Self-Emptying

Giving Away Every Gift
Monday, December 14, 2020

A focus on self-emptying or “letting go” might seem like a call to self-denial or “making do with less,” but as Cynthia Bourgeault points out in her description of Jesus’ teaching, it can also lead to radical generosity and abundance. When we cling to less—of our possessions and even our lives—we are free to give it away for the sake of others.

[Jesus] certainly called us to dying to self, but his idea of dying to self was not through inner renunciation or guarding the purity of his being but through radically squandering everything he had and was. John the Baptist’s disciples were horrified because he banqueted, drank, and danced. The Pharisees were horrified because he healed on the Sabbath and kept company with women and disreputables, people known to be impure. . . .

What seemed disconcerting to nearly everybody was the messy, freewheeling largeness of his spirit. Abundance and a generosity bordering on extravagant seemed to be the signatures of both his teaching and his personal style. . . . When he feeds the multitudes at the Sea of Galilee, there is not merely enough to go around; the leftovers fill twelve baskets [John 6:13]. When a woman anoints him with expensive ointment and the disciples grumble about the waste, he affirms, “Truly, I tell you, wherever this good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her” (Matthew 26:13). He seems not to count the cost; in fact, he specifically forbids counting the cost. “Do not store up treasures on earth,” he teaches; do not strive or be afraid— “for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32). All will come of its own accord in good time and with abundant fullness, so long as one does not attempt to hoard or cling.

It is a path he himself walked to the very end. In the garden of Gethsemane, with his betrayers and accusers massing at the gates, he struggled and anguished but remained true to his course. Do not hoard, do not cling—not even to life itself. Let it go, let it be— “Not my will but yours be done, O Lord. Into your hands I commend my spirit.” [1]

Richard again: Jesus came into the world and gave himself fully into a poor life and a humiliating death. As Cynthia writes, he was “squandering himself” [2], which is really what the entire Trinity does: each self-emptying into the other! He revealed the poverty of God, who gives everything away. Yet most of us would probably not think of God as poor at all.

Self-Emptying

Less Is More
Sunday,  December 13, 2020
Third Sunday of Advent

Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God something to be grasped.

Rather, he emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
coming in human likeness;
and found human in appearance,
he humbled himself,
becoming obedient to death,
even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:5–8)

Kenosis, which means “letting go” or “self-emptying,” is clearly the way of Jesus. My spiritual father Saint Francis of Assisi lived kenosis passionately, and it is key to my own teaching. I believe all great spirituality is about letting go. Yet many associate letting go with Buddhism more than with Christianity. Sadly, Christianity seems to have become more about “saving your soul” or what some now call “spiritual capitalism.”

Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) profoundly understood this Gospel reversal. He let go of his life in the upper class and joyfully lived in solidarity with those at the bottom, especially the sick and the poor. But you and I have grown up with a capitalist and individualistic worldview, not a Gospel or Franciscan worldview. That doesn’t make us bad or entirely wrong. But it has severely limited our spiritual understanding—and Christianity’s power to transform culture and history. We tend to think that “more for me” is naturally better. South African Dominican writer Albert Nolan viewed our Western crisis of meaning with clarity:

The cultural ideal of the Western industrialized world is the self-made, self-sufficient, autonomous individual who stands by himself or herself, not needing anyone else . . . and not beholden to anyone for anything. . . . This is the ideal that people live and work for. It is their goal in life, and they will sacrifice anything to achieve it. This is how you “get a life for yourself.” This is how you discover your identity. . . .

There have been plenty of people in the past with inflated egos—kings, conquerors, and other dictators—but in the Western world today the cultivation of the ego is seen as the ideal for everyone. Individualism permeates almost everything we do. It is a basic assumption. It is like a cult. We worship the ego. [1]

In our consumer culture, even religion and spirituality have very often become a matter of addition: earning points with God, attaining enlightenment, producing moral behavior. Yet authentic spirituality is not about getting, attaining, achieving, performing, or succeeding—all of which tend to pander to the ego. It is much more about letting go—letting go of what we don’t need anyway, although we don’t know that ahead of time.

The great Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart (1260‒1328) said, “God is not found in the soul by adding anything, but by a process of subtraction.” [2] True spiritual wisdom reveals that less is more. Jesus taught this, and the holy ones always discover it in one way or another. Think of the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Dorothy Day, and the generations of nuns, friars, and monks who intentionally took a “vow of poverty.” I did so myself in 1965.

Sadly, like so many things that we call Christianity, we find that if we scratch right beneath the surface, it isn’t very much of Christianity; it’s just our local religious culture. Thankfully, there is a real longing today to clarify what is of Christ, what is essential Gospel, and what is historical or denominational accident.

Becoming Icons of Christ
Friday, December 11, 2020

What is it that grasps and impels these men and women to push beyond conventional boundaries and so delight us, ultimately, with new creative spaces? Wisdom—God’s Playmate, the Feminine Principle of the Godhead—is at work, ever delighting in birthing new possibilities and inviting open hearts to rise up and respond to visions and dreams by enfleshing them. —Edwina Gateley

Catherine de Hueck Doherty (1896–1985) was a Russian baroness who lived the Gospel “without compromise.” She gave up all she had and began Friendship House in Toronto, “a storefront center for the works of mercy, where the hungry were fed and the homeless were welcomed.” [1] Robert Ellsberg writes that Catherine’s formation of the Friendship House in Harlem, New York in 1937 emerged out of a deep conviction of the sins of racism and segregation. In 1947 she also established Madonna House, “which became a place of prayer and retreat. . . . Through Madonna House and the communities it inspired around the world, Catherine promoted the two principles by which she lived—a commitment to the social apostolate in the world and the need to root such a commitment in a life of prayer and the spirit of Christ [i.e., action and contemplation]. [2]

In her own words, Catherine describes how we give birth to Christ:

Christians are called to become icons of Christ, to reflect him. But we are called to even more than that. Ikon is the Greek word for “image of God.” We are called to incarnate Christ in our lives, to clothe our lives with him, so that people can see him in us, touch him in us, recognize him in us. . . . [3]

We have to begin to love one another in the fullest sense of Christ’s teaching. But to do so we must pray. . . . The immense problems of war, of social injustice, of the thousand and one ills that beset our world, these can be solved only if we begin to love one another. When people begin to see, love, respect, and reverence Christ in the eyes of another, then they will change, and society will change also. [4]

Richard here: To paraphrase the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart (1260–1327), “We are all meant to give birth to God.” [5] As a man who has taken a vow of celibacy, I will never know what it is like to physically give birth, nor have I ever held the hand of a woman I love in labor—neither sister nor friend. However, I have experienced the birth of Christ in the world many times throughout my life—in big ways and small, sometimes through grand gestures, but more often through simple acts of patience, love, and mercy. To incarnate the Christ is to live out the Gospel with our lives, as faithfully and fearlessly as a woman in labor who holds nothing back in order to bring new life into the world.

Giving Birth to Christ

A Lifetime Commitment
Wednesday,  December 9, 2020

My dear friend Ronald Rolheiser, O.M.I. reminds us that giving birth spiritually is a dynamic and creative process. To bring Christ into the world involves an ongoing commitment to growth, to discomfort, to love, and to surrender. It is not for the faint of heart, but it is God’s invitation to all of us.

Looking at how Mary gave birth to Christ, we see that it’s not something that’s done in an instant. Faith, like biology, also relies on a process that has a number of distinct, organic moments. What are these moments? What is the process by which we give birth to faith in the world?

First, like Mary, we need to get pregnant by the Holy Spirit. We need to let the word take such root in us that it begins to become part of our actual flesh.

Then, like any woman who’s pregnant, we have to lovingly gestate, nurture, and protect what is growing inside us until it’s sufficiently strong so that it can live on its own, outside us. . . .

Eventually, of course, we must give birth. . . .

Birth, however, is only the beginnings of motherhood. Mary gave birth to a baby, but she had to spend years nurturing, coaxing, and cajoling that infant into adulthood. The infant in the crib at Bethlehem is not yet the Christ who preaches, heals, and dies for us. . . .

Finally, motherhood has still one more phase. As her child grows, matures, and takes on a personality and destiny of its own, the mother, at a point, must ponder (as Mary did). She must let herself be painfully stretched in understanding, in not knowing, in carrying tension, in letting go. She must set free to be itself something that was once so fiercely hers. The pains of childbirth are often gentle compared to this second wrenching.

All of this is what Mary went through to give Christ to the world: Pregnancy by the Holy Spirit; gestation of that into a child inside of her; excruciating pain in birthing that to the outside; nurturing that new life into adulthood; and pondering, painfully letting go so that this new life can be its own, not hers. . . .

Our task too is to give birth to Christ. Mary is the paradigm for doing that. From her we get the pattern: Let the word of God take root and make you pregnant; gestate that by giving it the nourishing sustenance of your own life; submit to the pain that is demanded for it to be born to the outside; then spend years coaxing it from infancy to adulthood; and finally, during and after all of this, do some pondering, accept the pain of not understanding and of letting go.

Christmas isn’t automatic, it can’t be taken for granted. It began with Mary, but each of us is asked to make our own contribution to giving flesh to faith in the world.

Giving Birth to Christ

Christ Is Born in Creation
Monday,  December 7, 2020

Humanity too is God’s creation. But humanity alone is called to co-operate with God in the creation. —Hildegard of Bingen

For of his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. —John 1:16

The Greek word for “fullness” in this gospel passage is pleroma, which Paul also uses in his writings to describe a historical unfolding (see Ephesians 1:23, 3:19; Colossians 2:9–10). It is an early hint of what we now call evolutionary development, the idea that history, humanity and, yes, even God are somehow growing and coming to a divine fullness. What hope and meaning this gives to all life!

In his letter to the church in Rome, Paul writes: “From the beginning until now, the entire creation, as we know, has been groaning in one great act of giving birth” (Romans 8:22). Creation did not happen at once by a flick of the divine hand, and it is not slowly winding down toward Armageddon or tragic Apocalypse. Creation is in fact a life-generating process that’s still happening and winding up! We now know the universe is still expanding—and at an ever-faster rate, which means that we are a part of creating God’s future.

As Sister Ilia Delio says so well,

We can read the history of our 13.7-billion-year-old universe as the rising up of Divine Love incarnate, which bursts forth in the person of Jesus, who reveals love’s urge toward wholeness through reconciliation, mercy, peace, and forgiveness. Jesus is the love of God incarnate, the wholemaker who shows the way of evolution toward unity in love. In Jesus, God breaks through and points us in a new direction; not one of chance or blindness but one of ever-deepening wholeness in love. In Jesus, God comes to us from the future to be our future. Those who follow Jesus are to become wholemakers, uniting what is scattered, creating a deeper unity in love. Christian life is a commitment to love, to give birth to God in one’s own life and to become midwives of divinity in this evolving cosmos. We are to be wholemakers of love in a world of change. [1]

The common Christian understanding that Jesus came to save us by a cosmic evacuation plan is really very individualistic, petty, and even egocentric. It demands no solidarity with anything except oneself. We whittled the great Good News down into what Jesus could do for us personally and privately, rather than celebrating God’s invitation to participate in God’s universal creative work.

Instead of believing that Jesus came to fulfill us separately, how about trusting that we are here to fulfill Christ? We take our small but wonderful part in what Thomas Merton calls “The General Dance.” [2] We are a part of this movement of an ever-growing Universal Christ that is coming to be in this “one great act of giving birth” (Romans 8:22).

Giving Birth to Christ

The DNA of Creation
Sunday,  December 6, 2020
Second Sunday of Advent

We Franciscans believe that the first coming of “the Christ” is in creation itself. The Franciscan philosopher and theologian John Duns Scotus (1266‒1308), whom I studied for four years, wrote that “God first wills Christ as his supreme work.” [1] Creation could not have been empty of Christ for billions of years. In other words, God’s “first idea” and priority was to make the Godself both visible and shareable. The word used in the Bible for this idea was Logos (from Greek philosophy), which I would translate as the “Blueprint” or Primordial Pattern for reality. The whole of creation is the beloved community, the partner in the divine dance. Everything is the “child of God”—not only Jesus. There are no exceptions. When you think of it, what else could anything be? All creation must in some way carry the divine DNA of the Creator.

At Christmastime, most people think about the birth of the baby Jesus as the “coming” of Christ. Yet Advent reveals more; it is about preparing ourselves for the Christ to come in personal, contracted, and visible form. Only a perfect, trusting individual could allow such greatness to focus and communicate through a human body. Modeling the entire divine pattern of incarnation, Mary had to trust littleness or, better said, bigness becoming littleness! Go imagine.

Mary could trustingly carry Jesus, because she knew how to receive spiritual gifts—in fact, the spiritual gift. She offers a profound image of how generativity and fruitfulness break into this world. We have much to learn from her.

First, we learn that we can’t manage, maneuver, or manipulate spiritual energy. It is a matter of letting go and receiving what is given freely. It is the gradual emptying of our attachment to our small “separate” self so that there is room for new conception and new birth. There must be some displacement before there can be any new “replacement”! Mary is the archetype of such self-displacement and surrender.

There is no mention of any moral worthiness, achievement, or preparedness in Mary, only humble trust and surrender. She gives us all, therefore, a bottomless hope in our own little state. If we ourselves try to “manage” God or manufacture our own worthiness by any performance principle whatsoever, we will never give birth to the Christ, but only more of ourselves.

Whenever the material and the spiritual coincide, there is the Christ. Jesus fully accepted that human-divine identity and walked it into history. Henceforth, the Christ “comes again” whenever we are able to see the spiritual and the material coexisting, in any moment, in any event, and in any person. All matter reveals Spirit, and Spirit needs matter to “show itself”! What I like to call the “Forever Coming of Christ” happens whenever and wherever we allow this to be utterly true for us. This is how God continually breaks into history.

Spirituality and Social Movements

Participating in Movements for Justice
Friday, December 4, 2020

I think there are three basic levels of social ministry, and none is better than the other. I believe all are the movement of the Holy Spirit within us for the sake of others. I like to imagine a river flooding out of control—symbolizing the circumstances and injustices that bring about suffering—overflowing its banks and sweeping those in its path off their feet.

At the first level, we rescue drowning people from the swollen river, dealing with the immediate social problem right in front of us: someone hungry comes to our door and we offer them some food, or invite them inside. These are hands-on, social service ministries, like the familiar soup kitchen or food pantry. Such works will always look rather generous, Christian, charitable, and they tend to be admired, if not always imitated.

At the second level, there are ministries that help people not to fall into the swollen river in the first place, or show them how to survive despite falling in. In general, these are the ministries of education and healing. Most of the religious orders in the Catholic Church in the last three hundred years went in that direction, filling the world with schools, hospitals, and social service ministries that empowered people and gave them new visions and possibilities for their lives.

Finally, on the third level, some ministries build and maintain a dam to stop the river from flooding in the first place. This is the work of social activism and advocacy, critique of systems, organizing, speeches, boycotts, protests, and resistance against all forms of systemic injustice and deceit. It is the gift of a few, but a much-needed gift that we only recently began to learn and practice. It seeks systemic change and not just individual conversion.

I don’t think most people feel called to activism; I myself don’t. It was initially humiliating to admit this, and I lost the trust and admiration of some friends and supporters. Yet as we come to know our own soul gift more clearly, we almost always have to let go of certain “gifts” so we can do our one or two things well and with integrity. I believe that if we can do one or two things wholeheartedly in our life, that is all God expects.

The important thing is that we all should be doing something for the rest of the world! We have to pay back, particularly those of us born into privilege and comfort. We also must respect and support the other two levels, even if we cannot do them. Avoid all comparisons about better or lesser, more committed or less committed; those are all ego games. Let’s just use our different gifts to create a unity in the work of service (Ephesians 4:12–13), and back one another up, without criticism or competition. Only in our peaceful, mutual honoring do we show forth the glory of God.

W

A Migrant Movement for Justice
Thursday, December 3, 2020

In the 1960s, while the Civil Rights movement was creating significant change on a national level, the farmworkers in the western United States, under the leadership of César Chávez (1927-1993), were organizing for better pay and working conditions. The movement was informed and strengthened by Chávez’s authentic Catholic faith. Marvin Mich shares some of the history of that time:

As a Mexican American from the farms of Gila Valley (near Yuma), Arizona, César [Chávez] had known the poverty, despair, and discrimination that went with being a migrant worker. In 1949 when Chávez was 22, he was married and living in a barrio of San Jose, California, called “Sal Si Puede” (meaning “leave if you can”). . . .

The young Chávez was being shaped by his own experience of poverty and despair, but also by the vision and moral principles of Catholic social thought. Rerum Novarum [the 1891 papal encyclical concerning the Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor] and the Roman Catholic tradition were not distant, dusty principles for Chávez, but rather the building blocks for his emerging social, moral, and spiritual identity. . . .

The strike, la huelga, which began in September 1965, lasted for five years before contracts were signed with 140 grape growers and the United Farm Workers. During this time many church people and college students joined the strikers and supported the call for a national table grape boycott. [1]

Writer Daniel Rhodes explains how César Chávez’s spiritual roots impacted all aspects of the farmworkers struggle for justice:

The farmworker union was no normal union, and this would be no standard union struggle. It was a struggle that reached all the way down to their values, their spirits and faith—something Chávez understood and from which he drew. In fact, his first act after the vote [to strike] was to gather his family and pray a Hail Mary for each grower. Incessant prayer and regular Mass permeated the movement. [2]

The following prayer is César Chávez’s “Prayer of the Farm Worker’s Struggle,” which shows how devotion to God combined with action in the movement. I am deeply touched by the simplicity and humility of his prayer:

Show me the suffering of the most miserable;
So I will know my people’s plight.

Free me to pray for others;
For you are present in every person.

Help me take responsibility for my own life;
So that I can be free at last.

Grant me courage to serve others;
For in service there is true life.

Give me honesty and patience;
So that I can work with other workers.

Bring forth song and celebration;
So that the Spirit will be alive among us.

Let the Spirit flourish and grow;
So that we will never tire of the struggle.

Let us remember those who have died for justice;
For they have given us life.

Help us love even those who hate us;
So we can change the world.

Amen. [3]

Spirituality and Social Movements

Spirituality in the Civil Rights Movement
Wednesday, December 2, 2020

The deeply spiritual foundation of the Civil Rights movement is often underemphasized. The movement that sought political and legal equality for Black Americans was grounded in faith. The devout Christian commitment of virtually all its leaders, from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Fannie Lou Hamer to John Lewis, inspired them to work for the dignity and equality of all. Rosemarie Freeney Harding (1930–2004), the wife of civil rights leader Vincent Harding (1931-2014), recalls the power of the Holy Spirit working in the movement during that time.

One of the most exciting things for me about being in the freedom movement was discovering other people who were compelled by the Spirit at the heart of our organizing work, and who were also interested in the mysticism that can be nurtured in social justice activism. We experienced something extraordinary in the freedom movement, something that hinted at a tremendous potential for love and community and transformation that exists here in this scarred, spectacular country. For many of us, that “something” touched us in the deepest part of our selves and challenged us in ways both personal and political.

There was an energy moving in those times. Something other than just sit-ins and voter registration and Freedom Schools. Something represented by these signal efforts but broader. As I traveled around the country in the sixties, it seemed to me that the nation—from the largest community to the smallest—was permeated with hope; the idea that people can bring about transformation; that what we do matters. . . .

Martin and Coretta [King] and Anne Braden and Ella Baker and others like them had a beautiful effect on people who spent time with them. Living and working in their presence hastened changes in your own thoughts, your reactions, your priorities; even if you weren’t always cognizant of the shift. . . . Being constantly in the presence of people who lived so fervently in the power of nonviolence, who believed and acted from the understanding that love and forgiveness were essential tools for social justice; being surrounded by people like that fed those commitments in me, in many of us. And it infused the nation. . . .

For a lot of people in the Movement, our participation gave us a craving for spiritual depth. . . . Sometimes not knowing what was right or wrong in a situation, they had to be quiet about it. Had to go somewhere and just meditate about it. Pray on it. . . .

Rosemarie Harding’s description of the Spirit working within the young people of the Civil Rights movement reminds me of my time with the New Jerusalem Community where we also sang, prayed, and trusted that God would speak to us—and God did!

The Catholic Worker Movement
Tuesday, December 1, 2020

After Brian McLaren’s helpful summary of biblical examples of social movements, I want to turn our attention to movements that originated within the United States in the last century. The Catholic Worker movement, established by Dorothy Day (1897‒1980) and Peter Maurin (1877‒1949), has continued to bear good fruit since its founding in 1933. Dorothy is renowned the world over for her love for the poor, while Peter Maurin is less well-known. However, the Gospel was at the center of Peter Maurin’s vision and an essential part of what has made the movement so long-lasting. As editor Robert Ellsberg writes, Peter believed:

One should not await some presumably propitious moment, but instead begin at once to live by a new set of values. “The future will be different,” [Peter] announced in typical style, “if we make the present different.” [1] And the revolution began with oneself. There was no need to form a committee to study the problem; the commandments of Christ were there before us, and all that remained was to give flesh to those words, to translate the Gospel into action, and attract others to the cause. [2]

Theologian Marvin Mich (1948‒2018) shows how Maurin’s radical commitment flowed from his reading of the New Testament, and his own Catholic faith:

Maurin brought with him a “gentle personalism,” which was a Catholic radicalism based on the literal interpretation of the Beatitudes. He rejected the liberal institutions of capitalism and the modern state and their faith in material progress and technology. . . . He proposed [instead] a radical imitation of the gospel life of voluntary poverty in solidarity with the weak, the poor, the sick, and the alienated. The Catholic Worker movement’s consistent intellectual position was based on a radical interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount and on papal social encyclicals. . . .

The Worker encouraged communal living, ecumenism, and the concept of laypeople as missionaries. The movement is best known for its “direct action” on behalf of the poor. They started Houses of Hospitality, imitating the medieval hospice. These were soup kitchens, meeting rooms, clothing centers, and places of reflection. [3]

Finally, Dorothy Day reflects on how Peter Maurin’s love for God and people inspired the same in others:

Peter made you feel a sense of his mission as soon as you met him. He did not begin by tearing down, or by painting so intense a picture of misery and injustice that you burned to change the world. Instead, he aroused in you a sense of your own capacities for work, for accomplishment. He made you feel that you and all [people] had great and generous hearts with which to love God. If you once recognized this fact in yourself you would expect and find it in others. . . . But it was seeing Christ in others, loving the Christ you saw in others. Greater than this, it was having faith in the Christ in others without being able to see Him. Blessed is he that believes without seeing.” [4]