This column features bits and pieces from this one writer’s spiritual experiences of last week. They appear here in the hope of inspiring readers to reflect on their own recent encounters that may carry more meaning than first appears.
One encounter came through reading The Way Things Are, a series of interviews with Huston Smith, the world religions scholar who used to teach at MIT. One passage touches on Smith’s upbringing in China where his parents were Methodist missionaries.
Looking back on this experience and contrasting it with that of many other people, Professor Smith says: “What came through to me from my religious upbringing was quite different: we are in good hands, and in gratitude for that fact it would be good if we bore one another’s burdens.”
From a vantage point of some 80 years, this scholar feels thankful about learning from his parents such positive lessons about his place in the world. He still faces that world with basic confidence of being loved by the master of the universe. And he feels a corresponding impulse to reach out toward other people, showing them compassion.
He wishes every child had been endowed with a similarly affirmative religious outlook. Instead, he has often found his students to look like “wounded Christians” or “wounded Jews,” for example, people who took in religion as basically negative, full of do and don’ts without a positive view of themselves and the world.
As happens often, I also took heart from members of my small prayer group this week. Olivia, at whose house we meet, talked about her contact with a spiritual leader from whom she had drawn inspiration. “We are cut off from the holy,” said this man. “We are always taking from the world,” he went on, “but we ought to be giving back.”
Yes, our American culture is terribly secular and materialistic, making spirituality often seem unreachable, but people with vision like this man’s keep calling us back to deeper reality.
Another source of inspiration came in a talk given at my parish church to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the renewal of the Catholic liturgy. The speaker, a professor of liturgy based in Washington, D. C., emphasized the action of the Holy Spirit in the church’s public prayer.
“The Spirit’s action permeates all of the rites,” he said. “All liturgy is Trinitarian,” he added. The presence of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the sacred rituals should be seen as basic to the faith of the church.
The lecturer also stressed the ingredient of paschal mystery in the liturgy. By that he meant the ritual re-enactment of Christ’s death and resurrection that takes place when the church celebrates the sacraments. These latter are not simply outward gestures but contain with them the rhythm of dying and rising again that form the center of Christian faith.
Coming back to the heart of his belief, he repeated at the end his vision of the liturgy as a whole. It goes far beyond details about how it is performed. Instead, he insisted, “The goal is the living God.”
I find inspiration here because of being reminded of the deeper meaning of the worship in which I share each week with a community of my fellow Christians. It all goes deeper than appears on the surface: we take part in a sacred celebration that carries the mystery of who we believe ourselves to be.
On another front, a chronic health condition continues to draw me toward spiritual reflection. There is nothing, after all, that quite concentrates the mind like being less than well. It stirs one’s thinking about what remains most important as you continue to search for solutions.
Instead of a solution, one often finds it necessary to live with it. When the doctors have trouble discovering answes, then that seems the only alternative. It serves as fine material for prayer – putting oneself in the hands of an understanding and compassionate God, hoping for a breakthrough but not counting on it.
So these bits and pieces of an ongoing spiritual quest may suffice for this week’s consideration. Taken together, they represent at least this one person’s odyssey toward insight. Here’s hoping for sympathetic vibrations in the souls of others.
Richard Griffin