the limitations of flesh.

I realized that the only religion I was ever going to begin to understand as a faith, even if I didn't confidently share that faith, was the incarnational one I was born into. Christianity's deep divisions reflect my own. The incarnation of God in the body of Jesus, fully God and fully human at the same time, presents a Mobius strip of logic. It boggles my understanding, yet perfectly represents the way I ex Jerience my life, as my body and soul strain to go their separate ways while at the same time struggling for the unity that Christ represents. Pauline Christianity, with its all but horror of the corrupted body and its love of the pure soul, balances against the God who became the son of a rural carpenter. Christ, the Christian ideal, takes these opposing essences-body and soul-and fuses them into one essence, an act of philosophical synthesis that defies my understanding while it defines my yearning. And that yearning is so strong it holds my natural skepticism in yet another uneasy balance.

When I was a boy, thirteen or fourteen, I prayed my truest prayers in bed, after the family prayers had been said and the light snapped out. This was my real praying, pouring out to God what I hoped was my soul. After the "Amen," I'd masturbate, and then, wretched with guilt, I'd pray again, pleading for forgiveness. But why should God forgive me? We both knew I was going to commit the same sin again, perhaps within the next fifteen minutes. My prayers and my sins wound around each other in an orgy of urgency, release, guilt, and terror of hellfire that repeated itself nightly and often several times a night. This lascivious cycle of despair prepared me to read the Inferno with the eyes of one of Dante's sinners, or Pilgrim's Progress with the eyes of one of the many pilgrims who founder in the Slough of Despond and never come near the Celestial City. To me, those books felt absolutely contemporary, a vital reflection of life as I and many of the people around me understood it.

Now, though, I see those frantic bouts of prayer and release as complementary. The hoped-for ecstatic union of the body in sex directly parallels the hoped-for ecstatic union of the soul with God in prayer: bodily and spiritual intercourse. Under the sweat-damp sheets of my bed, I was discovering a metaphor that the mystics have known since at least the Song of Songs. Whitman sang it in "Song of Myself," and even the medieval church tacitly acknowledged it in one of the legends collected in The Little Flowers of Saint Francis. While Francis is in Babylonia (where, by the way, he secretly converts the sultan to Catholicism), he is approached by a lustful woman. He works out a deal with her. If she will do what he wants, then he will do what she wants.

She accepts, and suggests that they immediately prepare a bed for their lovemaking. But Francis says, "Come with me, and I will show you a very beautiful bed," and he leads her to the large fire burning in the central hearth of the house: And in fervor of spirit he stripped himself naked and threw himself down in the fireplace as on a bed. And he called to her, saying: "Undress and come quickly and enjoy this splendid, flowery, and wonderful bed, because you must be here if you wish to obey me!"

And he remained there for a long time with joyful face, resting on the fireplace as thougl on flowers, but the fire did not burn or singe him. The legend tells us only that the woman was so terrified and remorseful at seeing the miracle that she converted on the spot and "became so holy in grace that she won many souls for the Lord in that region." What is left for us to understand is that when the woman saw Francis lounging luxuriously in the fire, she saw the purified vision of the longing for passion, union, ecstasy, and fulfillment that had driven her to prostitute herself.

Even now I envy this fictional character the unambiguous certainty of her sudden faith. In those intense, troubled nights, I too was reaching out desperately for the God I already doubted, asking for a word, for some assurance that the body was not all I had, that the material world was not the only world. I heard nothing.

Through my late teens and into my middle twenties, I declared myself an agnostic, even an atheist. Still, I never quite stopped praying. It was too natural a part of my life for me to stop.

But three times-long after I quit consciously listening-I have heard God's voice speak directly to me. I wonder what the average number is for a man my age.

The first time I have forgotten almost entirely. My first wife and I were separated and I was on the edge, I suspect, of a nervous breakdown. One morning in the bathroom, shaving, I heard a voice clearly not my own say something to me. Whatever the voice said, it was something so trivial and inscrutable that I laughed out loud. Still, I was thrilled to have heard the voice, and for a day or two I felt a sense of serenity and otherworldly detachment that I had never felt before. I'm sorry, but those cliches, which are almost invariably used to describe experiences like this, are all I have to offer. As I knew it would, the sense of peace dwindled over the next three days. But in that short period of grace, I laughed at and accepted my own immediate questioning of what had happened: "This could just be stress. People often hear voices when they are stressed." "If it was really God, why didn't he tell you something useful?" "If it was really God, why do you find it so hard to remember what he said?" Whatever I heard, it was already abandoning me, sliding out of my mind, and I didn't want to write it down because I knew it would look silly in print.

I never mentioned to anyone that I'd heard the voice. I was too embarrassed to talk about it. And I distrusted it. I thought I might be nuts. I have talked to myself all my life, and my mother, who was both amused and slightly disturbed by this habit, used to say, "It's okay to talk to yourself, but when you start hearing answers, you know you're in trouble." I also remembered a strange psychology class I had taken at Huntingdon College, a small Methodist school in my hometown of Montgomery, Alabama. Dr. Statum, the hard-nosed psychologist who taught the class, told us that one of the questions frequently asked on psychological tests was "Do you hear God talking to you?" Since he was a born-- again Christian, he always answered yes. He paused to let that sink in. Someone in the class tittered nervously. But we should remember, he went on, that answering yes to one of the "trick" questions wasn't enough to get you declared insane. You had to answer yes to several of them before you were deemed truly, clinically over the line. His point was that psychological exams didn't really know how to deal with religious people, so they simply built in some slack.

For a long time, I pondered Dr. Statum's comfortable acceptance of the idea that many religious people had at least one of the primary earmarks of insanity, unsure what to make of it or of him. And I wondered what it meant about my father and all the people I sat next to in church every Sunday. Now, though, I returned to that moment in Dr. Statum's class for reassurance. Sure, I'd heard a voice speak to me out of thin air, and my impulse at the time-and my impulse now-was to think it was the voice of God. If it was, I wasn't crazy. And if it wasn't-well, Dr. Statum (I reminded myself) had said that you had to have more than one symptom before you were officially nuts.

In truth, I didn't worry too much about my sanity. The experience was clearly a positive one, and through a difficult time in my life, I was buoyed by the idea that God had spoken to me and reassured me-while I also held in mind the understanding that I might have had a momentary schizophrenic delusion. Though I did not know it at the time, the voice I heard meets the third of St. Ignatius's "Rules for the Discernment of Spirits": "I call consolation any increase of faith, hope, and charity and any interiorjoy that calls and attracts to heavenly things." In St. Ignatius of Loyola: The Psychology of a Saint, W. W. Meissner, who is both a Jesuit and a psychiatrist, considers Ignatius's own mystical visions. "Was Ignatius psychotic?" he asks.

Meissner admits that some psychiatrists "have not hesitated to call mystical phenomena psychotic." Both psychotics and mystics see visions (or, more rarely, hear voices), fall passive during the experience, develop a sense of mission, lose a sense of time and space, and undergo rapid mood shifts. And both are ashamed of the experience; it belongs to a realm that cannot be shared with others. But Meissner seems to be more persuaded by scholars who point out that mystics, unlike psychotics, maintain a steady grasp on reality, are humble rather than self-aggrandizing, and possess a "serene optimism." Meissner quotes the psychiatrist Silvano Arieti as saying, "Religious and mystical experiences seem instead to result in a strengthening and enriching of the personality." Meissner answers his question about Ignatius's sanity by saying that a modern psychiatrist, diagnosing the future saint's condition in the turmoil surrounding his conversion, might well have concluded he was psychotic. But psychosis would have been the last word that would have sprung to mind if he or she had examined the extraordinarily self-possessed and forceful Ignatius who governed the Society of Jesus and conducted its "world-wide operations and complex and difficult relations with royalty and the papal court."

While the voice I heard is small spiritual potatoes next to Ignatius's visionary feast, the saint, like me, was sometimes absentminded about what had been served at the banquet. In his autobiography, which is told in the third person, Ignatius records that God unveiled to him how the world was created, but he has forgotten the details: "One time the manner in which God had created the world was revealed to his understanding with great spiritual joy. He seemed to see something white, from which some rays were coming, and God made light from this. But he did not know how to explain these things, nor did he remember very well the spiritual enlightenment that God was pressing on his soul at that time."

I remember more clearly the second time I heard God's voice. I was visiting my father in north Alabama while the woman I am now married to was in California. She and I weren't seeing each other at the time. She had some personal problems to sort out without the distraction of a man in her life. Wondering if I was being strung along or manipulated by a woman I didn't yet know very well, and wondering if I should forget her and move on, I was agitated and unhappy. All this was in my head as I got up one morning and made the bed. The bedspread was in midair, ballooned above the mattress, when I heard a voice say, as clear as God calling Samuel's name in the night, "Isn't she doing everything she can?"

Immediately I felt a sense of calmness. Yes, I said to myself. Yes, she is doing everything she can. Pondering what had happened, I walked into the dining room and had breakfast with my dad. I sipped my coffee, ate my Raisin Bran, and read the Birmingham News in silence, trying to hold onto the moment for a little longer before it began to fade into the noise of everyday life. I did not tell my father what had happened. What could I say-"Hey, Dad, I just heard God talk to me in your guest bedroom, and he was offering advice for the lovelorn"? Of course, as I munched my Raisin Bran, I was already wondering why God, if that is who it was, talked to me only when women abandoned me. And why did God ask a question? Why didn't he just tell me that she was doing everything she could? But the question the voice asked was clearly rhetorical. It presupposed its answer. And the slightly comic nature of the whole scene reassured me. My love life, though important to me, hardly seemed of divine importance. Perhaps that's the point-that the first two times I heard God speak to me, he was concerned with my personal life. That's not what I expected.

When I had prayed as a boy for God to speak to me, I had both longed for and dreaded the words that he might say. From all the stories I'd heard preachers tell, from all the devotional books I'd read, and from the Bible itself, I thought God almost invariably called the unbeliever to believe and the believer to preach. I was afraid that God would order me to be a missionary or a street-corner preacher. I was truly terrified that God would tell me to spend my life serving the poor. In church, as the preachers exalted evangelists like Billy Sunday and Billy Graham and missionaries like Lottie Moon, I identified both with these religious models and with Jonah sailing in the opposite direction from Nineveh, where God had commanded him to go. I even identified fully with Jonah's rage at God for showing mercy and sparing Nineveh. After Jonah had walked through that great city crying that God would destroy it in forty days, the people fasted, covered themselves and their beasts with sackcloth and ashes, and repented. But what gratification is there in actually being listened to when you had relished the image of God striking dead all the unbelievers who had scorned and mocked you?

From my childhood fear of being called by God, I well understood Jonah's petulance and rage. When my father and the other deacons in his church went witnessing door to door, I shrank from them, afraid they'd ask me to accompany them and testify to strangers. Sharing their greatest happiness and their faith in eternal life was meant as an act of generosity, but confronting complete strangers with one's beliefs has always seemed to me like a very intimate violation of other people's selfhood. I spent many childhood hours imagining how I would do it, and how I would respond when people brushed me off, as I would brush them off if our positions were reversed.

Though I have known plenty of born-again preachers, I have known only one person who underwent a dramatic conversion, like the one I feared, and became a street-corner evangelist. When I was teaching parttime at a small university in Montgomery, I'd sometimes go out for drinks after class with the older students. One of the regulars was a rowdy chop-- haired blonde in her mid-twenties. Part hippie, part redneck, Liz drank as heavily as men who outweighed her by eighty pounds and smoked unfiltered Camels as if smoke were sustenance. She left her illegitimate child with her mother, and though she talked about him a lot, she never seemed in a hurry to get home. She wore cheap tube tops and tight jeans artfully frayed to single threads across her thighs, and she laughed with a rough hee-haw that I loved.

Several months after the class ended, Liz called and told me that she'd been born again. She'd moved back in with her mother. She'd noticed me driving by her mother's house on my way to visit my girlfriend, and she wondered if I'd like to stop by for a cup of coffee.

At her mother's kitchen table, she told me about her ministry, and whenever her eyes grew faraway as she got lost in the telling, I studied her face. She looked relaxed, almost peaceful, telling of the rebuffs she'd suffered as she, along with her new preacher Brother James, witnessed for two days every week on street corners in downtown Montgomery. They worked twelve-hour days, exhorting crowds, stopping passersby, and simply preaching to the empty street when there were no people to preach to. Her clothes were clean and modest. She didn't smoke, she didn't swear, she didn't drink, and she was plowing ahead at school, determined to get her degree and go on to a small seminary I hadn't heard of. But as she told stories about the rude remarks and threats that people made while she was witnessing, she occasionally let out one of those vulgar, braying laughs that I admired.

When her son-he looked to be about ten-wandered into the kitchen and demanded orange juice, she politely told him that she was talking and she'd get him some juice when she was done.

"I want it now. Now! Now! Now!" he chanted in an ascending pitch, his face turning purple.

Liz grabbed him by the upper arm and swung him around till he was face to face with her. "Mommy said she'd get you some juice in a minute. But you are not allowed to interrupt me when I'm talking to company."

The boy sucked a long breath, preparing to scream. Liz held up the index finger of her right hand and said, "Johnny, don't act like a baby. If I have to spank you, I will."

He snuffled for a moment or two, and then leaned forward, resting his head on her arm for a few moments. She gave him a quick hug. "You go play and I'll bring you your juice in a few minutes."

While he was still in the room she gave me a quick, apologetic smile, and said to me, but speaking so he could hear, "It's hard for him. I let him run wild for ten years and it's hard for him to learn that he now has a mother here to take care of him."

As I left, she said-she said it casually when I paused at the door to say good-bye-"You know I pray for you."

That simple sentence ran me through a whole array of emotions as I stood in her mother's doorway, looking at as changed a human being as I have ever seen in my life, and changed for the better.

"Thank you," I said. "Thank you." I was supposed to say, "I'm praying for you too," but I couldn't get the words out of my mouth.

When I was younger, between about twelve and twenty-five, I hated it when people told me they were praying for me. And I hated it even more when they didn't say it but I could tell from the look on their faces that they were mentally adding me to their prayer lists. I hated it with the passion of a self-conscious boy and young man who wanted to think he was invisible, unnoticed by adults. Also, I perceived other people's prayers as their desire to coerce me mystically-prayer as the voodoo of the middle class. I thought that, under the guise of caring for me, they were using God as an invisible robot arm to make me do things that they couldn't make me do themselves: join the church, be a better student, stay out of trouble. I felt as if I were a billiard ball that might not be making its true run across the table because they were using God as a sort of mystical body English to affect my movements, even to tilt the table.

But now that I have a stronger, steadily stronger, sense of mortality and of the limitations of human effort, I find myself longing for their prayers. I want the table tilted. I want to be remembered by them, and I have a superstitious faith in the faith of believers like my wife, my father, my cousin Julie, my friend Randall. And of course if I want them to pray for me, I have to pray for them. It is unthinkable that I would withhold my prayers from those who pray for me, just because I am skeptical that my words to God do any good.

The only other time, the most recent time, I heard God speak, his voice was coming out of my mouth. One morning several years ago, as I woke from a deep sleep, I was chanting "God loves me" over and over again-a slow, intense, two-beat repetition that was part of my own breathing. "God," I said, as I inhaled. "Loves me," I said, as I exhaled. I lay in bed awake for fifteen or twenty minutes, repeating "God loves me" as if possessed. At any time during those fifteen minutes, I could have stopped myself with a simple act of will. But why would I want to? The feeling was wholly pleasurable, and deeply reassuring on any number of levels-- personal, spiritual, and even intellectual. I'm well acquainted with Carlyle's "The Everlasting No." This was my strongest brush with "the EVERLASTING YEA, wherein all contradiction is solved: wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him." I think of this voice as God's because it said something that until then I would never have said myself, and it is in fact something that I don't say even now, except sometimes late at night when I am having trouble sleeping. Then, I will try to work my way back into the strange, serene rhythm of that morning: "God" on the in-- breath, "loves me" on the out-breath.

So of the three times I have heard God's voice, I remember two sentences: an embarrassingly personal rhetorical question and Christianity's most mind-numbingly obvious cliche. But I hear the Sunday school simplicity of the phrase "God loves me" as a reminder that spiritually I am a beginner, a child, a tyro-and that before I can go any further I must absorb this basic lesson. Sometimes the most basic lesson is the most profound. Toward the end of his life, Karl Barth, in a story that has become a favorite of contemporary pulpits, was asked if he could sum up his lifework in systematic theology. He replied with the words of the children's song, "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so."

I feel especially grateful for the last voice. I feel God put those words in my mouth because I would never say them myself; I would never even begin to feel the feeling without his forcing the issue. In my mouthing of the cliche there is the odd mixture of divine subtlety and ham-handedness that the mystics speak of. And despite my doubts and misgivings, I believe, with a tentative and anxious faith, that my prayers for a sense of the presence of the godhead are being answered. The next step is harder; it's even more daunting than trying to believe that God loves me. In Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, the phrase immediately before "This is the EVERLASTING YEA" is "Love God." But for me that is like looking at the last chapter of the trigonometry text on the first day of class. I can't imagine ever getting there.

Sometimes I ransack various translations of the Bible, trying to get a grip on a verse that eludes me. For a long time I was puzzled by a sentence from John 5:17. "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work" is how the King James Version renders it. "Hitherto what?" I wondered, until, after some years, curiosity overtook lethargy and I checked other translations. "My Father is working still, and I am working," says the Revised Standard Version. The New Jerusalem Bible is even clearer: "My Father goes on working, and so do I."

On the in-breath: "God." If he exists. On the out-breath: "Loves me."

Andrew Hudgins is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent of which is Babylon in a Jar. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University. His essay "An Autobiographer's Lies" appeared in the Autumn 1996 issue of the SCHOLAR. For more observations on prayer, see "Commonplace Book" on pages 14-15 of this issue.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.-volver índice-

Gordon Rixon. Bernard Lonergan and mysticism. -volver índice-

Theological Studies, Washington, Sep 2001

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Volume: 62, Issue: 3, Pagination: 479-497, ISSN: 00405639

Subject Terms: Theology // Philosophy // Religion // Behavior // Mysticism //

Personal Names:Lonergan, Bernard //Rahner, Karl //Egan, Harvey //Johnston, William //

Abstract:

Rixon assembles and interprets archival materials, advancing a preliminary assessment of the significance of mysticism for the development of Lonergan's intellectual project. The density of Lonergan's published account of religious experience is relieved by an exploration of its relation to the thought of Karl Rahner, Harvey Egan, and William Johnston.

Copyright Theological Studies, Inc. Sep 2001

Full Text:

[The author assembles and interprets archival materials, advancing a preliminary assessment of the significance of mysticism for the development of Lonergan's intellectual project. Lonergan assigns priority to a mysticism of transforming union as the existential principle from which flow charitable service and theological reflection. The density of Lonergan's published account of religious experience is relieved by an exploration of its relation to the thought of Karl Rahner, Harvey Egan, and William Johnston. A suggestion is made about the continued importance of systematic reflection for the refined articulation of religious experience.]

INERPRETERS OF BERNARD LONERGAN'S intellectual project may find it difficult to assess the influence of mysticism on the development of his thought. Interpreters who approach Lonergan through his early writings may find the suggestion that mysticism had any impact on the genesis of his cognitional theory, epistemology, and metaphysics to be an anachronistic accommodation to later readers' heightened interest in spirituality. Even though the moving viewpoint of Insight: A Study of Human Understanding does arrive at a treatment of general and special transcendental knowledge, the tenor of Lonergan's discussion carries no resonance to the mystical experiments of spiritual authors such as John of the Cross or Teresa of Avila.1 Interpreters who approach Lonergan through Method in Theology and his other later writings encounter a significantly different tonality of expression.2 Here explorations of existential topics such as feelings, faith, and religious conversion are able to evoke strong affective responses in the reader. At times Lonergan might even be described as poetic in the fecundity of his idiom. The difficulty of estimating the influence of mysticism on the evolution of Lonergan's thought is real. My review of Lonergan's correspondence and other personal papers will reveal that he struggled with mysticism and prayer, both existentially and intellectually, as he pursued his interest in the philosophy of history and his larger theological project. This article hopes to make a preliminary contribution to the thesis that Lonergan's evolving appreciation of mysticism provides an important, dynamic context for the development and interpretation of his thought.

SPIRITUAL PERFECTION

Lonergan does not make frequent references in his writings and correspondence to his personal prayer life. A biographer of Lonergan suggests that his early spiritual life was quite and but that obstacles encountered in his initial training and subsequent life as a Jesuit priest and academician occasioned a greater affectivity in his prayer.3 As a young man who entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus at Guelph, Ontario, in 1922, Lonergan belonged to a generation of Jesuits whose religious training was framed by a classicist model of spiritual perfection. Lonergan's first appropriation of the Ignatian tradition of spirituality was mediated by authors such as Alphonsus Rodriguez (1526-1616) and Johann Philipp Roothaan (17851853).4 While Rodriguez is eloquent in his description of the general aim of religious life, his ascetical program, first published in 1609, submerges into over 1500 pages of itemized commentary on the rules, practices, and perfection in the virtues of religious life. Roothaan who was the third Superior General of the Society of Jesus after its restoration in 1814, employs the categories of faculty psychology to detail instruction in the "science of meditation," further blunting the Jesuit student's "ardent desire" for prayer. An interpreter familiar with the subsequent development of Lonergan's thought in the early 1930s will appreciate that the younger Lonergan's reading of these spiritual authorities would have been classicist, likely uncritical and perhaps even nominalist in characters Although Lonergan commented much later on his previous long incomprehension of the concept of "consolation without a previous cause," a fundamental notion in Ignatian spirituality, he did not seem to direct the same strong criticism toward his spiritual formation that he does address to his intellectual training within the Jesuit order.6

CONCRETE IDEAL

Even though Lonergan states in 1978 that it was not until 1975-1976 that he began to understand what the words "consolation without previous cause" meant, there is evidence that his appropriation of Ignatian spirituality began to emerge from its initial classicist framing much earlier. In the summer of 1941, shortly after returning to Canada as an ordained priest to teach theology at the College of the Immaculate Conception in Montreal, Lonergan preached a retreat to a group of Jesuit students.7 In the first conference of this retreat Lonergan cited Johannes Lindworsky's The Psychology of Asceticism as he emphasized that each person must respond to God's call by taking "our end" out of the "abstract" and making it "into a concrete ideal."8 In The Psychology of Asceticism, Lindworsky makes a fundamental distinction between two approaches to Christian perfection. One approach focuses on the acquisition and perfection of the classical list of theological and cardinal virtues. A second approach strives toward the realization of a "religious aim form." According to Lindworsky, religious aim forms arise from the interplay between the objective spirit of belief, circumstances, and general outlook of an age, and the aptitudes and inclinations of individuals. In effect, the person's religious vocation is historically conditioned. For example, Joseph in Egypt is the rescuer and guide of the Israelites, Moses is the law-giver and leader, and David is the founder of the state. Perfection in virtues obviously remains important for each religious aim form but they are developed in a manner that is organized by the motive force inherent in the available religious aim form associated with a particular person's vocation. Thus, religious aim form asceticism is not the accrual of an aggregate of perfections in specific virtues but a historically contextualized, unified, dynamic process that organizes the personal growth and work of a religious person as he or she responds to the call of his or her own particular vocation.9

In the retreat conferences Lonergan employs the concept of a "concrete ideal" to refer to a particular person's "religious aim form."10 Lonergan discusses the asceticism of ordinary religious life as the "realization of my concrete, whole, coherent, unified and harmonized ideal." He invites the students to ponder their knowledge, appreciation, and performance of their vocations in light of their own "divine discontent," abilities and shortcomings as well as the needs of their contemporary situation.11 The movement from "the abstract" to "a concrete ideal" indicates the person's willing engagement of a determinate, historical process as he or she responds to the transcendent call of his or her vocation. Here the notion of "the abstract" refers first, not to the normative, classicist enumeration of the virtues of religious life but to the potential paths to sanctification arising from the objective spirit of an age, which are then to be considered in light of an individual's aptitudes and inclinations. While the end in the abstract might be shared with others, the concrete ideal sets a unique, determinate goal before a specific person.

Lonergan acknowledges that people struggle with the external demands and challenges of their concrete ideal. The retreat conferences included considerations of penance, mortification, and reformation of life.12 Still, he advises the students that good meditation does not consist in "having fulfilled the scaffolding" but rather in the ordinary conscious effort of "having tried to speak or think with God."13 I suggest, therefore, that Lonergan's emerging alternative to classicist spirituality addressed, in effect, three conscious dialectics. One dialectic involves the divine discontent, expressing the pervasive and absolute task of self-transcendence. A second dialectic involves the interplay between the abstract end of religious life and the particular context of an individual that yields a concrete ideal. Finally, a third dialectic addresses the conflict between the concrete ideal and sin, overcome through the movements of penance and mortification. Lonergan's approach here reflects and perhaps informs his development of a dialectical philosophy of history that had achieved a synthetic but still preliminary expression in the methodological chapter of his doctoral project, completed in 1940.14

TRANSFORMING UNION

Some years later, after Lonergan had finished writing Insight, he prepared two drafts of a lecture outline identically entitled "Grace and the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius."15 Lonergan indicates that his intention in the lectures is to unburden the experimental life of grace presumed by the authentic practice of the Spiritual Exercises from voluntarist and conceptualist presuppositions in order to explore the transformative union of the human person with God.16 Lonergan observes that the Spiritual Exercises are sometimes depicted as "a set of things that I am going to do to make myself holier." He continues to remark that if the Spiritual Exercises were not heretically characterized as Pelagian, commentators still placed no emphasis on "the spontaneous movement of the soul towards God because of the workings of grace."17 Lonergan asserts that while the prima facie cause of such depictions lies in the existence of superficial Ignatian practitioners, the more fundamental cause rests in the contemporary state of theology. Lonergan observes that theology should provide the "conceptual network" needed to read Sacred Scripture and to understand life.18 Theology, in fact, had degenerated into a set of purely metaphysical entities that could not be related "intelligibly and organically" to ordinary living.19 In this climate the experimental character of the Spiritual Exercises became eclipsed by an unhelpful conceptualist treatise on grace.

Moreover, Lonergan remarks, the life of grace is prior to even a satisfactory theological theory. The Spiritual Exercises are at first "a practical manual on a method of cooperating with grace."20 Theological reflection remains contingent upon the prior effects of grace, incorporating integral persons as living members of Christ Jesus.21 Simply, the notional apprehension of grace in theology is not to be confused with the real apprehension of grace in concrete living.

Lonergan's discussion of the experimental grace sought in the Spiritual Exercises indicates that "Grace is that by which 1) we are; 2) more and more we are; 3) living members of [Christ] Jesus and; 4) more and more fully and even more consciously living members of [Christ] Jesus." The unitive effect of grace emerges as "a factor in the general field of consciousness." Lonergan's explication of this union indicates that the inhabitation of the Holy Spirit assimilates a participation in the grace of Christ; "producing in us the effects that it produced in the humanity of Christ; [that] habitual and actual illumination of our understanding and of the orientation of our wills."22

Thus, grace reforms and informs our conscious striving, releasing us from bondage to sin and strengthening our desire to love God in all we do. Lonergan synthesizes his appreciation of the process of union and assimilation effected by transforming grace with Ignatian discernment of consolation and desolation. Periods of affective struggle and ease accompany the conscious dynamism of transforming grace as issues are addressed and resolved. Lonergan notes that the discernment process brings the factor of grace in general states of consciousness into "sharper relief" with practical implications for decision-making. He writes: "one can go from the state to its cause; and from its cause to a practical conclusion about God's will in me."23

In "Folder 19" Lonergan refers to Augustin Poulain's descriptive account of mystical prayer as a "conspicuous instance" of conscious union and assimilation. Poulain's account relies on the distinction of mystic and ordinary prayer and the stages of mystic prayer as described by Teresa of Avila in her Interior Castle.24 Lonergan cites progress through the prayer of simplicity, quietude, union, and ecstasy to the culmination of transforming union. Lonergan emphasizes Poulain's treatment of transforming union that is characterized by permanent union with God, the transformation of the conscious operation of the intellect and will, and an intellectual vision of the Trinity or some divine attribute. Although Lonergan does not cite Poulain explicitly in "Folder 18," he does retain a consideration of the "phenomena of the unitive way." Lonergan writes: "A break across consciousness: intellect and will engaged in supernatural operations (the presence of God in the soul, in my soul); sense undergoes successively greater eclipse (control of inner, outer senses, increasingly lost) and then returns to function normally despite [the] presence of higher operations."26

Thus, the normal functioning of the senses is interrupted in the course of a developmental process in unitive prayer. In the general context of the integrative movement of Lonergan's treatise on grace, one might find it puzzling that Lonergan indicates that the normal functioning of the senses returns "despite" the transformation of the operations of intellect and will. One might anticipate that this observation would give way to an appreciation that the transformation of a person's conscious knowing and willing through unitive prayer anticipates and stimulates a corresponding transformation and reintegration of his or her spontaneous biological and psychic sensibilities.27

Nonetheless, Lonergan's discussion of the interaction of the illuminated intellect and the inspired will does reflect the deeply integrative approach of authentic Ignatian spirituality. In both "Folder 19" and "Folder 18" Lonergan refers to Joseph de Guibert's treatment of the spiritual doctrine of the Spiritual Exercises in his La spiritualite de la Compagnie de Jesus, emphasizing the docility to the Spirit that guides the combination of strong and prudential reasoning with tenacity of will in the process of discernment.28 Lonergan gives clear precedence to Ignatius's "second time" for decision-making in which the fruits of prudential reasoning are further tested by the affective suggestions of grace expressed in the movements of consolation and desolation. Here Lonergan makes no mention of the direct inspiration of the first time and the more rational evaluation of the third time.29

Significantly, Lonergan's citation from the volume La spiritualite de la Compagnie de Jesus stops abruptly short of de Guibert's concluding synthesis of Ignatius's spiritual doctrine, which summarizes the thematic of Ignatius's spirituality as apostolic service as a disciple of Christ.30 Here de Guibert contrasts Ignatius's approach with a mysticism of union and transformation. "Mystique de service par amour, plutot que mystique d'union et de transformation . . ."31 Lonergan chooses to cite Poulain's description of Teresa's mysticism of transforming union rather than accept de Guibert's assertion that Ignatius took an alternative approach. While it can be obviously argued that neither a mysticism of service through love nor a mysticism of transforming union are mutually exclusive, Lonergan's discussion of the Spiritual Exercises makes a clear option for the priority of union and assimilation as the principles from which service might consequently flow. Lonergan's approach resonates with Ignatius's respect for God's direct action in the human person.32

Lonergan continues in "Folder 18" to develop a parallel between the role of a teacher and the role of a spiritual director. The teacher can hope only to assist the student's learning by providing helpful visual and auditory stimulation. The principle of the student's learning is his of her own wonder. Comprehension is a personal achievement first producing the inner word of understanding that may then ground the outer word of expression. The outer word of a student's personal achievement is not to be confused with mimicry or mere manipulation of the clues offered by a teacher. The spiritual director likewise can only help another person recognize God's action in his or her life, transforming his or her knowing and willing. No external action takes precedence over or replaces the gracious transformation of the human person as he or she becomes the indwelling Spirit's true other self; unitive love then overflows in charity.33

A MYSTICAL EPIGRAM

In Method in Theology Lonergan provides his reader the vantagepoint toward which the moving viewpoint of Insight progressed but never arrived. In Insight, Lonergan had approached general and special transcendental knowledge as an expansion of his intentionality analysis and his position on the complete intelligibility of the real. After a thorough development, he was able to present his argument for the existence of God in a rigorous syllogism.34 In Method, however, Lonergan considers the question of God more important than the exact manner in which the answer is formulated, and the human person's basic awareness of God arises "not through our arguments or choices but primarily through God's gift of his love."35

Lonergan develops in Method his previous intentionality analysis, now conceiving the good not simply as the intelligent and reasonable but as a distinct transcendental notion revealed in questions for deliberation.36 Human consciousness is not only empirical, intelligent, and rational but also deliberative. The reflexive application of the operations of deliberative consciousness constitute the subject as existential; human persons inform and reform themselves through their deliberative choices.37 Still, even as Lonergan refines the achievements of his intentionality analysis, he recognizes that the existential subject lives within a mystical horizon. Here he understands the transcendental notions to be the divine call transformed and fulfilled by the further call and gift of God's grace.38 The human person is a conscious, existential response to this complex divine initiative. In Method Lonergan's reflective, methodological analysis proceeds within the context of an explicit acknowledgment of religious experience.

In the period during which Lonergan was drafting Method, he struggled to synthesize the approach he had taken to transcendental knowledge in Insight and his affirmation of the priority of experimental grace such as that found in "Grace and the Spiritual Exercises."39 In January of 1968, Lonergan responds in a letter to a question posed by a correspondent:

While we do not in this life experience God, we do not know him apart from experience. We do not experience him, for God is not among the data of sense or the data of consciousness. We do not know him apart from experience, for it is our experience of this world and of its complete intelligibility that provides the premises whence we infer to his existence."40

In contrast with this juxtaposition of the possibility of "knowing God" with the impossibility of "experiencing God" in this life, 19 months. later Lonergan takes a different position. During the question period following a pre-publication presentation of Method as a work in progress, Lonergan offers the following responses:

How are these (transcendental) notions related to God? They are associated, and from them I get the question of God: not the experience of God, the experience of the divine. What is the difference? Have you read Rahner on St. Ignatius and consolation without a cause? Well, that sort of thing I would call an experience of God.41

The published text of Method confirms the possibility of religious experience but does so almost epigrammatically. Lonergan describes religious experience as "being in love with God ... without limits or qualifications or conditions or reservations," the proper fulfillment of the human person's unrestricted capacity for self-transcendence.42 Lonergan's elaboration tends toward paradoxical expression. If the transcendental notions are a divine call, their fulfillment in the further gift of God's love is a radically transformative terminus. The fulfillment of unrestricted human intentionality is not the product of human knowing and choosing but, in fact, the denouncement of the established horizon of human knowing and choosing in the accouchement of a new horizon "in which the love of God will transvalue our values and the eyes of that love will transform our knowing." Lonergan describes the new horizon as "a conscious dynamic state of love, joy and peace, that manifests itself in acts of kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22)."43 Clearly, the fulfillment of the transcendental notions, the realization of the human person's unrestricted capacity for self-transcendence becomes a principle of further (supernatural) activity.

Lonergan elucidates that to affirm that the dynamic state of being in love with God is conscious is not to affirm that it is known, clarifying that consciousness is simply experience whereas knowledge is a compound of experience, understanding, and judging. Further, Lonergan locates religious experience as consciousness that has been brought to fulfillment on the fourth level of human intentional consciousness. Religious experience involves the transformed self-presence of the human subject whose deliberative spontaneity has been reoriented and fulfilled by the unconditional love of God. Lonergan is careful here not to associate religious experience immediately with the empirical, intellectual or rational levels of consciousness. Religious experience is immediate; it remains most fundamentally an experience of mystery. Later in Method, in the chapter on foundations, Lonergan writes:

(L)et us consider religiously differentiated consciousness. It can be content with the negations of an apophatic theology. For it is in love. On its love there are not any reservations or conditions or qualifications. By such love it is oriented positively to what is transcendent in loveableness. Such a positive orientation and the consequent self-surrender, as long as they are operative, enable one to dispense with any intellectually apprehended object. And when they cease to be operative, the memory of them enables one to be content with enumeration of what God is not.44

Lonergan indicates that he found William Johnston's The Mysticism of the Cloud of Unknowing very helpful and suggests that readers will find there a fuller exposition of mysticism "largely coherent" with his own approach. In the chapter on systematics, Lonergan writes:

On what I have called the primary and fundamental meaning of the name, God, God is not an object. For that meaning is the term of an orientation to transcendent mystery. Such an orientation, while it is the climax of the self-transcendent process of raising questions, none the less is not properly a matter of raising and answering questions. So far from lying within the world mediated by meaning, it is the principle that can draw people out of that world and into the cloud of unknowing.45

Still, for both Lonergan and Johnston, withdrawal through the purgative cloud of forgetting into the unitive cloud of unknowing enables a renewed appreciation of creation and participation in world process. The human person is purified and transformed not only to find God in all things but to find all things in God. ". . . (T)ranscendent value links itself to all other values to transform, magnify, glorify them."46 A new horizon of knowing and willing emerges. Johnston writes:

The all-important thing, however, is that when inordinate desire has been vanquished, so that man can see creatures as they really are, then he may know again. For then (and only then) is he capable of true knowledge. Strangely enough, when the cloud of forgetting has done its work perfectly, man is permitted to remember; and now for the first time he really knows; no longer is he warped by the ignorance of concupiscence. He looks out on the created world and he sees there only God for (writes St. John of the Cross) "even as all the trees and plants have their life and root in the grove, so the creatures, celestial and terrestrial alike, have their roots and their life in God;" (Canticle, Stanza XXXVIII, 8) and the English author puts the same idea even more forcefully when he says (and reiterates several times) that God is the being of all things-not in the sense of a pantheistic identity but because we share analogously in what He has by right. To look on the world and see only God is truth (for he who sees the creature divorced from its Creator is in abysmal ignorance), and it is to this God-filled vision of the world that the author leads... So in the final stage nothing is rejected: science, music, poetry, and the beauty of nature are not rejected but seen and loved and relished in God who is their being. It is simply that when the cloud of forgetting has purified the soul, it is free to love in the liberty of spirit.47

Thus, the mystic who "withdraws into the ultima solitudo" and "drops the constructs of culture and the whole complicated mass of mediating operations," may reflect upon his or her religious experience and its relation to God, yielding in this life a "mediated immediacy."48 This unitive transformation of deliberative consciousness implicates the integral consciousness and intentional operations of the human person, calling forth adjustments and developments in the first three differentiations of consciousness, reorienting and elevating the operations of knowing and willing, enlivening dialectical and historical religious expression. For Lonergan and Johnston, the mystic's withdrawal into apophatic prayer returns to find its authentic expression in the expansive freedom of a kataphatic spirituality.49

EXPATIATION

The dense expression of Lonergan's notion of religious experience might be further relieved by paying attention to his repeated references to Karl Rahner's explication of the Ignatian mystical notion of consolation without a cause. In the published text of Method Lonergan makes a cryptic reference to Rahner's understanding of consolation without a cause, indicating that notion of religious love as the dynamic state of being in love with God corresponds to Rahner's explication of the Ignatian notion.50 Lonergan elaborates upon this comparison on three occasions in the question-answer exchanges of the "Regis Method Institute."51 He also indicates several years later that Harvey Egan's account of Rahner's explanation stimulated a synthetic reprise of his own previous intellectual and spiritual journey.52

In the context of a discussion of the discernment of God's particular will with respect to specific concrete personal decisions, Rahner argues that Ignatius Loyola's approach assumes two complementary foundations. The first foundation is constituted by the first principles of logic and ontology, the rational application of which within the framing provided by knowledge of the actual situation and by adherence to the prescriptions of faith discriminates a general realm of possible, morally acceptable choices. The second foundation is the utterly transcendent love of God, that is, "consolation without a cause," with respect to which specific, concrete choices are tested to discern God's particular will for the individual.53

Rahner draws on his transcendental analysis to explicate the notion of consolation without a cause in contradistinction to the closely related Ignatian notion of consolation with a cause. With respect to consolation with a cause, Rahner suggests that the cause of consolation is the presence of an object from which the understanding or will draw their consolation and consolation itself "signifies the inner frame of mind that follows from the object," characterized as peace, tranquillity, and quiet.54 Consolation without a cause is the inner frame of mind that does not follow from a determinate object. Consolation without a cause is the radical, unrestricted love of God which cannot be properly conceptualized.55

Rahner observes that consolation without a cause presents an inherent contradiction to those who would identify by definition " `being the object of a concept for consciousness' and `being known' (of something in a consciousness)." Rahner's subsequent treatment, in effect, presents two counterexamples to this identification; the concomitant self-awareness which accompanies every intentional act of the mind, but cannot be identified with the subject as made the object of a mental act; and consolation without a cause understood as the concomitant awareness of God's unrestricted love which forms the mystical horizon of every intentional act, but can never be associated with the determinate object of any intentional act.56

Rahner thus affirms that consolation without a cause is conscious but is not referenced to an object and cannot be properly conceptualized. "The absence of object in question is utter receptivity to God, the inexpressible, non-conceptual experience of the love of the God who is raised transcendent above all that is individual, all that can be mentioned and distinguished, of God as God."57 Or as Ignatius himself says: "It belongs solely to the Creator to come into the soul, to leave it, to act upon it, to draw it wholly to the love of His Divine Majesty."58 Consolation without a cause, the radical, personal, non-conceptual love of God becomes the selfjustifying foundation with respect to which the individual's particular choices are then tested.59

Lonergan's reference to Rahner's understanding of consolation without a cause as "consolation with a content but without an object" is simply illustrative of the dynamic state of being in love with God as the conscious horizon within which transformed knowing and willing proceed.60 The context and scope of Rahner's discussion suggest a way in which the relation between the dynamic state of being in love and particular acts of knowing and willing can be understood. In effect, consolation without a cause provides the self-justifying principle with respect to which the moral tonality and integrity of particular acts can be discerned; attentive reflection assesses the resonance of a particular act with the person's conscious but unthematized experience of unitive love.

A significant contrast between the two thinkers, however, becomes evident. Rahner's indirect method accepts God's redemptive selfcommunication as given and unthematically available to human consciousness. His indirect method then approaches intentionality analysis as a discovery of the metaphysical conditions of possibility for redemption. While Lonergan shares Rahner's existential turn to the subject, he disagrees with Rahner on cognitional theory and the epistemology and metaphysics that ensue from it.61 It is very significant that Lonergan differentiates four interrelated dimensions of intentional consciousness and locates religious experience as the fulfillment of the transcendent striving of deliberative consciousness. The revelation of God's love transforms the horizon within which further conscious acts of knowing and willing occur. For Lonergan, metaphysics refers to the content of what is known through subsequent acts of intelligence and critical reflection. Lonergan's approach recognizes the possibility of conversion as an existential change in the subject which is neither reducible to information nor follows from knowledge and thus is distinct from the thematization of an implicit condition of possibility. Religious conversion remains the unconditional response of a particular person to the mystical experience of God's love flooding his or her heart.62

COLLATION

Lonergan's notion of religious experience as being in love with God remains a very dense expression and requires further expansion. I have attempted to relieve this density by means of an expatiation through some of Lonergan's source texts in the context of a consideration of his evolving appreciation of mysticism. The trajectory of Lonergan's development is toward a transcendental spirituality in which the pervasive dynamism informing human living becomes more adequately expressed in explanatory terms and relations.63 Once an appropriate and sufficiently rich context of interpretation has been evoked, the further development of Lonergan's thought becomes, at least transitionally, a systematic exercise.

Some other interpreters of Lonergan's thought have addressed the compact nature of Lonergan's expression through just such a systematic effort, transposing the metaphysical categories of sanctifying grace and the habit of charity into correlative categories of intentionality analysis.64 Robert Doran develops such an approach proceeding from Lonergan's discussion of created participation in the four divine relations, focusing on active and passive spiration, and drawing on Frederick Crowe's analysis of "complacency and concern"; the twofold action in human willing: "the passive process of receiving and the active process of causation."65 In a manner that resonates both with our previous discussion of the priority that Lonergan places on transformative union which overflows, so to speak, to inform a principle of consequent service and Lonergan's citation of Rahner's explication of the Ignatian notion of consolation without a cause, Doran develops the correlative notions of a "nonintentional complacency" and "a dynamic state of being in love" as conscious, created participation in the opposed relations of active and passive spiration.66 Doran's hypothesis warrants careful assessment. I hope that the effort I have made in this present study to trace Lonergan's evolving appreciation of mysticism will help to evoke the context within which to make just such an evaluation.

Notes:

1 Bernard Lonergan, Insight A Study of Human Understanding, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1992; original ed. London: Longmans, 1957).

2 Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1999; original ed. London: Dayton, Longman & Todd, 1972).

3 Frederick Crowe recalls that Lonergan remarked later in life that an injustice during his Jesuit training taught him to pray. Crowe indicates that this injustice was the extension of his "regency" (a period of studies and teaching prior to ordination) from the usual three years to four (Lonergan [Collegeville: Liturgical, 1992] 7, 17). Crowe also suggested to me in a conversation that dismissive criticism leveled against Lonergan's Verbum articles in Theological Studies (1946-1949) may have occasioned another deepening of the affective dimension of his prayer. For the criticism of the Verbum articles, see Matthew J. O'Connell, "St. Thomas and the Verbum: An Interpretation," The Modern Schoolman 24 (1947) 224-34. The timing of such a development corresponds to a remark made by Lonergan to a correspondent : "I was touched by your wishing me Joie spirituelle'. Most sincerely I hope and pray that it be yours. After twenty-four years of aridity in the religious life, I moved into that happier state and have enjoyed it for over thirty-one years. But I have no doubt that God's love is always with us no matter how we feel" (Bernard Lonergan to Louis Roy, 16 August 1977, Lonergan Research Institute [LRI], Toronto). All unpublished materials are quoted with permission of the Trustees of the Estate of Bernard J. F. Lonergan, and an archive catalogue number is indicated where available. I am grateful for the assistance of Frederick Crowe, Robert Doran, Robert Croken, and John Dadosky who brought important archival materials to my attention.

4 Alphonsus Rodriguez, Practice of Perfection and Christian Virtues, 2 vols., trans. Joseph Rickaby (London: Manresa, 1929); John Roothaan, The Method of Meditation (New York: John Gilmary Shea, 1858).

5 For Lonergan's retrospective on this period, see "Insight Revisited," in A Second Collection, ed. William F. Ryan and Bernard J. Tyrrell (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1974) 263-78, at 263-65.

6 Bernard Lonergan to Thomas O'Malley, 8 November 1978, LRI, A3108, quoted in part in n. 52 below. Lonergan was known for his concerns about the intellectual formation within the Jesuit order and the general state of Catholic intellectual life (Crowe, Lonergan 5-6). Crowe also recalled in a conversation with me that about 1975 Lonergan expressed strong criticism of Roothaan's influence on the practice of Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises.

7. From 1933 to 1940 Lonergan completed his initial studies in theology at Rome, then his tertianship (a formative year of spiritual training) in Amiens, France, and thereupon returned to Rome for a biennium in theology. My account of the retreat experience is based on interviews with Frederick Crowe, Michael Lapierre, and Patrick Malone who were participants at the eight-day retreat at Stanley House in Muskoka, Ontario. Michael Lapierre kept careful notes which I have transcribed and, with his permission, make available to the LRI. I cite these notes as Lapierre, "Retreat Notes" and indicate the folio page.

8 While the immediate audience of Lonergan's remarks is a group of fellow Jesuits, his illustrations suggest that his comments are more generally conceived and applicable. I would therefore read "our end" to be expansive in meaning, indicating "our human end" and not "our end" as a group of Jesuits. The exact text of Lapierre's note reads: "the importance of our end which must be taken out of the abstract and made into a concrete ideal" ("Retreat Notes" 1; emphasis original). Lindworsky is also a Jesuit but again his examples and citations point toward a consideration of religious dynamics that is not limited to any particular spiritual tradition and does not proceed under the then common assumption that Christian perfection is coextensive with vowed life in a religious community (Johannes Lindworksy, Psychologie des Aszese [Freiburg: Herder, 1935]; English trans.: The Psychology of Asceticism, trans. Emil A. Heiring [London: H. W. Edwards, 1936]).

9 Lindworsky, Psychology of Asceticism 7-21.

10 For instance, Lonergan uses the notion of "concrete ideal" to refer to Lindworsky's example of "daughter of God" as the religious aim form of St. Therese of Lisieux (Lapierre, "Retreat Notes" 1; and Lindworsky, Psychology of Asceticism 9-10).

11 Lapierre, "Retreat Notes" 3. By "divine discontent" Lonergan seems to mean the affect that accompanies the task of the human person to transcend self. In a conversation about the 1941 retreat more than 50 years later, Patrick Malone recalled the emphasis that Lonergan placed on the phrase "Le metier de l'homme est de se passer." 13

12 Lapierre, "Retreat Notes" 4, 5, 7. 13 Ibid. 11.

14 Bernard Lonergan, "The Form of the Development," Part II-1, Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2000) 162-92.

15 The methodological approach taken in his doctoral project is a transitional achievement following a series of at least four previous attempts to write a philosophy of history, beginning in 1933. For a discussion, see Michael Shute, The Origins of Lonergan's Notion of the Dialectics of History, 1933-38 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1993) and my Ph.D. dissertation "Bernard Lonergan's Notion of Vertical Finality in His Early Writings" (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 1995) 29-94.

15 The longer four-page outline is found in Batch II, Folder 18, entitled "Habitual Grace," LRI, A161, cited here as "Folder 18" with folio page indicated. The shorter two-page outline is found in Batch II, Folder 19, entitled "Grace," LRI, A164, cited here as "Folder 19" with folio page indicated. "Folder 19" presents four points, provides a short list of implications for the praxis of Ignatian Exercises, and cites Francis X. Lawlor, "The Doctrine of the Spiritual Exercises," Theological Studies 3 (1942) 513-32; Augustin Poulain, "Chapter XIX: The Spiritual Marriage (Fourth and Last Stage of the Mystic Union)," in The Graces of Interior Prayer: A Treatise on Mystical Theology, trans. Leonora L. Yorke Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950) 283-98; and Joseph de Guibert, La spiritualite de la Compagnie de Jesus (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1953) 122-61. "Folder 18" presents three more fully developed points, provides a more extensive list of illustrations drawn from the Spiritual Exercises but cites only Lawlor and de Guibert. "Folder 18" incorporates and develops several of the insights related to the unitive way attributed to Poulain in "Folder 19" without explicit citation. The first point presented in "Folder 18" incorporates the first two points of "Folder 19" but provides a more highly developed and organized analysis of contemporary misunderstandings of the experimental life of grace presumed by the practice of the Spiritual Exercises. Conversely, the first point of "Folder 19" does not appear to summarize the development of "Folder 18." "Folder 18" therefore appears to be dependent upon "Folder 19." Our discussion will focus on "Folder 18" but refer to "Folder 19" as necessary. The lectures were apparently to be addressed to fellow Jesuits but there is no external evidence with which to date the drafting of the outlines beyond noting that the most recent cited source was published in 1953.

16 For a literal English translation, see Ignatius Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius: Based on Studies in the Language of the Autograph, trans. Louis J. Puhl (Chicago: Loyola University, 1951), cited as Spiritual Exercises.

17 "Folder 18" 1.

18" Lonergan will later differentiate this "conceptual network" into the special and general categories (Method 285-93).

19 "Folder 18" 1. Lonergan's comment here should be read in light of his discussion of critical metaphysics in Insight, see especially his consideration of metaphysical equivalence (Insight 526-33).

20 "Folder 18" 1.

21 Lonergan writes "Grace: not a set of abstractions o[fl which some schematic and superficial knowledge [is] needed for exams; not a set of rules for theologically correct speech but that by which, that which makes it really true, that we, the whole of us, body and soul, biologically, sensitively, intellectually, voluntarily, are living members of [Christ] Jesus" ("Folder 19" 1). Or again: "Grace is a mystery: there is notional apprehension through theology; there is a real apprehension in concrete living; the [E]xercises are a device of real apprehension. St. Bernard on the unitive way: one cannot talk about it; each one has to drink at his own well; true, for all concrete real apprehension of grace; you know life by living; you know what is to be a living member of [Christ] by being one as fully as you can" ("Folder 18" 3).

22 "Folder 18" 2.

23 Ibid.

24 Poulain's approach is descriptive rather than speculative or explanatory. Poulain defines mystic prayer as "those supernatural acts or states which our own industry is powerless to produce, even in a low degree, even momentarily" (Graces of Interior Prayer 1). Teresa's four stages of mysticism are quietude, union, ecstasy and transforming union. The first three stages are progressive, "non-transforming union" representing increased passivity of the intellect and will in prayer. The fourth stage, also known as spiritual marriage, is not a further perfection of the previous stages but a modification of intellect and will by conscious participation in the divine life. Ordinary prayer involves supernatural acts such as contrition in which human effort "corresponds to grace." With respect to ordinary prayer Poulain describes four stages including vocal prayer, meditation, affective prayer, and the prayer of simplicitude (Graces of Interior Prayer 1-58).

25 Poulain, Graces of Interior Prayer 283-89. 26 "Folder 18" 2.

27 Such as suggested by Robert M. Doran (Theology and the Dialectics of

History [Toronto: University of Toronto, 1990]).

28 "Joseph de Guibert, La spiritualite 122-23; English trans.: The Jesuits:

Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice, trans. William J. Young (Chicago:

Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1964) 134.

29 See Spiritual Exercises no. 175 ff.

30 de Guibert, La spiritualite 162-70. Lonergan cites only pages 122-61 of the Guibert text in both "Folder 19" and "Folder 18."

31 de Guibert, La spiritualite 167.

32 Spiritual Exercises Annotation 15.

33 "Folder 18" 4. 34 Insight 696.

35 See Lonergan's retrospective, "Insight Revisited" 277.

36 Method 104-5. The transcendental notions are "our questions for intelligence, for reflection and for deliberation . . ." See also Lonergan's discussion of transcendental notions as active and passive potencies (Method 120-21).

37 Lonergan writes: ". . . [T]he change in Method primarily regards the fuller attention to the fourth level on which consciousness is conscience and subjects are not only practical (changing objective states of affairs), interpersonal (relating to others) but also existential (transforming themselves)" (Bernard Lonergan to Edward Braxton, 12 February 1975, LRI).

38 Lonergan responds to a series of questions during the Regis Method Institute, a 1969 presentation of Method as a work in progress, offered at Regis College, Toronto: "Are the transcendental notions like a call? Yes. That would be true. The transcendental notions are the call. There is the further call of God's grace. What about mystery? I think the experience of mystery lies in a fulfillment of the transcendental notions, of what one is in terms of the transcendental notions. The experience described by St. Paul when he says in Romans 5.5, `God's love has flooded our hearts through the Holy Spirit he has given us.' In chapter 8 of Romans St. Paul goes on to explain that there is nothing in heaven or on earth that can separate us from the love of Jesus Christ. The Old Testament talks about loving God with one's whole heart and soul and mind and strength. To get to that love is something conscious but we cannot say what it is; it is mystery. But it is loving, and it is loving in an unrestricted manner; it corresponds to the unrestricted character of the transcendental notions" (Bernard Lonergan, questions 100-101, "Regis Method Institute," transcribed by Nicholas Graham, Regis College, Toronto, July 17-18, 1969, 583-84).

39 Lonergan had also previously completed a genetic analysis of the development of the doctrine of grace in Grace and Freedom and a preliminary systematic treatment of grace in published lecture notes (Bernard Lonergan, De ente supernaturali: Supplementum schematicum [Montreal: College of the Immaculate Conception, 1946; re-ed. Frederick E. Crowe, Willowdale, Ontario: Regis College, 1973]). For a discussion, see J. Michael Stebbins, The Divine Initiative: Grace, World-Order, and Human Freedom in the Early Writings of Bernard Lonergan (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1995).

40 Bernard Lonergan to Rocco Cacopardo, 28 January 1968, LRI. Lonergan continues in this letter to write: "Mysticism is a distinct pattern of experience, but when the mystic ends his prayer and joins the rest of us, he can ask about the validity of his experience and raise such intellectual questions as I raised in chapters 19 and 20 [of Insight]."

41 Questions 102-3, emphasis added, "Regis Method Institute" 584. 42 Method 105.

43 Ibid. 106.

44 Ibid. 277-78.

45 Ibid. 342. See also Lonergan's comments in his n. 7. William Johnston, The Mysticism of the Cloud of Unknowing (New York: Desclee, 1967). The published text of Method makes two other references to Johnston (29, n . 1 and 278, n. 4). The transcription of the 1969 "Regis Method Institute" makes no reference to Johnston, either in the text presented or in Lonergan's responses to questions.

46 Method 116. 47 Johnston, Mysticism 183.

48 Method 29. In a written response to a question posed during the 1979 Method in Theology Seminar at Boston College, Lonergan wrote: "My `mediated immediacy' is different from the Scholastic view that the beatific vision is immediate. Immediate in the Scholastic sense is the denial of an intermediary object between the act and the object. Mediated immediacy does not posit an object between the act and the object but posits a reflection that understands the nature of the act and its relation to God" (Lecture Notes, LRI, A2860).

49 For a discussion of dialectical and historical religious expression, see Method 108-12.

50 Ibid. 106. Lonergan cites the discussion of consolation without a cause in Karl Rahner, The Dynamic Element in the Church, Questiones disputatae 12 (Montreal: Palm, 1964) 131 ff. See also Method 278 n. 4 where Lonergan again cites Dynamic Element 129 ff.

51 Questions 103, 114, 203, "Regis Method Institute" 584, 591-92, 672.

52 Lonergan writes: "I got to know Fr. Egan in 1975-76 when he addressed the Jesuit Community at St. Mary's Hall on `Consolation without a previous cause.' I had been hearing those words since 1922 at the annual retreats made by Jesuits preparing for the priesthood. They occur in St. Ignatius's `Rules for the Discernment in the Second Week of the Exercises.' But now, after fifty-three years, I began for the first time to grasp what they meant. What had intervened was what Rahner describes as the anthropological turn, the turn from metaphysical objects to conscious subjects. What I was learning was that the Ignatian `examen conscientiae' might mean not an examination of conscience but an examination of consciousness: after all in the romance languages the same word is used to denote both conscience and consciousness, both Gewissen and Bewusstein. I was seeing that 'consolation' and 'desolation' named opposite answers to the question, How do you feel when you pray? Are you absorbed or are you blocked? I was hearing that my own work on operative grace in St. Thomas (cf. TS, 1941-42) brought to light a positive expression of what was meant by Ignatius when [he] spoke of `consolation without a previous cause:' in Aquinas grace is operative when the mind is not the mover but only the moved; in Ignatius consolation is from God alone when there is no conscious antecedent to account for the consolation" (Bernard Lonergan to Thomas O'Malley). In conversation Harvey Egan advises me that the talk given in the 1975-76 academic year was an informal presentation based on his doctoral project, which was rewritten and published as The Spiritual Exercises and the Ignatian Mystical Horizon (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1976). Egan's doctoral project, "An Anthropocentric-Christocentric Mystagogy: A Study of the Method and Basic Horizon of Thought and Experience in the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola" (Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat, Munster), was completed in 1972 under the supervision of Karl Rahner. In the O'Malley letter, Lonergan indicates that he became familiar with the published version of Egan's project and had consulted the original dissertation.

53 ss Rahner, Dynamic Element 90-95. Rahner's interpretation of the Spiritual Exercises focuses on the "Rules for Discernment of Spirits for the Second Week" nos. 329-36, especially no. 330 and no. 336, and the "Three Times When a Correct and Good Choice of a Way of Life May Be Made" nos. 175-78.

54 Rahner, Dynamic Element 133. 55 Ibid. 135. 56 Ibid. 133 ff. n. 28.

57 Ibid. 135. See also Lonergan's responses during the Regis Method Institute: "Has consolation got a content? Yes. It has a content, but it hasn't got an object; this is Rahner's way of putting it. This is how he puts it in The Dynamic Element in the Church. Here he discusses this consolation without a cause that Ignatius talks about as the discernment of the Spirit; and he says that `without a cause' means without an object. Insofar as it is unrestricted it is out of this world; it is otherworldly; there are no conditions or qualifications, etc., to that love, and it is with all one's mind, heart, and strength. Because it is conscious without being known, it is mystery; one can call its object mystery. Because it is love it is fascinating; because it is unrestricted it is tremendum; it is awe as well as love. Now, is that continuous? It is continuous with our capacity for self-transcendence; it is the fulfillment of our capacity for self-transcendence;it is something ultimate in self-transcendence, in the line of self-transcendence. And because it is a fulfillment of a capacity it is a source of joy and peace. It is a joy and peace that is quite different from any other" (question 114, "Regis Method Institute" 591-92).

58 Spiritual Exercises #330.

59 Rahner continues to describe the process of concrete, individual discernment which proceeds from this foundational principle (Dynamic Element 156 ff).

60 Method 106 n. 4. See again Lonergan's responses during the Regis Method Institute: "What is the nature and content of religious experience? Rahner says that it has no object but it has a content; that is his way of expressing it. It has a content, viz., being-in-love, that manifests itself in joy, peace, etc. To understand this one can discuss the tag: one can't love what one does not know; and, in a general sense, that is true. But insofar as God's love floods one's heart (Romans 5:5), one doesn't love God because one knows him. One has that love because of the gift of his grace and it is through that gift that one comes to know him" (question 203, "Regis Method Institute" 672).

61 I am following a clue offered by a comment Lonergan makes in lecture notes for the 1979 Method in Theology Seminar at Boston College regarding Rahner's understanding of the beatific vision (Lecture Notes, LRI, A2860). See also Bernard Lonergan, "A Response to the Reverend William V. Dych's Presentation entitled `Method in Theology according to Karl Rahner'" (LRI, A2868).

62 Lonergan indicates that he learned from Harvey Egan's development of Rahner's thought that such mysticism is not a series of exceptional events but a way of life: "In time I came to know Fr. Egan's views on mysticism. It is not just a series of exceptional events. It is a whole way of life. It is the way to which St. Paul refers in Romans 8:14: `For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.' It is of a piece with Newman's `Lead kindly light, lead thou me on.' It replaces Socrates' obedience to his daimon with the Ignatian rules: In desolation change nothing; rely on consolation when there was no conscious antecedent that accounts for the consolation. Or in the words of Aquinas, grace is operative when you become willing to do the good that previously you were unwilling to do. The succession of such changes in willingness is the way of the mystic that first purges one of one's inordinate attachments, then opens one's eyes to things as they are, and eventually brings those that persevere to a transforming union with God" (Bernard Lonergan to Thomas O'Malley).

63 See, for instance, Bernard Lonergan, "Healing and Creating in History" in A Third Collection: Papers by Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S.J., ed. Frederick E. Crowe (New York: Paulist, 1985) 100-109; see also Pierre Robert, "De l'analyse de sujet connaissant A la reprise des dimensions existentielle et religieuse chez Bernard Lonergan," Science et Esprit 44 (1992) 127-58.

64 Robert M. Doran, "Consciousness and Grace," Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies 11 (1993) 51-75; Michael Vertin, "Lonergan on Consciousness: Is There a Fifth Level?" MJLS 12 (1994) 1-36; Robert M. Doran, "Revisiting `Consciousness and Grace,'" MJLS 13 (1995) 151-59; " `Complacency and Concern' and a Basic Thesis on Grace" in Lonergan Workshop 13 (1997) 57-78.

65 Frederick E. Crowe, "Complacency and Concern in the Thought of St. Thomas," TS 20 (1959) 1-39, 198-230, 343-95.

66 See especially the concluding summary, Doran, "Basic Thesis on Grace" 76-- 77.

GORDON RIXON, S.J., received his Ph.D. from Boston College in 1995. He is assistant professor and director of basic degree studies at Regis College, in the Toronto School of Theology. He specializes in systematic theology with emphasis on methodology, foundations, and grace.

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Gardiner H Shattuck Jr. The University Gets Religion: Religious Studies in American Higher Education. -volver índice-
Anglican Theological Review, Evanston, Fall 2000
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Volume: 82, Issue: 4, Pagination: 838-840, ISSN: 00033286

Subject Terms: Nonfiction // History // Colleges & universities //Religious education

Personal Names: Hart, D G

Abstract:
"The University Gets Religion: Religious Studies in American Higher Education" by D. G. Hart is reviewed.
Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Fall 2000

Full Text:
The University Gets Religion: Religious Studies in American Higher Education. By D. G. Hart. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. xi + 321 pp. $38.00 (cloth).

A few years ago, I was one of about two hundred people who applied for a position in the religion department of a small state college in the South. Although I was lucky enough to be among the forty or so candidates initially interviewed for the job, it soon became clear that the search committee intended to use the occasion simply as a way to reduce an unwieldy number of applicants to a more workable size. Seeking a suitable reason to disqualify me, several members of the committee expressed concern about my status as an Episcopal priest and asked how I would resist the temptation to use the faculty position as a platform for evangelizing my students. Despite my efforts to explain what I thought was the obvious distinction between proselytism and pedagogy, the search committee insisted that no ordained representative of a Christian denomination was capable of approaching the study of religion with the critical distance necessary to teach in a public institution.

Although I was bothered at the time by the bias of my interviewers, I might not have felt quite so upset if I had been able to read D. G. Hart's excellent and insightful history of the development of religious studies in American higher education. As Hart cogently demonstrates, the fears of that search committee were entirely understandable. Prior to the 1960s the academic study of religion had, in fact, been in the hands of Protestant clergy concerned as much with providing pastoral and spiritual guidance to students as with teaching their subject in an impartial or critical manner. Given what Hart calls "the troubled relationship" (p. xi) between Protestantism and higher education over the past century, it is hardly surprising that many people in academia today would view an Episcopal priest teaching religion at a secular institution with alarm.

This book is divided into three major sections, each of which examines the dominant attitude toward religious studies within successive historical periods: the embrace of the modern research university by mainline Protestants between 1870 and 1925; the triumph of neo-orthodox theology and the establishment of religious studies departments between 1925 and 1965; and the emergence of a postmodern concern for religious and cultural diversity from 1965 through the present day. Hart's narrative begins with a discussion of the ideas of Andrew Dickson White, president of Cornell University and author of The History of the Warfare of Theology with Science in Christendom (1896). Despite the title of his book and his condemnation of sectarian bigotry, White not only believed in the compatibility of science and liberal Protestantism, but he also instituted daily chapel services at Cornell. Thanks to the efforts of reformers like White, American educators gradually substituted "Enlightened Christianity" (p. 23) for the allegedly narrow doctrinal traditions taught at denominational colleges prior to the Civil War-a trend supported by most mainline Protestant leaders. Although the fundamentalistmodernist controversy of the early twentieth century called into question the rapprochement between Protestantism and the modern university, the desire for social stability and the dramatic rise in churchgoing after World War II revived interest in the academic study of religion. Since the liberal Protestants who controlled American higher education in the 1950s thought they could depend on the Bible "to combat both secularism at home and totalitarianism abroad" (p. 142), they welcomed the study of Christianity and Judaism and helped found religion departments in many universities.

A critical watershed was reached in 1963, however, when the Supreme Court ruled that the longstanding practice of prayer and Bible-reading in public schools was unconstitutional. This decision not only represented a major blow to the hegemonic intentions of the mainline churches, but it also posed an implicit threat to college-level religious studies programs. By suggesting that religious values and democratic ideals were separable, the Supreme Court abruptly undercut the main intellectual rationale for the creation and support of departments of religion within universities. Cut loose from the Protestant establishment that had engendered it, the study of religion soon became an amorphous mass, neither scholarly enough to satisfy its anti-religious detractors nor religious enough to please ordinary churchgoers. Although the American Academy of Religion is now one of the largest academic professional organizations in the United States, it lacks a clear identity and possesses no single methodology uniting its highly disparate membership. Having apparently followed Paul's advice to "become all things to all people" (1 Cor. 9:22), religious studies has succeeded only in transforming itself into a "rudderless" (p. 222) pseudo-discipline.

Hart concludes his book with an intriguing critique of two recent works that also discuss the role of religion in American intellectual life: Stephen Carter's The Culture of Disbelief (1993) and George Marsden's The Soul of the American University (1994). While Carter and Marsden lament that modern educational institutions have discouraged the expression of explicitly religious ideas and made spiritual values marginal to their mission, Hart chides these writers for ignoring the enduring presence of religious studies in most leading colleges and universities. Based on the historical material he uncovers and analyzes, moreover, Hart argues that the inclusion of religious perspectives between 1870 and 1965 has had little positive effect either on the academy or on mainline Protestantism. Indeed, "religion does not do well in the hands of academics" (p. 250), he suggests, for it is inevitably watered down to a point where faith has almost no meaning or significance. In spite of his own impressive credentials as both an academic historian and a theological conservative, Hart encourages Christian scholars of all ideological persuasions to accept the inevitably secular nature of the modern university.

A historical work with a distinct theological bent, The University Gets Religion will undoubtedly annoy many readers because of its author's refusal to endorse the inclusion of religious studies in the contemporary college curriculum. Nevertheless, Hart effectively demonstrates the ambiguous consequences of the involvement of mainline Protestantism in American universities. His book significantly increases our understanding of a neglected aspect of American religious history, and it provides a useful perspective on both the growing curiosity about quasi-spiritual topics and the declining interest in academic theology among Episcopalians and other Christians in the United States today.

GARDINER H. SHATTUCK, JR. Warwick, Rhode Island

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Hans P Johnson. Academics vow to resist Ex Corde norms. -volver índice-
Academe, Washington, May/Jun 2000
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Volume: 86, Issue: 3, Pagination: 15-16, ISSN: 01902946

Subject Terms: Educators // Catholicism // Colleges & universities

Abstract:
Religion professors at two Catholic campuses in Massachusetts announced plans to defy a key provision of the implementation norms for "Ex Corde Ecclesiae." The policy aims at strengthening the church's ties with affiliated universities.
Copyright American Association of University Professors May/Jun 2000

Full Text:
IN STATEMENTS FILLED WITH ALLUsions to past struggles over academic freedom, religion professors at two Catholic campuses in Massachusetts announced plans to defy a key provision of the implementation norms for Ex Corde Ecclesiae. The policy, approved by the nation's Catholic bishops last November, aims at strengthening the church's ties with affiliated universities. Its approval also prompted a professor in California to resign her tenured position at a Catholic institution, citing a chilled political climate.

The professors' criticisms center on the policy's insistence that theology professors at Catholic campuses obtain a "mandate" for their teaching position from their local bishop. "I have no fear about getting a mandate if I were to present myself, but I see it as a form of ecclesiastical McCarthyism," Peter Beisheim, a professor of religious studies at Stonehill College, told the Boston Globe in February. "I don't need to take a loyalty oath," he added.

Donald Dietrich, chair of the theology department at Boston College, also bristled at seeking a bishop's blessing for his appointment. "My own personal plan would not be to seek a mandate," Dietrich says. "My thinking is that a university is a university, an autonomous entity that should be supportive of free thought in the American tradition. You can't have free thought if there's a mandate and some kind of control."

Boston College president William Leahy made clear his intention not to enforce the mandate provision on that campus. "The university's position is that it's an individual Catholic theologian's decision to seek a mandate or not," said college spokesperson John Dunn.

In another sign of resistance in December, Anne Eggebroten, a professor of English at Mount St. Mary's College in Los Angeles, resigned from her position amid fears about the effects of Ex Corde's implementation. "As much as I love the college and my colleagues, I couldn't continue to accept a paycheck or donate energy." Eggebroten says she viewed the Catholic bishops' vote of approval as a nod to forces "external to academe," who may gain undue sway over the content of instruction at Catholic campuses under the policy. "I realized I would have difficulty teaching in this kind of political environment."

Captioned as: The Rev. Richard McBrien, the CrowleyO'Brien-Walter Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, is among faculty critics of Ex Corde norms. University of Notre Dame theology professor Richard P. McBrien told Academe that his concerns parallel some of his colleagues'. "If external, nonacademic agents can intrude on the internal academic life of our Catholic universities and colleges, that fact in itself would compromise those institutions' claims to be universities and colleges in the fullest academic sense of those words." McBrien notes that difficulties stemming from the policy transcend fears about academic freedom: "The concern I have is not the potential impact on individual faculty members but on the reputation of Catholic higher education and the long-term effect it will have on the recruitment and retention of faculty and graduate students."

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.-volver índice-

Terrance Wayne Klein. 10 ways to improve your prayer life. -volver índice-
U.S. Catholic, Chicago, Mar 1999
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Volume: 64, Issue: 3, Pagination: 10-15, ISSN: 00417548

Subject Terms: Christianity // Spirituality // Prayer

Abstract:
Ten practical ways Christians can improve their prayer life are discussed. It is important that Christians be themselves, be disciplined, learn to meditate and make prayer fruitful through moral living.
Copyright Claretian Publications Mar 1999

Full Text:
Whether you're a novice or a novice master, a regular to rote prayer or a connoisseur of contemplation, here are ten ways to help you cultivate a good conversation with God.

In this fast-paced world of ours, we are accustomed to shortcuts, good deals, best buys, and money-back guarantees. We want to think that our savvy good judgement has cut to the quick and emerged at the bottom line. As "Christian consumers" we want homilies to be fascinating, humorous, and deeply spiritual. And, of course, brief. If nothing else, brief!

What follows is a series of brief "Rules for Prayer." They respond to a need as old as the gospels themselves, when the disciples first requested that their master teach them how to pray. But don't let their brevity and simplicity fool you. This really is "the bottom line."

Rule #1:
Be yourself.
Your high-school speech teacher and your mom probably made this a mantra of your adolescent years, but the maxim bears repeating here. Why is the first rule of prayer that you be yourself? Because God created you-the you that you are today, not yesterday or tomorrow-to be a praying person. You were created to dialogue with God, to live in communion with the Holy Trinity, to sit at God's table and sup. There is no fundamental change needed to make you into a praying person.

The great German Catholic theologian Karl Rahner called human beings "hearers of the Word." He wasn't alone in using the phrase. What he meant by it is simply the fact that we were made to speak with God, to see his face, to live in his presence. If we were computers, this would be a fact of our hardware that no software virus could corrupt. Rahner suggested that if one could look upon the very essence of the human person, one would see something resembling a satellite dish. One glance tells you that men and women are oriented toward communication, toward communion with a being beyond the self.

What's the consequence of this truth for a life of prayer? Simply this. Everything that you need to pray has been given to you already. Praying well is not a question of learning a technique. Give technique and effort a rest. They have their place, but it's not first.

Suggestions: Remember that God has already taken the lead in our life of prayer. He has revealed himself in Jesus Christ. Prayer, before it is anything else, is simply our response to that revelation. Think a little less about what you want to say to God, and give more time to listening. Sit down with the scriptures and read slowly. When a passage says something meaningful to you, stop. Savor it. Ponder its meaning for you at this moment in your life. Force yourself to wait for just awhile in silence. Believe that listening for God to speak is not purposeless. Simply to turn our attention to God is to pray. And God will speak in that silence.

Another great theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar, once described the prayer life of the Swiss mystic Adrienne von Speyr. The following comes from his introduction to the autobiography of her early years:

Over time prayer would take all possible shapes: verbal and wordless prayer, prayer as uplifting contemplation, as returning gratitude, as petition, as self-sacrifice for people, as mute existence with a silent God, as active offering in service of neighbor. She became well practiced in each of these, one after the other, like an organ in which new stops are installed, until in the end the full-voiced instrument stands ready for the Master to play with pleasure.

Rule #2:
Be disciplined.
The great medieval theologian and saint, Thomas Aquinas, based much of his theology on the maxim that grace builds upon nature. He meant that what God does with us by means of his grace is a ready continuation of how he already relates to us by way of our human nature.

The practical consequence of this truth for a life of prayer is this: Don't expect grace to do what nature should be doing. How does one become excellent at prayer? The same way children learn to play the piano, or Olympic divers learn to dive, or superb figure skaters learn to skate. Practice, practice, and then more practice! Becoming good at anything is always one measure of talent and two measures of hard work. For our purposes, we can call talent the grace and hard work the discipline. You will never become a praying person without the latter.

Many people never become good at prayer, despite their natural (or supernatural) inclination to be praying persons, simply because they do not give time to prayer. Remember Aquinas: grace builds upon nature. Remember that fundamental law of nature: practice makes perfect.

If there is one ingredient the average person trying to pray lacks, it's perseverance. Pick up any book on exercise, and I promise you will read something like the following: Do a little each day. It's not the amount on any given day, it's the fact that you do something each day until the routine has become a firm habit. Even 10 minutes a day, every day, will begin to produce an effect.

Most people pray the way they exercise. Heavy enough on weekends to be stiff on Monday morning, but too many days without in between. Being faithful to prayer has a lot to do with being faithful to a stopwatch. Even the great Spanish mystic, Saint Teresa of Avila, confessed to using a clock as an aid to prayer.

Suggestions: Decide how much time you want to give to prayer each day, and then do it. Don't overdo it. You only need a little more than you are currently setting aside. Better to up the amount two months from now than to reduce it, or worse, be haphazard in frequency. The point is to be regular. It's not the amount of time. It's the frequency that counts.

At this point, don't evaluate the quality of your prayer time. In the beginning-and strangely enough, at the end-it's not the quality that counts, it's the quantity. Don't worry about distractions. Since grace builds upon nature, it will sometimes wobble because we are tired, ill, distracted, nervous, or angry. Accept your human condition and persevere. Grace builds upon nature, but nature is not its master.

How many ways are there to pray? Probably as many ways as souls. Still, the Christian tradition has identified several categories of prayer. One is called vocal prayer, and all of us have used it. By vocal prayer, I mean the use of words in prayer that come to us from another. Prayers like the Our Father, the Hail Mary, or an Act of Contrition. These can be used in two ways, either silently for the self, or aloud.

Vocal prayer can be considered a first level of prayer, although by calling it that I mean no disparagement. Here first means foundational, one of the building blocks that the edifice always will need in order to stand. There are times in life when only vocal prayers seem to work, when our mind simply can't summon up anything else. For example, people often pray the Rosary immediately after a terrible shock. But a full life of prayer involves more than recitation.

A second layer of prayer could be called discursive. Here we again use words to pray, but this time they are our own. We simply speak to God in sentences similar to those we use when communicating with others. Again, this form of prayer can be either interior or aloud. If you are doing the latter, however, you should be careful where you do it, unless you have been invited to pray aloud. (Usually when someone is found speaking to herself, others aren't so kind as to presume that God is the interlocutor!)

Rule #3:
Learn to meditate.
Saint Francis de Sales taught that no one can progress in the spiritual life without learning to meditate. Every new seminarian or religious novice is introduced to the practice of meditation, which is sometimes called "mental prayer." At least I hope they are. Meditation in its essentials has nothing to do with exotic postures, mantras, or incense sticks that smell like burnt frankfurters. De Sales taught that meditation is simply placing thoughts before your mind in order to move the heart to God. It's a simple definition, but there is quite a lot within it. Notice the second half of the definition, which contains the goal of meditation. Its purpose is to move the heart to God. Meditation is supposed to act upon our emotions. We imagine the scenes we do, or think the thoughts we think, with the purpose of lifting our emotions to God.

Suggestions: "Placing thoughts before your mind" means that meditation is essentially an imaginative exercise. You are simply trying to think the "things of God." Anything that makes you think of God is fit material for meditation. One can meditate by gazing at a holy card or a crucifix. One can meditate by reading from sacred scripture or the life of a saint. We look upon a sunset and feel gratitude. We consider the way we spent last night and feel sorrow. We can examine, hour by hour, the events of the day with the goal of seeing God at work.

Does meditation always work? Usually, but not always. That's why vocal and discursive prayer are still foundational. But never forget that you were made to pray-and that means being made by God to meditate. Even young saints discovered meditation without the aid of a teacher. Here is a passage from Saint Therese of Lisieux in which she describes a primary-school encounter:

One day, one of my teachers at the Abbey asked me what I did on my free afternoons when I was alone. told her I went behind my bed in an empty space...and that it was easy to close myself in with my bed-curtain and that "I thought." "But what do you think about?" she asked. "I think about God, about life, about ETERNITY... I think!" The good religious laughed heartily at me, and later she loved reminding me of the time when I thought, asking me if I was still thinking. understand now that I was making mental prayer without knowing it and that God was already instructing me in secret.

Rule # 4:
Get a book.
If progress in the spiritual life means learning to meditate, and meditation is the placing of thoughts before the mind in order to raise the heart to God, then most of us are going to need a little help with those "Godly thoughts." Philosophers may argue endlessly about whether or not our minds are blank tablets, but no one disputes the fact that they need to be fed.

And whether or not we are conscious of it, they are being fed every day by radio, television, newspapers, magazines, etc. As a society, we are intellectual junk-food junkies. I defy anyone to watch 24 hours of Ricki Lake and her cohorts and still be able to offer any prayer beyond, perhaps, "Saints preserve us."

If we want to raise our minds to God, they are probably going to need a little help. That's where books come in. Remember that we are not the first souls to seek the face of God. We live in a communion of saints. Saints are our older brothers and sisters in the faith, and one of our most visible ties to them are the writings they have left behind. Learn from your older brothers and sisters. Let them inspire you. They in-spire by sharing their spirit with us.

Teresa of Avila confessed that for 14 years she never went to the chapel to pray without a book. Here's the passage from her autobiography:

Reading is very helpful for recollection and serves as a necessary substituteeven though little may be read-for anyone who is unable to practice mental prayer....In all those years, except for the time after Communion, I never dared to begin prayer without a book....[Dryness] was always felt when I was without a book. Then my soul was thrown into confusion and my thoughts ran wild. With a book I began to collect them, and my soul was drawn to recollection. And many times just opening the book was enough; at other times I read a little, and at other times a great deal, according to the favor the Lord granted me.

Suggestions: The book can be any book that inspires. Obviously, the Sacred Scriptures have a priority here Sometimes, however, their very familiarity can be a hindrance rather than a help. Try reading them in a foreign lan guage or listening to them on tape. Take up one of the saints. Read about them, or read their writings. In their own ways, each saint has translated the gospel into the story of his or her life.

In reading at prayer, the goal is never the amount read. One reads until a thought moves the heart to God, and then one lingers. When distractions return, one takes up the book again. Some days the book will hardly be necessary Other days it will seem essential. Remember that God wants to give him self to us, and if that means showing up in a Judith Krantz novel, so be it.

Rule #5:
If it works, do it!
I was only in high school when a spiritual director taught me this fundamental rule of the spiritual life. I had just had a wonderful experience in prayer and wanted to share it. If I had to guess, it probably had something to do with candles, a beanbag chair, and a record album like Jonathon Livingston Seagull or John Denver's "Sunshine on my Shoulders." (It was the '70s, after all.) The question I remember asking my spiritual director was this: Is it OK to listen to a record while trying to pray? Do I need to be on my knees? What about just staring out the window? Is it possible to pray the Rosary while listening to a song from Bread?

"If it works, do it," he said. "Don't argue or struggle with the Holy Spirit."

The advice is as sound today as the first day I heard it. It's based upon a profound insight into the human person. The Holy Spirit intends to use every aspect of that which makes us human in order to communicate himself to us. Memories, understanding, intellect, will, sensations, emotions: there is no part of the human person that is foreign ground to the Holy Spirit. It is all God's creation, and its greatest purpose and meaning is expressed in communion with God. This means that God can-and will-seek communion with us in every area of human life. Nothing is foreign to him. In fact, a lot of frustration in the spiritual life is due to resisting the pull of the Holy Spirit, often simply because the Spirit is claiming an area of human life that we didn't anticipate.

Suggestions: "I simply pray better when I kneel." Then get on your knees. "I find that I pray better in the early morning." Then get yourself up. "Strange, but I actually feel close to God when I drive home from work in the evening." Then give yourself as completely as possible to the God of the homeward-bound drive.

Abraham has an experience of God and builds an altar (Genesis 12:7-8). Jacob sees a ladder of angels and erects a pillar to God on the spot (Genesis 28:10-22). The Old Testament is full of references to places being esteemed as holy because a revelation of God's love occurred there. One erects an altar because he or she plans to return, because one hopes to recreate the original experience. If it works, do it!

Rule #6:
Make your prayer fruitful through moral living.
In his classic program of retreat meditations known as the Spiritual Exercises, Saint Ignatius of Loyola responds to the question of dryness and unfruitfulness in prayer with a question of his own. Has the soul remained faithful to God's law? Or has the soul grown tepid in her love for God's will as expressed in the scriptures, the commandments, and the teachings of the church? Before we ask why God doesn't seem to be present in prayer, we must ask about our own response to the will of God.

If I were to characterize Rule #6, I would say this. It separates every form of authentic Christian spirituality from all its New Age competitors. This is because the entire orthodox, JudeoChristian understanding of religion is linked inextricably to morality. The God we seek in prayer is the God who created us and the universe around us. Unlike human beings, there is no distinction in God between who-God-is and what-God-wants. The two are one. God is what God wants. God's being and his will are one. To live in communion with God is to do the will of God.

Traditional Catholic moral theology frequently speaks of natural law. Essentially the phrase means that there's a fundamental order or pattern to the universe put there by God in the very act of creation. Human reason can come to see God's purposes by studying the reality of our world. When we see the pattern, the order of the universe, our response must be to live in accordance with it.

Reflect, for example, on the absolute impossibility of living together in families and communities if people never told the truth to one another. Every lie strikes out against the social nature of what it means to be human. Human reason alone can see that to be truthful is part of the "natural law." We of course have a commandment not to bear false witness. Here the revelation of salvation history confirms an order of revelation already contained in creation. To be truthful is to open ourselves to communion; to tell a lie is to close off its very possibility.

The spiritual life and the moral life are one. Both seek the God who created us. The New Age spirituality I reject isn't seeking a God beyond the self, it is simply seeking a new and pleasant experience for the self. It remains trapped within the self, and never raises the question of morality.

Because God is "other," we can come to love him in a way that is fruitful. To love the self is only the first moment of human existence. If human existence remains there, it putrefies. To go out of the self in love of another is to find both the self and the other. This is why prayer in our tradition is always more of an encounter than a technique.

Suggestions: If your prayer isn't fruitful, could it be because it has remained on the level of self-expression, rather than rising to a genuine encounter with the God of the Bible who created us? Make your prayer life fruitful through moral living, and find strength for moral living through prayer.

Rule # 7:
Don't judge prayer by feelings.
As tempting and perhaps even as natural as it may be to do, one should not judge the quality of one's prayer by the feelings that it does-or doesn't-produce.

Remember that the single goal of all prayer should be union with God. Period. Union with God in prayer may or may not produce a pleasant emotional sensation. When we pray, we are seeking the God who lies behind and beyond all feelings, all emotional states. If we make the positive feelings that prayer often produces the object of our pursuit in prayer, then we have made something less than God our goal.

It is absolutely essential to make a distinction between union with God and emotional states. First, God can produce positive as well as negative feelings when we pray. Either may accomplish God's aim of drawing us to him in an intimate union based upon obedience to his will. A mother praying for strength to be patient with her difficult child may experience great peace in prayer. This feeling of peace is a positive emotion and, in this case, one sent by God. But consider the husband who is involved in an adulterous affair and finds that he feels miserable when trying to pray. His thoughts seemed robbed of peace. This is a very negative emotional state, but when one considers that it exists to call him back to God, it is easy to see that heaven itself sometimes allows negative emotional experiences. God is as surely present in this second act of prayer as the first. One soul found consolation in prayer; she needed that strength. Another found desolation; it was meant to call a lost soul home.

Another caution about feelings: as Saint Ignatius of Loyola long ago noted, the Evil One doesn't go off-line simply because we are praying. The devil himself can raise doubts, insecurities, and temptations during prayer when one would expect to find positive feelings. In the same way, he knows that nothing produces spiritual arrogance as fast as "good feelings" at prayer. The Evil One often consoles the sinner, telling her that her sin is light, something to be expected, something hardly worth rejecting. He bolsters those who pride themselves upon spiritual delights, those who drive wedges into the very hearts of parish communities, those who naively presume that all their actions are justified, that their vision of church is self-evident because they have felt the Holy Spirit.

Suggestions: So how does one judge? The first disciples of Jesus must have asked a question very close to our own. That's why they cherished and recorded the words our Lord gave them in response, found in the Gospel of Saint Luke, 6:43-45:

No good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit; for each tree is known by its own fruit. Figs are not gathered from thorns, nor are grapes picked out from a bramble bush.

The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good, and the evil person out of evil treasure produces evil; for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks.

There is only one criterion for the evaluation of prayer: its effect, positive or negative, in our lives.

Rule #8:
Don't plot your prayer's progress.
Nothing is as inherent to modern sensibility as progress. We expect our medicine, our technology, and our standard of living to improve and progress each year. So perhaps it is only natural that, when we resolve to give ourselves over to a life of prayer, we carry with us a latent expectation of progress. We want to know that we are moving ahead, but, unlike acts of self-improvement, prayer doesn't seem to offer a tape measure method of evaluation. Evaluating your prayer life is a bit like watching a plant grow. You can do it if you want, but it's not going to be all that satisfying.

Plants grow all around us every day, but even if you stare at one, resolving to watch it grow, you will be unable to observe what, in fact, you are observing. The plant will grow before your eyes, but your eyes will be unequal to the challenge of observation. Prayer is like that. Day after day that we give ourselves over to it, changes will occur, but at a pace that seems to defy enumeration and calculation.

To be absolutely clear, the evaluation of a prayer experience never lies within the experience itself. It lies in the life that comes forth from that prayer. This truth applies to a hastily uttered Our Father or to the most exalted vision experiences.

Suggestions: Prayer does bring growth and change, but it does so according to the measure and meter of God. Overnight success is often overnight delusion. If you really want to measure your progress in prayer, make a moral inventory of your life and compare it to one made six months, or a year, earlier. Just as one can see the growth of plants over time, so too the work of the Spirit becomes evident from a distance.

On any given day of our lives there are so many factors that combine to create an experience in prayer: work, relationships, health, rest or its deprivation, distractions, and contentment. No one but God can sort these factors out. Don't use them to evaluate prayer. Evaluate the life that prayer produces, and judge that life over time.

Rule #9:
Prayer is more the work of Christ and church than of you. We tend to approach prayer as individuals. It's something we do as-and when-it feels right to us. But prayer is more than our own solitary search for God.

I once visited a former drug addict dying from AIDS. At the end of his life, in a hospice, he was finally surrounded by loving and caring men and women. They bathed and fed him; they met all his needs. They were there for him in a way no family ever had been. He told me that he wanted desperately to do something to return their love. He wanted to help clean, to care for others, but now he was bedfast. I suggested that he pray for those around him.

"But you don't believe that God would listen to the prayers of a man like me, someone who has lived on the streets his whole life?"
"Are you baptized?"
"Yes."
"Then the Father cannot tell your voice from the Son. When you pray, he will hear only the voice of Jesus. To be baptized is to pray with Jesus. We take up his voice, and he takes ours. When the Father looks upon him, he sees us. When he sees us, he recognizes the Son."

The man agreed to begin praying in earnest, since he now believed his prayers would have some effect. That is how he spent his last week of life.

Early Christians were convinced that baptism inserted them into the very person and life of Christ. To be a Christian was to be another Christ. Pagan temples had no place within them for the assembly of a crowd. Crowds did not belong within the precinct of the sacred, only priests did. Nothing could be farther from the spirit of early Christianity, which viewed the liturgical assembly as the truest prayer. Everything else was derived, secondary, and supplemental. The Book of Acts goes to some effort to depict the apostles maintaining the Jewish hours of communal prayer. The book is full of great individuals, but the true actor of the drama is the Holy Spirit at work in the nascent community.

Even today, Christian churches-in whatever architectural form they assume-are always halls of assembly. Christians believe themselves to be a plebs sancta, a holy people, a nation of priests.

Suggestions: Christ has promised to be present when the church gathers for prayer. No other prayer carries this pledge. And so learn from the liturgy. It is the source of all authentic Christian prayer. A course in spirituality could be taught from its form alone. The liturgy has so much to teach us about prayer: Prayer involves coming together. It means hearing the Word of God and responding to it. It involves the body in gesture, posture, and movement. Prayer is about being addressed by another who is not we. (A basis for the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.) Prayer is about being "ministered to" and then ministering. Prayer makes the flesh and blood of Jesus our own flesh and blood.

Learn from the liturgy. It is Christ and us-within Christ, standing in dialogue with the Father, through the power of the Holy Spirit. This is why liturgical prayer is the "most true prayer." Whenever the Christ you know wanders from the Christ revealed in the assembly of the saints, then your Christ needs to be driven out with prayer and fasting.

Rule #10:
Sometimes, just sit.
An old man goes every afternoon to church; he sits in a back pew. Over the years people notice him. Perhaps he is a saint. They do not know him, but how else does he pass so many hours in contented prayer? One day someone finally asks him, "Just what do you do when you pray?"

At first the question seems inexplicable to him. It is as though the words themselves somehow don't fit together. He repeats the question to himself. "What do I do when I pray? Well, sometimes I come here and I sits and I talks with Jesus. Sometimes we just sits. Most of the time, we just sits."

There is only one place we are trying to reach in prayer. We want to be in the presence of God and know that we are in the presence of God. We want to be filled with gratitude because we are, at this moment, with God. He looks at us; we look at him. What have words to do with this?

In the Christian tradition of prayer this place is called contemplation. It is a place where words and activity cease. The place is not easily reached, but it has its parallels in human life. A mother leans against a park bench and follows her child at play. She is a child again, because all the desires of her heart are before her, playing with that child. An old man and old woman eat in silence, not because there is nothing to say, but because nothing needs to be said.

We hold the weakened hand of a loved one. It is filled with tubes, pressed down against a starched hospital bed. There is nothing to be said, hopefully, because the time for words is almost past. This is a moment just to be together.

Suggestions: Human beings know what it means to contemplate, even if we live most of our waking moments far from contemplation. Transfer that way of being to prayer, and you understand the heart of the Christian tradition of prayer. Contemplation is a lover's gaze, a simple act of being with the Other.

Coming from prayer, Therese of Lisieux once penned the following: Jesus, O Jesus, if the desire of loving You is so delightful, what will it be to possess and enjoy this love? How can a soul as imperfect as mine aspire to the possession of the plenitude of Love? O Jesus, my first and only Friend. You whom I love uniquely, explain this mystery to me! Why do you not reserve these great aspirations for great souls, for the Eagles that soar in the heights?

I do not know the answer he gave her. The simple truth is that God does not reserve the aspiration to pray-the desire simply to be with God-to great souls, to the eagles that soar. The longing to be with God is planted deep within every human heart. We want to arrive at that holy place of rest, that moment when striving ceases. We want to join the beloved in a rapturous gaze, one that does not grow old because it does not stand within time. We want desperately, sometimes, just to sit-because even a single moment spent thus sustains all the heavy hours that follow.

By Father Terrance Wayne Klein, a priest of the Diocese of Columbus and former seminary director of spiritual formation. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.-volver índice-

Elizabeth Rhodes. Loyola's Acts: The Rhetoric of the Self. -volver índice-
Hispanic Review, Philadelphia, Spring 2001
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Volume: 69, Issue: 2, Pagination: 247-248, ISSN: 00182176

Subject Terms: Nonfiction // Autobiographies // Literary criticism // Saints

Personal Names: Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) // Boyle, Marjorie O Rourke

Abstract:
"Loyola's Acts: The Rhetoric of the Self" by Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle is reviewed.
Copyright University of Pennsylvania, Romance Languages Department Spring 2001

Full Text:
Loyola's Acts. The Rhetoric of the Set: By Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. 274 pages.

The so-called autobiography of Ignatius of Loyola is a textual scholar's nightmare: it covers but 17 years (1521-1538) of the saint's 65-year life, and was dictated by its subject. Its Portuguese scribe reconstructed it from a temporal and geographic distance, rendering some of it in Spanish to a Spanish scribe, then dictating the rest to an Italian scribe. As Boyle indicates, it is five times removed from Ignatius's lips, and not even a manuscript of the complete Spanish/Italian version exists.

A highly unstable narrative, Loyola's Acta attract speculative interpretations, which have historically tended toward literal readings. Boyle proposes that as epideictic, its primary purpose was to praise God, not represent Ignatius in a historical fashion, and reading it was intended to produce a moral impression, which the author elucidates by typecasting Loyola as he moves through it. Emphasizing the Acta's first episodes, she selects its textual models from a very wide gamut of texts ranging from classical and Biblical works to sixteenth century literature.

"The Knight Errant" is young, chivalric Ignatius, whose early follies and vanities are meant to instruct by via negativa. Here as throughout the book, Boyle adduces evidence from far-ranging texts (to cite a few, Plautus, Homer, and d'Etaples) to set forth her thesis that the young hero's stand against the French in Pamplona constitutes a prideful act rather than a valiant one. She immediately identifies the principle sin with which she believes Ignatius grapples throughout the Acta as vainglory. Leaving nothing to literal reading, she finds, for example, that the limp which resulted from surgery to Loyola's wounded leg symbolizes "the imbalance of intellect and will" of humanity, and the fallen Adam himself (44).

"The Ascetic" treats the saint's travels to Montserrat and Manresa, pausing at length over Loyola's reported dispute with a Moor about the Immaculate Conception, after which he fails to defend his "Lady's" honor, and winds up letting his mule decide between the path to revenge against the Moor (who represents the heretic) or to Montserrat, an episode laden with chivalric fantasy; Boyle prefers to relate the incident to Hercules at the crossroads rather than Amadis at the same, and this tendency to read the Acta in light of remote literary sources rather than more period-specific models is characteristic of her interpretation. In the descriptions of Ignatius' clothing and acts of penance and charity which follow, she finds further evidence of the young man's failure to vanquish his pride, evidenced in his fixation on exterior acts.

"The Flying Serpent" analyzes Ignatius's reported vision of a many-eyed, winged snake, which he recognizes as the devil and brushes away. Boyle relates this two-sentence passage to Ezekiel's vision, to angels, to the devil as animal, and finally to a peacock, which, although often invoked during the period as a positive emblem of resurrection, here represents vanity, an association Boyle supports with an encyclopedic report on references to peacocks in literature. The chapter continues, relating Ignatius's eye-opening meditations by a river to a struggle with narcissism, related to the hero's rejection of the peacock.

The final chapter, "The Pilgrim," likewise extracts single events from the narrative and explores their generic symbolism. For example, during his trip to Jerusalem, Ignatius's falling from a bridge signifies a confession of sin (163). Throughout the remainder of the Acta, which represent the saint until the time he formed his Company, Ignatius is seen in an on-going struggle with appearances and vanity. The story thereby provides the reader with "a spectacle of vainglory" (182) whose conflicts are resolved outside the text, in Papal approbation of the Jesuits and the saint's later deeds.

This book will delight those who enjoy bold interpretative acts, since Boyle regularly travels far from the primary text and seeks to ally the Acta with long-standing literary topoi rather than more immediate textual precedents, a move sanctioned by the text's internal ambiguities. Her book contains a wealth of information, not all of which pertains to the business at hand, such as a three-page excursion into the topic of false women visionaries, followed by the conclusion that the visionary in the Acta is not such a type (95-97), or the songs cited about "going to the river" meaning a sexual tryst, in Chapter 3, clearly not what the famous conversion scene is about. Boyle's vibrant fanning out of Ignatius's Acta brings to mind the beautiful peacock's tail, a stunning map of textual colors on display.

Boston College ELIZABETH RHODES Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.-volver índice-

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