pathways, DECEMBER 2007
Sydney's Fr DAVID RANSON likens spirituality to being fully awake.
He explored this theme when addressing audiences in Launceston and Hobart, late in November. He was in Tasmania at the invitation of the Emmanuel Centre, a Sisters of St Joseph-run pastoral and spirituality centre in Launceston, for the final celebrations to mark its 20th anniversary...
In trying to define 'spirituality' so that justice is done both to the traditional and religious framework in which the spiritual life has been treated over the centuries, and, at the same time, acknowledges the pervasive contemporary interest in spirituality, Fr Ranson believes the best definition resides in the experience of 'awakening'.
"Spirituality awakens us; it is the dimension of our lives that works to awaken us and to keep us awake to the deepest currents and springs of life, or as David Tacey comments, that which gives 'depth, meaning and resonance to what we do ordinarily'...
"Yet, 'I have never met a man who was fully awake,' wrote the American humanist Henry Thoreau in his classic Walden. 'How could I have looked him in the face?' And so, writes Thoreau,
'We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not be mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep ... To [the one] whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labours of [people]. Morning is when I am awake and there is dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep . .. The millions are awake enough for physical labour... only one in a hundred million to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive.(1)
"Lest we think that such an understanding of spiritual maturity is a late invention, I wish to suggest that it the 'awakening' to which Thoreau alludes lies at the heart of the gospel.
"It is our encounter with the risen Jesus that most fully awakens us. The Risen Christ awakens us to the depth and to the height, to the entire breadth, of our humanity and our divine vocation (cf Eph3:16-19).
"Our discipleship of the Risen Christ demands that we 'stay awake' in constant expectation of the varied ways in which his approach is incarnated within our experience (cf Matt 24:42; 25:13; Mk 13:33, 35). Jesus is the One who comes to greet us, and who calls us, 'to come and see'. (John 1:39). It is the Risen Christ, in the Spirit, who continues to open our eyes and our ears, so that we might see and hear, might listen more deeply, and might perceive more fully the truth of ourselves, of the world and of the divine promise that is offered us (cf Matt 13:14-16) ...
"How difficult it is to live our lives as those who are awake. In her 2004 book, Putin's Russia, the recently murdered Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, lamented that her society, 'wants nothing more than to be lulled into sleep'. (2) There is a part in each of us, too, more or less, that wants to live life asleep.
"The Spirit comes to us, thought, to 'rouse us from our slumber', from our passivity and inertia and to bring us refreshed vision and new energy... The Pentecostal miracle is the transformation of slumber, the New Testament metaphor for fear, into wakefulness, which is its metaphor for love. For love fully awakens us whilst fear renders us somnolent. Life belongs to the one who is awake, no longer fearful, but enlivened by love.
"The Christian strategy by which we become awakened is first and foremost that of listening.
"Listening is a simple skill but one of the most difficult for us to practice. Perhaps, precisely because of its simplicity, we keep forgetting the significance of listening in Christian discipleship. We have wanted to make Christian living something deductive, something instructional, whilst all the time the Christian perspective on life is foundationally inductive, receptive, interpretative and discerning.
"Christian life is a life of anticipation. It gives birth to a new way of seeing and hearing, conscious of the subtle ways in and by which the Mystery manifests itself.
"Christian spirituality works toward a sacramental imagination, that capacity to see in one thing, ordinary and mundane, another reality more whole and sacred. It develops within us a consciousness that gazes upon the world as an icon that stands ready to disclose deeper truth and meaning. For the Christian, listening has the capacity to make the world diaphanous ...
"This pathway of listening is not easy for us as Western people because we are used to the language of mastery rather than of receptivity. We are accustomed to dominating and conquering things, to having control, rather than of surrendering and trusting.
"The Lutheran theologian, Jurgen Moltmann, demonstrates we are used to perceiving the world through our hands (3) ... (Another) way of perceiving ... is through our eyes. This was the way of the Fathers of the Church ... This kind of perception ... confers not domination, but participation, communion, and transformation. It is the way of contemplative knowledge - a knowledge that is directly linked to love. St Benedict, the father of western monasticism in the Christian west, knew the importance of such a contemplative attitude of heart. The very first word in his sixth century Rule, a guideline for monastic communities, was Ausculta! (4) ... 'Listen, with the ear of your heart!' More fully, however, it designates a listening akin to the anticipation of hearing a reply having knocked on a closed door. Benedict imagined this stance to be one that permeated the whole of life...
"Living in the present is the necessary ancillary skill to listening which works to release such desire from deep within us.
Where shall I look for Enlightenment? the disciple asked.
Here, the elder said.
When will it happen? the disciple wanted to know.
It is happening right now, the elder said.
Then why don't I experience it? the disciple asked.
And the elder answered, Because you do not look.
But what should I look for? the disciple wanted to know.
And the elder smiled and answered, Nothing. Just look.
But at what? the disciple insisted.
Anything your eyes alight upon, the elder continued.
Well then must I look in a special kind of way? the disciple said.
No, the elder said.
Why ever not? the disciple persisted.
And the elder said quietly, Because to look you must be here. The problem is that you are mostly somewhere else.
"The more we are able for the present, the more we are able for the gift of wonder. Wonder is the opposite of cynicism and boredom; it indicates that a person has a heightened aliveness, is interested, expectant and responsive - all those things that are naturally a part of intense listeninG ... (and) with this spirit of wonder, the ordinary becomes extraordinary.
"In other words it is precisely at the most ordinary moments of life that Jesus is apt to come among us, into the very midst of life at its most real and inescapable moments ... The sacred moments are usually everyday moments which, if we look with no more that our eyes or listen with our ears, reveal only the gardener, a stranger coming down the road behind us, a meal like any other meal.
"But if we look with our hearts, if we listen with what is deepest within, if we live our lives not from weekend to weekend, escape to escape, but from the miracle of one precious moment to the next, then we may see Jesus himself. (J. Goetz)
"When our life is imbued with this sense of wonder then not only does creation bear within it the potential to disclose something of the Mystery of God to us, but then also do the ordinary events of our life offer us this potential. We grow therefore in a sense of Providence, of God at work for us, leading us, in and through the events of life ...
"Can we listen to the story of our life with this faith and with this confidence? Can we enter into the events of our life, always wondering how this or that particular event might be the action of God fulfilling his promise to us?
"This deep attentiveness to the events our life leads us into the same kind of dependency that Jesus had with the Father. In that relationship Jesus has complete trust 'If you know how to give your children what is good, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him.' Then he said to his disciples,
That is why I am telling you not to worry about your life and what you are to eat, nor about your body and how you are to clothe it ... think of the ravens. They do not sow or reap; they have no storehouses and no barns; yet God feeds them. And how much more you are worth than the birds! Can any of you, however much you worry, add a single cubit to your span of life? ... Now if that is how God clothes a flower which is growing wild today and is thrown into the furnace tomorrow, how much more will he look after you ... There is no need to be afraid, little flock, for it has pleased your Father to give you the kingdom. (Lk 12:22-32)
"To listen is the key to that kingdom."
Fr Ranson went on to say that it is the Spirit who impels us to look more closely, to watch and to wait more passionately. No longer asleep, our memory connects with our own suffering and that of others; it warns us about distorted relationships and impels us to solidarity with victims (5) and so the spiritual life and the political life "achieve a fundamental integration".
"This mysticism of open eyes awakens us," he said. "But to what are we awakened? ...
"No longer politically innocent, we thus become awake to the new sectarianism in the West that is being peddled by the chatter of commercial journalism on the one hand and the silence of religious and political leadership on the other; we become awake to the marginalisation, the fear and the confusion of those who are rendered suspect and unacceptable by such facile commentary; we become awake to the anonymous social revolution occurring in the country within a particular legislative agenda just as we are to the first sprouts of a new fascism growing under the mantle of a misnamed war on terrorism and fueled by the lies of political convenience which swirl around us.
"We become awake to the pain of those suffering in Darfur, in the Congo, in Zimbabwe, in Mutujulu ...; we become awake to the desperation of the thousands whose lives have become a misery in Iraq, in Chechyna, in Afghanistan ; ... we become awake to the groan of the planet struggling to breathe, and the dying Australian landscape now that the indigenous song lines are no longer preserved.
"Let us make no mistake, to be awakened, to live one's life awake, is to be disturbed, and to be disturbed greatly. I do not mean to say that we are only awake to the pain around us. We are, equally, of course, awakened to the sheer beauty, natural and human, in which we are immersed. But we do not have such difficulty in remaining alert to that side of the story; we do struggle to remain awake to the side that demands our resistance, our responsibility and our reform.
"... fidelity to this kind of attentiveness brings us to that level deep within us which holds a desire awaiting release, which holds an intentionality for something vaster and simpler than ourselves. Our deep listening to life ineluctably brings us to this place wherein desire waits to be born. The more we are brought to this place through our attentiveness to the whole of life, we find that in our relationship with God there are less words, less ideas, less images and only desire.
"Our attentiveness is brought from outside to inside us ... We become attentive to our own feelings, our own conflicts, our own ambiguity, our own deepest desires. We listen to the many different levels of our own experience ...
"To desire God in this way, to reach out in our attentiveness with great intention toward God in simple desire may take some courage from us. Sometimes this desire can frighten us, and we are used to trivialising our desire. Some of us have great difficulty desiring, so used have we been to being disappointed in desire. We may have been taught not to desire, to simply be grateful for what is given. As a result our horizons are small. We dare not reach out too far. When we do we can be so overwhelmed with selfish feelings that we quickly pull back.
"As we follow this deepest desire, whenever or wherever it presents itself, we realise over time that it deepens and steadies ... As time goes on it also purifies ... (It matures) to become a desire for God's own life ... to share in the hospitality of the Banquet that is our God ...
"This desire born out of our attentiveness to life, is itself a sign of the deep desire for God. The desire to pray is itself a prayer. At these times when we are surprised by our desire we need to have the courage to allow its small flickering flame to be and to allow our attentiveness to the ordinary moment to protect and fan it. There is then no place and no situation that is exclusive of prayer.
Nothing can come between us and the love of Christ, even if we are troubled or worried or being persecuted or lacking food or clothes of being threatened or even attacked ... For I am certain of this: neither life nor death, no angel, no prince, nothing that exists, nothing still to come, not any power or height or depth, nor any created thing, can ever come between us and the love of God made visible in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom 8: 35- 39)
"Let us therefore listen, and love, and loving, let us listen. Then we shall live our lives as those who are awake."
1 Henry Thoreau, Walden, (Signet Classics, 1960), 65-66.
2 Cited in James Button, "A tough crusader falls," The Sydney Morning Herald, 14-15 October 2006, 27.
3 Moltmann distinguishes between the 'way of the eye' and the 'way of the hand'. See, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 200-201.
4 Rule of St. Benedict. In RB 1980. Edited by Timothy Fry. (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1981), 156-157. The translators of this edition use a Latin variant, Obsulta, with the translation "Listen carefully."
5 John K. Downey, "Introduction," Love's Strategy: The Political Theology of Johann Baptist Metz edited by John K. Downey (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999), 8.
A key feature of life at the Emmanuel Centre during its 20 years has been the support it has received from mainland congregations in assisting with providing full-time, resident spiritual directors. At the 20th celebrations, all those Sisters were able to return, from various parts of Australia. Present and past, they are pictured at the celebration dinner held in Launceston. They are (from left) Sisters Angela Dance LMC, Ann Condon OP, Ellie Dawson RSJ , Marjorie Boutchard PBVM, Trish Dance SSJ (who has been at Emmanuel for its 20 years), Maureen Delaney RSC, Jill Dance SSJ (Sister Guardian for the Tasmanian Sisters of St Joseph), Carmel Drew RSJ and Margaret Barry RSJ.
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