Spirituality 
17-24
 

Henri Nouwen, one of my favorite spiritual writers in his book Reaching Out talked about three movements in the spiritual life of a person. I have used these three movements in my own life as a way of examening my spiritual growth.

1. The First Movement: From Loneliness to Solitude

In the movement from Loneliness to Solitude one moves from self-hate to self-acceptance. We begin to understand that we are not perfect but that does not matter because God loves us. We begin to tolerate our imperfections not in a way that leads us into giving up on self-improvement but rather in away that does not allow discouragement to lead into giving up all together.

2. The Second Movement: From Hostility to Hospitality

In the second movement we are challenged to see how we treat others. Do we see them as a threat or as competition or do we see them as a brother or sister in Christ. The more Christian we become the more we see others not as threats but rather as guests. How do you treat the people in your life? When we treat people badly is it not most of the time because of our own insecurities?

3. The Third Movement: From Illusion to Prayer

In the third movement we learn to give up our illusions of control and immortality and begin to trust God more and more. We begin to give up any notion that we can control or manipulate God and begin to trust in His loving kindness.
 

Nouwen, Henri, J.  Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life (New York: Image Books Doubleday, 1975)

Prayer For Light
Begin by relaxing into God’s Presence. 
Ask for the Light to know myself as the Holy Spirit knows me.

Thanksgiving
Center on the concrete, uniquely personal gift.
I’ve been blessed with, whether obviously important or apparently insignificant with the deep realization that ALL IS GIFT

Practical Survey of Action
Look over the experiences of the day and the events that provoked these experiences: joy, pain, love, anger, anxiety, peace, etc.
 
Choose an experience that seems to be the most significant or dominant.
1. When or where has God especially touched my life?
2. When have I not allowed God in my life?
3. In what area of my heart is God especially calling for conversion?

Sorrow and Contrition
For not responding to what the Lord asks of me.  This sorrow is hopeful, an awe-ful recognition of my inability to respond whole-heartedly to the Lord but, at the same time trusting in His faithful and personal love for me.

Responding in Practical Hope
To respond to what the Lord wants of me in the future.  With a faith-filled vision and a discerning mind and heart, I stand before the Lord with a desire to see Him in all things.  My hope for the immediate future will be expressed uniquely and in petition each time I pray the Examen.

The "Our Father" is not only a great prayer in itself but it is also a great formula for prayer. Try composing your own prayer to God by following the steps in the Our Father.

Step 1
Our Father: Acknowledge God not only as your creator but also your Father through Baptism.

Step 2:
 Who art in heaven - Say a few words of praise of God. What are some of things that you think are awesome about Him?

Step 3:
Hallowed be thy name - Tell God how you wish to believe/trust/love him more.

Step 4:
Thy kingdom come & thy will be done - Acknowledge that you and God are on the same side and that God knows what is best for you.

Step 5:
Give us our daily bread - Ask God for something that you deeply desire and not something you simply want.

Step 6:
Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us - ask God for help in forgiving someone who has hurt you and ask for forgiveness for things that you may have done to hurt God and others.

Step 7.
Lead us not into temptation - ask the Father to help you stay away from the near occasion of sin.

Tips for praying: 
1.  Find a quite place and time.  Prayer can be done anywhere but it is good to have a place that is conducive to relaxing and focusing our attention on God.  Finding a regular time to pray each day can also be helpful to making prayer an important daily routine.
 
2.  Calm yourself and put away distractions.  It is important to be relaxed when we pray by finding a comfortable posture. 
 
3.  Use formal prayers or speak what you feel to God, or a combination of each.  It is important to note that there is no “right” way to pray.  Experiment with styles and forms of prayer.  Prayer is an ongoing, developing relationship with God.
 
4.  Take time to listen.  God does speak to us in prayer but we need to listen with our hearts.  Be open to what God is telling you rather than just on what you want to or expect to hear.
 
5.  Use the Bible in your prayer
 
6.  Keep a journal of prayer
 
7.  Have a proper attitude.  Prayer requires openness to God and a desire to worship and get to know God better.
 
8.  Take time to read books about prayer.
 
9.  Share your prayer experience with another person or persons.
 
10.  Be consistent – Be Consistent –Be Consistent

I have been thinking a lot of the idea of how easy it is to be a Palm Sunday Catholic but how truly difficult it is to be an Easter Catholic because in order to celebrate Easter one must first go through Good Friday. Let me explain a little more. What I mean is that it is easy to proclaim Christ to be our Lord and Savior when everyone else is, but it is much more difficult to proclaim Christ to be our Lord and Savior when everyone thinks that He is dead and a joke. How then can we become like Peter, Mary Magdalene, and the other Apostles and truly come to know the Resurrection through their experiences of sorrow, joy and their personal relationship with Jesus. One method that people have used to grow closer to God is called the Twelve Step Method and was developed by Alcoholic Anonymous. For the month of April, therefore I wish to reflect on these Twelve Steps.

Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over the effects of our separation from God—that our lives had become unmanageable.
Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham in their book: The Spirituality of Imperfection: Story Telling and the Search For Meaning, describe a sort of spiritual history of Alcoholics Anonymous and the insights that they are believe are gained from someone practicing the Twelve Step. One of their first statements is the following: “The spirituality of imperfection begins with the recognition that trying to be perfect is the most tragic human mistake.” I think St. Augustine said it in the following way: “My heart is restless until it finds its rest in Thee.” I think that combining the two I would say the following: “Spirituality begins with the recognition of a God size hole in our heart that only God can fill and that we find true freedom only when we stop trying to fill it.” To continue with another quote from Kurtz and Ketcham: “According to the way of life that flows from this insight, it is only by ceasing to play God, by coming to terms with errors and shortcomings, and by accepting the inability to control every aspect of their lives that alcoholics (or any human beings) can find the peace and serenity that alcohol (or other drugs, or sex, money material possessions, power or privilege) promise but never deliver). The first step therefore in the 12 Step Method is to simply admit that we are not God

Step 2: Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
The key to this second step for me is the words “a power greater than ourselves”. Whatever this power is that can restore us to sanity it must first of all be greater than ourselves and unfortunately so often we look for things equal or less than ourselves to make us better: sexual pleasure, alcohol, drugs, etc. There is no way that they can heal us. Once again to quote Kurtz and Ketcham: “The search for spirituality is, first of all, a search for reality, for honesty, for true speaking and true thinking.” If we are honest with ourselves we realize that only a higher power can save us. Lucky for us we know that such a higher person exists. One of the main tenants of Catholic Theology is that human beings did not climb to the heavens on their own power like Prometheus but rather God condescended (became lowly) in order to life us up.

Step 3: Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
The key to the third step is that we are not helpless victims. We are rather people with free will. Kurtz and Ketcham put it this way: A spirituality of imperfection suggests that spirituality’s first step involves facing squarely, seeing one’s self as one is: mixed-up, paradoxical, incomplete, and imperfect. Flawdness is the first fact about human beings. And paradoxically, in the imperfection foundation we find not despair but joy. For it is only within the reality of our imperfection that we can find the peace and serenity we crave.” And they go on: “A spirituality of imperfection suggests that the first prayer is a scream, a cry for help. “O God, come to my assistance / O Lord, make haste to help me,” reads Psalm 70, sung for over a millennium and a half at the beginning of each monastic hour.” Sometimes the hardest thing to do in life is to ask for help from another because we must first give up our illusion of self-sufficiency. How many times did the Pharisees, Scribes, and Herodians miss their opportunity to really get to know Jesus in the Scripture because of their pride? Tax Collectors, Prostitutes, and Roman Soldiers though who came to Jesus and humbly asked for healing for themselves or others always received what they asked for from Jesus. I hope that we look at our lives that we have the courage to cry out to God for help.

Step 4: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
I love the word “fearless” in the fourth step. It does take courage to look at oneself and to name all our faults. It is only though by doing so that we can begin to with God’s grace fix everything that is wrong. If we brought a car into a mechanic we would hope that he would first look at the entire car to see what is wrong rather than just having him look at the parts of the car that we know are working well.

I have come to believe that all problems in the world come down to the simple fact that we all want to be loved. This is after all how God made us. We are afraid however that God did not make us loveable. We can come to believe that no one will ever love us if they know the real us and therefore we put on masks, manipulate, etc in order to earn love. The sad truth though is that love that is earned is not love at all for love must be freely given.

It is however only by facing our fear of being unloved in an honest way that we can discover the truth of the Gospel and that is that our God does love us even despite our sinfulness. St. Paul put it this way in Romans 5: “For Christ, while we were still helpless, yet died at the appointed time for the ungodly. Indeed, only with difficulty does one die for a just person, though perhaps for a good person one might even find courage to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.”

There is a great freedom and joy that comes when we discover that our God loves us even though we are sinners. We no longer have to put on masks or manipulate people. We can simply be ourselves.

Step 5: Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
I can remember when I was a teenager; a few of my peers convinced me to do something that I knew was wrong in order to be cool. After committing the act, I felt really guilty and wanted to tell someone about it and so I went to the one person that I knew would always forgive me - my mother. While my mother was disappointed in me for committing the act she was more proud of me to have the courage to come talk to her about it. There was a great joy in being able to tell her and to receive her forgiveness. Now that I am older and understand the Sacrament of Reconciliation better, I get that same feeling each time I go to confession.

I do think though that when confessing our sins to another human being (outside of the confessional) that this needs to be done in the proper environment. There is a big difference telling a support group and a sponsor verses telling a random stranger or a group of people who would rather make fun of you than support you.

There is also a great feeling of freedom when we admit “the exact nature of our wrongs.” It prevents us from only half doing the job.

Step 6: Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
Many of our sins in life give us some form of physical pleasure and others sometimes “dull” us to the pain we are feeling and therefore there are certain sins that we may not wish to give up. Jesus and the Twelve Steps remind us that we cannot do this half way: “If your hand or foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter into life maimed or crippled than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter into life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into fiery Gehenna.”

Many of our habitual sins would stop if we would do small adjustments to our lives for example moving the computer into a public space or adding accountability software. Avoiding alcohol, drugs or going to a counselor to talk about our “issues” could also be small things that make a big difference in our lives. God is there waiting to help us with his grace.

Step 7: Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings
As we begin to acknowledge our need for God we must avoid a serious temptation according to Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham in their book: The Spirituality of Imperfection: Story Telling and the Search For Meaning is “In our quest for spirituality, a chief danger is the temptation to change the rules. We attempt to escape our imperfections by redefining or lowering the standards necessary for “perfection” or by blaming our flaws and errors on someone else. The tradition of spirituality of imperfection reveals such attempts for what they are—unnecessary. True healing follows the example of the early Christian church, which, rather than redefining the rules to allow anyone to declare himself perfect, sought to provide “a vision of life in which imperfection could be endured.”

I also like the word “humbly” in this rule. So many times in the Gospels people come to Jesus demanding that He show them a sign and He refuses but when someone comes to Jesus humbly, He always answers their request. For me this points out a key difference between miracles and magic. Magic attempts to control the divine through doing the right actions and saying the right words. Miracle is all about allowing and recognizing God at work in our lives. I love the following two quotes from Kurtz and Ketcham: “ Miracle involves openness to mystery, the welcoming of surprise, the acceptance of those realities over which we have no control, to manage everything—it is the claim to be, or to have a special relationship with, some kind of “god.” Spirituality is aligned not with magic and effort to control, but with miracle, “the wonder of the unique that points us back to the wonder of the everyday.” And “We do not create miracles, we witness them. In witnessing them, we must acknowledge that they exist. In acknowledging that they exist, we must admit that we do not know “why” or “how.” Somehow above and beyond human reason, miracle, like mystery, is inexplicable, unsolvable, incomprehensible.”

Step 8: Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
Making a list of all people that we have harmed can be quite a tricky situation because it often means that we have to list people who have in some way have hurt us. As we begin to focus on our own flaws and imperfections we begin to see that most of the time when we have hurt others we have acted out of fear and weakness and not out of true malice. In much the same way Kurtz and Ketcham points out “When we accept ourselves in all our weakness, flaws, and failings, we can begin to fulfill an even more challenging responsibility: accepting the weakness, limitations, and mixed-up-ed-ness of those we love and respect. Then and only then, it seems, do we become able to accept the weakness, defects, and shortcomings of those we find it difficult to love.” I wonder how many relationships especially marriages would be saved if people examined their own lives and emotions in the spirit of the Twelve Steps.

Kurtz and Ketchem also point out: “Resentment is the poison of the spiritual life. The word means, literally, “feeling again,” in the sense of “feeling backward”; the emphasis is on a clinging to a past, a harping on it that becomes mired in it. Resentment goes over and over an old injury: revisiting the hurt, the powerlessness, the rage, the fear, the feeling of being wronged. Scraping the scab off the wound, resentment relishes anew its pain; it is the particular kind of memory that reinforces the vision of self-as victim. The vision is the antithesis of spirituality, for spirituality begins with the recognition of our own imperfections. Focusing on the past faults and failings of others blinds us to the reality of our own present defects and shortcomings.” Step 8 therefore challenges us to put down the bottle of poison and to focus on forgiving ourselves and others.

Step 9: Made direct amends to such people wherever possible except when to do so would injure them or others.
Making amends for one’s mistakes helps to relieve guilt for handling a situation badly and allows us to change the world for the better. Violence breathes more violence. The only way to stop violence is to not return violence for violence but rather to offer forgiveness.

I think that it is important to point out that the focus is moving away from our selfishness that got us into the situation that we are in and moving toward a caring for others and that is why if making amends would injure others, we refrain. It would be better therefore to make a donation to a charity or do some other sort of service than to reinjure the person whom we have hurt.

Step 10: Continued to take personal inventor and, when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.Alcoholics that I have met tell me that each day it becomes harder to remain sober because a temptation arises to think that they are now stronger and that they no longer need the Twelve Steps or their support system. It is a constant battle for them to remain humble and to make the Twelve Steps away of life for them. This corresponds perfectly with my struggle with the habitual sins of my life. Kurtz and Ketchem put it this way in their book: Spirituality is a reality that must touch all of one’s life or it touches none of one’s life. Spirituality is pervasive for the same reason that spirituality cannot be analyzed: the spiritual has no parts. And because the spiritual has no parts, it cannot touch only part of us. Spirituality’s pervasiveness, then, has two dimensions: “The spiritual” not only touches all of our surface—it penetrates to all our depths. We must live it, think it, feel it, and most important, act it in our own lives, for only if we do it, only if we practice it, will we come to understand what it is.” A little later they put it much simpler: “Spirituality is not a pet project that we can take up for a month or two; it is never “hobby.”

This can be hard though because there are so many distractions out there. So many things that are begging for our attention and we rarely speak of our fears or the eternal values that we wish to have and to guide our lives.

The Christian Philosopher Kierkegaard put it this way: “Life must be lived forwards, but it can be understood only backwards.” It is therefore important that we take time to grow to Examen our lives each and every day.

Step 11: Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
As we realize that our God loves us the more we are able to overcome our primordial fear of being unloved and the more we realize that we are loved (and loved beyond measure) the more we can therefore accept our failings.

We cannot but help to live a life of gratitude. Kurtz and Ketcham describe “gratitude” as following: “Gratitude can best be defined and understood as the only possible response to a gift, to something recognized as utterly, freely given. Gratitude is the vision—the way of seeing—that recognizes “gift”.”

Instead of focusing on the negatives in our lives we become more aware of the positives in our lives. Mother Teresa had a tradition of not only naming five ways in which she had sinned each day but she would also name five things that she was particularly grateful for. How often do you think of your blessings?

Step 12: Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
The final step points out an amazing truth and that is the more that we learn to accept and love ourselves the more we want to help others. Fr. Robert Barron put it as moving from the pusilla anima (small self-centered soul) to the magna anima (the large selfless-soul). Fr. Henri Nouwen put it saying that people who have learned to accept themselves can then move to the second of his three spiritual movements and can now focus on a movement from hostility to hospitality (the acceptance of others in their own life). Another way of putting it is that the more that we realize that we are loved no matter what the less we see others as competition. The more we realize love is something that grows when it is shared the more we want to share love with others instead of hoarding it like material things.

The month of April happens to be one of those months with five Sundays and so with this bonus Sunday I wish to focus on two stories from Ernest Kurtz, Katherine Ketcham and their book: The Spirituality of Imperfection: Story Telling and the Search For Meaning. In their book that is a kind of spiritual history of Alcoholics Anonymous they focus a lot on the importance of storytelling. They point out that stories can often speak truth in a way that cannot be given in any other way. The following are two simple stories about everyday life that I think speak volumes about living one’s faith.

A few years ago at an alcoholism treatment center in the suburbs of Chicago, staff members reported an intriguing discovery. Many of them lived at some distance from the facility, each day braving the hazards of toll way traffic in commuting to and from work. Then one day, the State of Illinois instituted “honor system” toll collection booths in that area: no attendant, no barrier-gate, just a basket into which motorists were expected to throw their coins.

Data are unavailable about how well the method served in meeting the highway department’s fiscal and traffic-flow needs, but counselors at the treatment center collected observations that soon added up to an axiom: “Those who don’t throw their money in, their patients don’t get well.” As one counselor put it telling the story: “How can you pass on an “honest program” if you aren’t honest yourself? Honesty is indivisible.

How often do we Catholics hear other Catholics disagreeing with the Church’s teaching on this issue or that issue? My first thought when I see these people on television is that they have not lived the Catholic faith to its fullest. Instead they have settled for only allow their faith to be a surface experience. I feel sorry for them because I fear that they have not gotten the courage to face their own fears.

Some years ago a student of the Twelve-Step spirituality offered a presentation at the newly established Renewal Center at Hazelden, one of the oldest and most renowned centers for the treatment of alcoholism and other chemical dependencies. As he was laboring to make his point about the pervasive nature of spirituality, one of the participants asked for an image to help her “picture” the words. “What is it like?” she asked, her expression earnest and intent. “I think I understand what you mean, but can you give me a picture?”

Momentarily stumped, the presenter sat for several frustrating minutes staring across the conference-lounge at the massive stone fireplace, so carefully fashioned out of rock deposited in the locality during Minnesota’s glacial era. Late afternoon sun streamed into the room. Warming the stones with light. Suddenly the stones themselves came into focus—perhaps he could use them for an image! The deep reddish rocks, flecked with golden specks, the green-hued pieces, irregular marble in white; the many shaded blue slabs, their shallow niches sparkling as if with silver. Which of these stones could best present “the spiritual?”

“Physical, mental, spiritual”—the phrase reverberated in his mind, but which of the rocks provided the best image for each of those realities? The workshop participants, ever polite and patient, shifted quietly in the rare silence. Then suddenly, the image came! Looking at the stones, wondering at their beauty, the presenter’s vision made one of those gestalt switches, and he saw not the individual stones but the chimney itself.

The mortar—the bland, grayish, pebbly “stuff” that held all those stones together—that was “the spiritual”! The spiritual is not some separate category, one specific type of stone or a particular stone of great beauty, but the substance that holds everything together.

“Spirituality is like that mortar in the fireplace,” he offered pensively, finally breaking the silence. “Just as the mortar makes the chimney a chimney, allowing it to stand up straight and tall, beautiful in its wholeness, “the spiritual” is what makes us wholly human. It holds our experiences together, shapes them into be whole, gives them meaning, allows them—and us—to be a whole. Without spirituality, however physically brave or healthy or strong we may be, however mentally smart or clever or brilliant we may be, however emotionally intergraded or mature we may be, we are somehow not “all there”.

As usual in such settings, the presenter did not have the last word. Around the kitchen tables after the formal session, over steaming cups of coffee and cocoa, the workshop participants added to the image. Someone pointed out that the individual stones, before they were shaped into fireplace and chimney, have been lying around—heavy, irregular, useless pieces of rock. Beautiful stones, perhaps, but scattered meaninglessly of just piled up uselessly, they really didn’t amount to much did they? The mortar had transformed them, putting them all together in a way that gave each stone purpose and meaning and a wholly new kind of beauty. – 146

To say one is not a spiritual person is to say that one is dead. Spirituality (our relationship with God and how we view others and ourselves because of it) is the glue that holds us together. God is an artist and He is creating a masterpiece of love. We struggle only because we only see a part of the picture. When we die and receive God’s perspective, we will be able to stand back and look at God’s masterpiece