551[1]

THE WAY
a review of Christian spirituality published by the British Jesuits
January 2016 Volume 55, Number 1
PRAYER AND THOSE WHO PRAY
© Des D. Mona @ Flickr

THE WAY January 2016
Foreword 7–8
Lessons from the Spirit of Pedro Arrupe: For the Seventieth 9–19
Anniversary of Hiroshima
James Menkhaus
Pedro Arrupe was Superior General of the Jesuits in the turbulent years
immediately after the Second Vatican Council. Earlier in his Jesuit life, he
had been novice master in Hiroshima when the first atomic bomb was
dropped on that city. Here James Menkhaus asks what lessons can be
drawn from Arrupe’s experience seven decades after Hiroshima was
destroyed.
Praying with Images: Some Medieval Advice 20–30
Anne Mouron
Of the three Abrahamic faiths, Christianity has been most consistently
content to use images as an aid to prayer. Here Anne Mouron describes a
late medieval text, The Desert of Religion, which offered the monks for
whom it was originally intended a series of meditative illustrations alongside
its poetic text. This can suggest ways of incorporating such images into
prayer that have lost none of their relevance in the intervening centuries.
Saints, the Church and Personal Prayer 31–44
Robert E. Doud
‘The reason why the universal Church canonizes saints is so that we will
look around us and see examples of holiness for us to copy.’ Starting from
this premise, and drawing on examples from poetry, art, and the writings of
Thomas Merton, Robert Doud reflects on how such examples can touch
our own prayer, and so enable a deeper growth of the holiness that is the
ultimate goal of any Christian life.
Bede Griffiths’s Advaitic Approach to Religion 45–56
Ambrose Ih-Ren Mong
Advaita is a Hindu term signifying a certain unity between human beings
and the divine. The Christian theologian Bede Griffiths attempted to
reconcile this notion with his own faith, and use it to open up a dialogue
with Eastern religions. Although his understanding remains controversial,
Ambrose Ih-Ren Mong argues that it represents an important element in
the relationship between Indian Christians and their Hindu neighbours.

THE WAY January 2016
Spirituality and Living
Pray Anywhere 57–59
Matt Kappadakunnel
Matt Kappadakunnel is a busy investment manager living in Los Angeles.
Like many committed Christians, he struggles to find time to pray as he
would wish to. Here, in our occasional Spirituality and Living strand, he
offers a New Year reflection on how to find times and spaces for prayer.
A Reflection on the Charism of Religious Life 61–78
Loan Le
Within the Roman Catholic church, a ‘Year of Religious Life’ has just
drawn to a close. Loan Le here uses the thought of the French
Dominican theologian Jean-Marie Tillard to show how a state of life
characterized by the three vows of poverty, chastity and obedience can only
be fully understood in the context of the wider Church. For it is only
within the Church that we can hear and respond to such a call of the
Spirit.
Paying Attention to the Wisdom of Our Sorrows 79–88
Peter Wilcox
The idea of making use of the experience of sorrow in order to live a more
positive and fruitful life may seem a strange one. However, in his work as a
psychotherapist over the last three decades, Peter Wilcox has become
convinced that this is possible. Here he suggests ways in which sorrows can
indeed be used positively, rather than being wasted in regret and
recrimination.
The Experience of the Absence of God According to John of
the Cross
Louis Roy
The experience of God’s silence or seeming absence has been described by
many Christians (and Jews) over many centuries. For some, this has led to
an abandonment of their faith; for others, the experience has ultimately
brought them to a deeper trust in God. The Spanish Carmelite John of the
Cross reflected deeply on this phenomenon, and here Louis Roy traces
some aspects of his thought.
89–98

THE WAY January 2016
The Spirit in Contemporary Culture
The ‘Ordinary’ Contemplative Life and the ‘Little Way’ of
Social Justice
Meredith Secomb
Many would think of the contemplative life as one that withdraws from the
world and its demands into silence and prayer. As such it would seem to be
the polar opposite of, and incompatible with, the active pursuit of social
justice. Meredith Secomb’s psychological and pastoral work has led her to
believe that these two approaches to the world need to be brought
together, and are not only compatible but mutually enriching.
99–109
Book Reviews
Michael Rogers on Ignatian spirituality and pilgrimage
Philip Endean on Christianity and the Internet
Brendan Callaghan on spirituality and healthcare
John Pridmore on the Song of Songs
Ian Coleman on Christian cosmology and today’s spirituality
Kate Kirkpatrick on the philosopher William James
Jan Graffius on seventeenth- and twenty-first-century art
James Sweeney on practical theology
T. Frank Kennedy on Jesuits and music
FOR AUTHORS
The Way warmly invites readers to submit articles with a view to publication. They should normally be about
4,000 words long, and be in keeping with the journal’s aims. The Editor is always ready to discuss possible
ideas.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The folios from BL, MS Add. 37049 are reproduced by kind permission of The British Library Board. The
scripture quotations herein are generally from the New Revised Standard Version Bible © 1989 by the
Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, and are
used by permission. All rights reserved.

THE WAY January 2016
ABBREVIATIONS
Autobiography
Constitutions
Diary
Dir
Exx
Jesuit Life and
Mission Today
MHSJ
‘Reminiscences (Autobiography)’, in Ignatius of Loyola: Personal Writings, translated by Philip
Endean and Joseph A. Munitiz (London: Penguin, 1996)
in The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus and Their Complementary Norms (St Louis: Institute
of Jesuit Sources, 1996)
‘The Spiritual Diary’, in Ignatius of Loyola: Personal Writings, translated by Philip Endean and
Joseph A. Munitiz (London: Penguin, 1996)
On Giving the Spiritual Exercises: The Early Manuscript Directories and the Official Directory of
1599, translated and edited by Martin E. Palmer (St Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996)
The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, translated by George E. Ganss (St Louis: Institute
of Jesuit Sources, 1992)
Jesuit Life and Mission Today: The Decrees and Accompanying Documents of the 31st – 35th
General Congregations of the Society of Jesus (St Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2009)
Monumenta Historica Societatis Jesu, 157 volumes (Madrid and Rome: Institutum Historicum
Societatis Iesu, 1898– )

Conference
15-19 August
2016
Hinsley Hall Leeds
Where are the Exercises
taking us now?
A conference for those involved in the ministry of the
Spiritual Exercises
The Conference will seek to explore this important question by
focusing on three aspects arising in the ministry of the Spiritual
Exercises.
• Current Culture: Nikolaas Sintobin SJ will explore engaging with
younger generations and the internet – social media and spiritual
development.
• Ageing: Bishop Emeritus Brian Noble will discuss the Ignatian
insights that can contribute to the spiritual needs that can surface
in the increasing longevity of our population.
• Social Edges: Anne-Marie Paulin-Campbell and Puleng
Matsaneng will offer their experience of using Ignatian ‘adaptation’
in crossing cultural and racial divides in South Africa.
Booking and further information
www.thepilgrim.org.uk
admin@thepilgrim.org.uk

I
FOREWORD
T IS NOT UNUSUAL, among the New Year’s resolutions made by
Christians, to find some related to prayer. People hope to pray more
regularly, or for longer, or with greater attentiveness. Nor is it unusual,
as with most such resolutions made at this time of year, to find them
abandoned and forgotten after just a few days. Yet the desire to live a
better life of prayer does not go away, and seems somehow to be hardwired
into the spirituality of the average follower of Christ.
This issue of The Way looks at both what it means to pray and who
it is that is doing the praying. Anne Mouron takes us back to the late
Middle Ages, describing a manual to aid monastic prayer assisted by very
contemporary-looking illustrations and diagrams. Matt Kappadakunnel
outlines how, when seeking to discover ways of praying in a very busy
life, finding suitable places may be as important as being able to set aside
an appropriate amount of time. Meanwhile, if working for social justice
seems at first sight to be at the opposite end of the spectrum of Christian
living from contemplative prayer, Meredith Secomb suggests that these
two approaches can be seen as complementary rather than competing.
Sometimes negative experiences block that road to God that is
opened up by prayer. A factor common to Christianity and Judaism is
the feeling of God’s absence, and the desire to make some sense of it.
In Christian spirituality one of the chief exponents of this quest for
understanding is the Carmelite friar St John of the Cross. He called the
experience of God’s seeming absence the ‘dark night of the soul’, and
Louis Roy here shows the continuing relevance of his analysis. As a
practising psychotherapist for the past three decades, Peter Wilcox has
had plenty of opportunity to see how some people are able to make use of
the sorrowful aspects of their lives to grow in fruitfulness, and applies his
insights to faith development. Few events of the last century can have
been more challenging to faith in a good and caring God than the
dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. Pedro Arrupe, who would later become Superior General of
the Jesuits, survived the first of these bombings and tended its victims.
James Menkhaus draws lessons from his experience, seventy years on.
Strictly speaking, prayer can never be merely a solitary activity, linking
us as it does not simply with God but with all those others who have
The Way, 55/1 (January 2016), 7–8

8 Foreword
prayed through the centuries. Robert Doud asks how we can be supported
in our own attempts to pray by what the Roman Catholic Church
traditionally calls ‘the communion of saints’. Bede Griffiths was a
Christian spiritual writer deeply influenced by Hinduism. Ambrose Ih-Ren
Mong explores his understanding of the Hindu concept of advaita, union
with the divine, and how this deepened Griffiths’s own faith. Finally,
prayer is at the heart of traditional religious life in community, and Loan
Le’s essay outlines the belief of the French Dominican Jean-Marie Tillard
that such a life could only be understood in the wider context of the
Church.
‘Say this when you pray’, said Jesus, and gave his disciples the Our
Father, a prayer that runs to only 66 words in the King James Version
of the Bible. There can be few followers of his who have been content
with that alone, and prayers, and words about prayers, have multiplied
ever since. Seen in one light, this edition of The Way is simply one more
addition to this conversation about conversing with God. But by pointing
not only to the prayers, but to those who are praying them, it may perhaps
invite you to join their number and explore for yourself what it takes to
deepen a life of prayer.
Paul Nicholson SJ
Editor

LESSONS FROM THE
SPIRIT OF PEDRO ARRUPE
For the Seventieth Anniversary of
Hiroshima
James Menkhaus
O
N 6 AUGUST 1945 an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in Japan
by the United States. This was the first time a nuclear weapon
was used in war. Three days later, a second bomb was detonated on the
outskirts of Nagasaki. These military strikes are credited with bringing a
swift end to the Second World War, as the unconditional surrender of
Japan quickly ensued. Seventy years after the bombings, it is appropriate,
perhaps imperative, to contemplate whether humanity has learnt anything
since using these weapons of mass destruction.
One of the survivors of Hiroshima was Pedro Arrupe, who is well
known for being the Jesuit Superior General who realigned the Society
of Jesus towards the vision of St Ignatius and the spirit of Vatican II.
But, twenty years before Arrupe would ascend to the highest levels of
Jesuit governance, he was a young missionary learning about the Japanese
language and customs. Arrupe’s descriptions of the fateful morning in
August 1945, as well as his reflections 25 years after the atomic bomb,
challenge humanity to pause. Arrupe wrote: ‘History is truly the teacher
of life, but only on condition that we know how to interpret her’. 1 Now,
as then, humanity needs to continue interpreting its lessons.
The Japanese Missionary
In 1927 Pedro Arrupe left the medical studies that he had been pursuing
to enter the Society of Jesus. Early in his Jesuit training he decided he
wanted to go to Japan to be a missionary, in the footsteps of Francis Xavier.
1
Pedro Arrupe, Recollections and Reflections of Pedro Arrupe, translated by Yolanda T. DeMola
(Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1986), 54.
The Way, 55/1 (January 2016), 9–19

10 James Menkhaus
Pedro Arrupe, shortly after his arrival in Japan
In 1938, while in the United States, Arrupe received a letter telling him
that his request to be sent to Japan had been approved. Upon his arrival
he quickly strove to learn Japanese calligraphy and the tea ceremony, and
also adopted a Japanese prayer posture by squatting on a small mat. 2
Arrupe knew that he had to find out as much about the Japanese as
possible in order to work with them. Despite his background in languages,
he struggled to learn Japanese. He continued to study diligently because he
knew, as his biographer George Bishop points out, ‘Without assimilating
the culture and without speaking the language there was no possibility
of preaching Christianity’. 3
As the tension increased between Japan and the United States,
eventually resulting in war, Arrupe’s recent visit to the USA drew
attention from the Japanese military police, the Kempetai. In December
1941 Arrupe was arrested on suspicion of espionage. The letters written
by Jesuits from all over the world that were found among Arrupe’s
personal effects did not help his cause. He was put into a cell with an
area of four square metres, containing a dirty straw mat, a metal receptacle
and rats. The walls were stained with blood. Describing his first night,
2
3
Hedwig Lewis, Pedro Arrupe Treasury (Anand: Gujarat Sahitya Prakash, 2007), 28.
George D. Bishop, Pedro Arrupe, SJ: Twenty-Eighth General of the Society of Jesus (Anand: Gujarat
Sahitya Prakash, 2000), 8.

Lessons from the Spirit of Pedro Arrupe 11
Arrupe later reflected, ‘It was very cold. One could not sleep; I was
shivering and my teeth were chattering. There is absolute silence. The
hours pass with the increased slowness of waiting.’ 4
Arrupe’s time was spent either alone in the quiet cell or under
interrogation from the Kempetai, who thought he would eventually admit
to being a spy. Guards would come to speak with him about his religion
and Arrupe enjoyed preaching to them about God. During interrogations,
Arrupe often told his life story, how he was a doctor and became a priest
after witnessing miracles at Lourdes. While interesting to his interrogators,
his stories could in no way prove his innocence.
Beginning at midnight on 11 January 1942 Arrupe underwent 37 hours
of continuous interrogation in which he was questioned about politics,
religion and numerous other ‘inconsistencies’ concerning his beliefs. After
this interrogation he returned to his cell, fearing that his execution was
imminent. A short time later he was escorted to the prison governor’s
office and, to his surprise, was told that he was being released. The governor
informed Arrupe that he had been imprisoned because of rumours against
him, but that the Japanese people believed ‘one of the best ways of judging
the innocence or guilt of the accused is to examine him closely in his
everyday actions’. 5 It was not his theological arguments that had saved
his life, rather, ‘his internal completeness, his simplicity, his transparency
of soul’. 6
Upon hearing this news, Arrupe thanked his guards and the governor,
telling them they had done him a service. To their astonishment, this man
who had been mistreated and isolated for over a month was not angry or
spiteful. When the flummoxed governor asked him to explain, Arrupe
replied,
You have taught me to suffer. I came to Japan to suffer for the Japanese
people. Jesus Christ suffered more than any other man. The believer
is not afraid to suffer with or like Christ. You have helped me to
understand this. 7
The policeman fought back tears as he told Arrupe he was free to preach
his religion. After the war, US war crimes investigators asked Fr Arrupe
for the names of those who had held him captive, but he refused to
4
5
6
7
Bishop, Pedro Arrupe, 19.
Bishop, Pedro Arrupe, 75.
Bishop, Pedro Arrupe, 76.
Bishop, Pedro Arrupe, 76.

12 James Menkhaus
divulge the information. He did not want revenge on those who had
done him wrong, but to move on to forgiveness and healing.
On 9 March 1942 Father Lasalle, his superior, asked Arrupe if he
would like to go to Nagatsuka to become the new novice master. Although
fearful that his knowledge of Japanese language and customs was not yet
strong enough for him to serve in such an important role, Arrupe
accepted the position. Two days later, he said goodbye to his parishioners
in Yamaguchi and journeyed to the outskirts of Hiroshima. Staring at the
valley he had called home and which had been the beginning of Xavier’s
journey, he ‘left part of his heart behind in Yamaguchi’. 8
The Day of the Atomic Bomb
The Jesuits had two houses in Hiroshima: one was a parish church in the
city and the other the novitiate in the hills outside at Nagatsuka. Arrupe
was charged with the care of 35 young Jesuits in the novitiate house.
The morning of 6 August 1945 began like any other. Arrupe said Mass
on the Feast of the Transfiguration at 5:30 a.m. At 7:55 he heard the
sound of a B-29 circling above, but he assumed the planes were making
their usual patrols. Around 8:10 a.m. he walked into his study with
another Jesuit and, no longer hearing the planes, assumed they had left.
At 8:15 a.m. a blinding flash of light filled the house. Some Jesuits
were thrown across the room from the power of the blast. While the
explosion was instantaneous, Arrupe reflected, ‘Three or four seconds
seemed an eternity because when one fears that a beam is about to
crash down and flatten one’s skull, time is incredibly prolonged’. 9
He
immediately checked on those in the house and was relieved to find no
one had been seriously injured. Suspecting a bomb had fallen just outside
the house, the men went out to investigate.
Continuing to search for the cause of the explosion, they looked
down towards the city and saw smoke. Moving to high ground to
ascertain what was going on, Arrupe recalls, ‘From there we could see
a ruined city: before us was a decimated Hiroshima’. 10 The entire city was
engulfed in flames. Many of the homes were built of wood, paper and
straw, and at the time of the blast families were lighting ovens to cook
their morning meals. These two aspects ensured the city would be
8
9
Bishop, Pedro Arrupe, 82.
Arrupe, Recollections and Reflections, 23.
10 Arrupe, Recollections and Reflections, 23.

Lessons from the Spirit of Pedro Arrupe 13
consumed in a lake of fire. Clouds gathered in the sky above the city and
a black, heavy rain fell in the north. Arrupe and his novices tried to enter
the city, but were prevented for twelve hours by the sea of fire.
Not knowing what to do in the face of tragedy, the men did the only
thing they could think of: ‘We fell on our knees,’ Arrupe recalled, ‘and
prayed for guidance, as we were destitute of all human help’. 11 200,000
victims of the blast needed aid, yet there was no water to put out the
fires and the wounded began to stream out of the city. Arrupe recalls that
God answered his prayers ‘in a very special way’ with a ‘simple and essential
idea’. The men cleared as much room as they could in the chapel and
made it into a hospital. They were able to care for 150 people. Arrupe’s
expertise as a doctor gave him the ingenuity to work with the sparse
means at his disposal.
Because neither Arrupe nor any other human being understood the
type of burns that appeared on the bodies of the victims, he was unsure
how to treat them. Most of his patients would tell Arrupe that they were
not directly burned. They described a flash of light, but then thirty
minutes later burns appeared on their bodies. Arrupe began to lance
the blisters that covered people’s bodies and kettles and basins were used
to catch the liquid that flowed from these wounds. He described the
situation, ‘The suffering was frightful, the pain excruciating, and it made
bodies writhe like snakes, yet there was not a word of complaint’. 12
Thousands of people lay in the streets begging for help. Arrupe
recalls a child with glass in his eye, a man caught between two pillars
with his legs calcified up to the knees, people burning alive, and children
searching for their parents. When they reached the house of the other
Jesuits, all five were badly wounded. They tried to escort them to
Nagatsuka, one being carried on a home-made stretcher. As they left the
city they saw thousands of people near the river, trying to put out the
fires and cool their bodies. As the evening approached the tide slowly
rose and many were unable to move, half buried in the mud. Arrupe
recalls, ‘The cries of those drowning are something I shall never forget’. 13
The fires burned throughout the night.
One of the most moving stories from Arrupe’s reflections is his
encounter with Nakamura, a fervent Christian who received communion
11 Arrupe, Recollections and Reflections, 26.
12 Arrupe, Recollections and Reflections, 29.
13 Arrupe, Recollections and Reflections, 31.

14 James Menkhaus
every day at the 6:30 a.m. Mass
with Fr Arrupe. As he was
passing through the streets in
the days following the bomb, he
entered what was left of her
home. There, lying on a table
in the room was Nakamura.
She was burned, and pus oozed
from the sores on her body. She
had been lying there for fifteen
days, only moving to get rice for
her wounded father. Her muscles
were hollow and rotten, and
maggots were already eating
her body. When she saw Fr
Arrupe she asked him weakly,
‘Father, have you brought me
Communion?’ 14 She died shortly
after receiving the Eucharist.
A church destroyed by the Hiroshima blast
Arrupe often recalled how much
she had taught him about faith and Christ’s consoling presence in the
Eucharist.
Although many people needed aid, the Jesuits continued to say Mass
in the chapel with bodies strewn across the floor. Arrupe recalled the
puzzled looks of the wounded, staring at him inquisitively as he said Mass.
Arrupe recollected, ‘In spite of it all, I do not think I ever said Mass with
such devotion’. 15 He explained,
I can never forget that terrible feeling I experienced when I turned
toward them and saw this sight from the altar. I could not move. I
stayed there as if I was paralyzed, my arms outstretched, contemplating
this human tragedy. 16
Nearly every person who was treated by Arrupe and his novices survived.
Even more powerful for Arrupe was the number of survivors who were
so inspired by his actions that they later asked to be baptized.
14 Bishop, Pedro Arrupe, 169.
15 Arrupe, Recollections and Reflections, 31.
16 Bishop, Pedro Arrupe, 157.

Lessons from the Spirit of Pedro Arrupe 15
Pedro Arrupe’s encounters with the victims of Hiroshima taught
him many lessons about the human person, the power of destruction and
the helplessness of not being able to save everyone. It is impossible to
divorce his actions and words as Superior General from the formative
lessons he learnt in the months following August 1945. His challenge to
Jesuits and all people to consider the poor and defenceless before acting
was made concrete by his presence at Hiroshima.
The Seventy Years after the Bomb
In 1970, now the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, Arrupe wrote
a reflection, revisiting the experience of being a survivor of the atomic
blast. His insights were not only appropriate for the changes in the world
during that decade, but are still prophetic for the twenty-first century.
For Arrupe, the dropping of the bomb was an experience stuck in history,
frozen in time. He wrote, ‘It is not just a memory, but a perpetually vital
event outside history, which does not go away with the ticking of the
clock’. 17
In the same way, the injustices Arrupe highlighted in his
reflection do not go away with the ticking of the clock. He specified unjust
social structures, racism and atomic weapons of mass destruction as three
central issues that afflict humanity.
Unjust Social Structures
Throughout Arrupe’s reflection he returned to the unjust social structures
that cause people to remain in conditions of marginalisation and hunger.
‘More than half of humanity is undernourished’, Arrupe wrote, ‘and
the situation of these underdeveloped countries becomes daily more
intolerable’. He went on to conclude that the responsibility for the ‘sin’
of the current situation rests with ‘a large segment of human society’. 18
While an individual may have a moral perspective, the interests of the
development of a country or economic system often take precedence
over responsibility to the poor and outcast in society.
Arrupe’s words in 1970 closely mirror the strong denunciation of
modern society by Pope Francis, the first Jesuit Pope, whose Jesuit
formation occurred while Arrupe was Superior General. For example,
in Evangelii gaudium, the Holy Father writes about the new economy of
17 Arrupe, Recollections and Reflections, 52.
18 Arrupe, Recollections and Reflections, 62.

16 James Menkhaus
exclusion that treats people as leftovers in society. ‘How can it be that
it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure,
but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of
exclusion.’ 19 The Pope also challenges people, as Arrupe did, to be more
observant about the waste of food and resources in society. Pope Francis
refers to this modern mentality as a ‘globalization of indifference’ that
is ‘incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping
for other people’s pain … as though all this were someone else’s
responsibility’. 20
Pope Francis’s strong condemnation of contemporary
ideologies of indifference echoes Arrupe’s criticism of the way in which
civilian casualties caused by the atomic bomb were treated as merely
incidental.
Pope Francis has continued to emphasize similar themes in his recent
encyclical Laudato si’. He applies his critique of the globalisation of
indifference to environmental degradation, challenging people to be
more aware of how their actions affect the common good and the earth,
humanity’s common home. Francis warns, ‘The [global] warming caused
by huge consumption on the part of some rich countries has repercussions
on the poorest areas of the world’. 21 His concern for the poor and their
particular susceptibility to the effects of climate change is evident
throughout the document. The problem of climate change was not as well
understood in Arrupe’s time, but Pope Francis’s concerns closely correlate
with his own reflections on the responsibility the rich nations have towards
the poor and marginalised.
Racism
The second issue Arrupe cited as destructive in society is racism. He
writes, ‘It is truly inconceivable that in the twentieth century the worth
of a person or of a people is measured by the color of the skin’. 22 Arrupe’s
observation remains pertinent to recent events in many parts of the
world. A number of violent incidents have demonstrated that Arrupe’s
concern is not anachronistic.
In the USA alone, controversy over police brutality against African
Americans has led to riots in St Louis, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland.
19 Evangelii gaudium, n. 53.
20 Evangelii gaudium, n. 54.
21 Laudato si’, n. 51.
22 Arrupe, Recollections and Reflections, 64.

Lessons from the Spirit of Pedro Arrupe 17
In August 2014, Michael Brown, an unarmed eighteen-year-old African
American, was shot multiple times by a police officer, Darren Wilson.
The civil unrest that followed lasted over a week and made international
headlines. Months later, a grand jury failed to indict Wilson and his actions
were found to be warranted. In April 2015 another incident in Baltimore
again led to riots and civil unrest. A 25-year-old African American man
named Freddie Gray was arrested and sustained fatal injuries while in
police custody. Six officers have been indicted on charges ranging from
illegal arrest and misconduct to assault and involuntary manslaughter.
Even more recently, in July 2015, a police officer from the University of
Cincinnati named Ray Tensing shot a motorist, Samuel DuBose, fatally
in the head after pulling him over for not having a front number-plate.
Tensing’s body camera indicates that DuBose made no threatening moves
towards the officer and he was unarmed. Tensing is currently awaiting
trial.
Numerous examples of racial distrust in the US have caused a reexamination
of the relationship between blacks and whites in the
country. Perhaps emblematic of this new analysis is the controversy
about the flying of the Confederate flag over the State House building in
South Carolina. After the horrific racially motivated murder of African
Americans worshipping at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church
in Charleston, South Carolina, the call to take down the flag sent
shock waves through the country. The Confederate flag is viewed by
many in the US as a symbol of slavery and the racial divide that remained
in the pro-slavery states during and after the Civil War. Therefore,
protesters feel it has no place on a US state building in the twenty-first
century. Balancing historical remembrance and the healing of the racial
wounds that have marked the US since its founding is a difficult process.
Weapons of Mass Destruction
The third issue Arrupe addressed was violence and war. 25 years after
Hiroshima, Arrupe warned against weapons of mass destruction remaining
in the hands of the militaries around the world. ‘The only sure guarantee
that they will not be used is their non-existence.’ 23 Nuclear weapons are
now accessible to more nations than ever before, who have stockpiled
the potential for mutually assured destruction. Negotiations during the
23 Arrupe, Recollections and Reflections, 65.

18 James Menkhaus
summer of 2015 between Iran and the Western powers over the Iranian
nuclear programme underline the importance of preventing nuclear
proliferation that is ever-present in this debate.
While nuclear weapons are still available to many countries around
the globe, there is a new form of technology that perhaps presents an
even greater immediate danger. The skies over Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Iraq, Syria and other Middle Eastern countries contain thousands of
drones sent by the US and other Western countries in an attempt to
fight against militant groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS. Drones have
resulted in civilian deaths in these countries, despite the fact that no
official declaration of war has been made. Estimates vary widely, but
drones have certainly been responsible for hundreds of civilian deaths
in Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan. 24 Many civilians in the West are in favour
of using drones in war because they decrease the likelihood of losing
their own soldiers in battle.
Atomic bombs have not been used in war since 1945 because of
their enormous power and the threat of mutual destruction. The
Hiroshima bomb killed over 100,000 people in a single blast, and modern
nuclear warheads are many times more powerful. 25 Countries understand
that the use of one of these bombs is likely to invite instant retaliation.
While the possibility of a rogue nation or a suicidal dictator using nuclear
weapons remains, there are more checks and balances than in the time
when Arrupe was writing. Drones, however, have become the new silent
killer: they are safer for soldiers, make fewer headlines—but still result in
the deaths of innocent people. Unlike nuclear weapons, whose function
is to be self-limiting, their use will tend to redouble as more and more
countries gain the technology needed to kill from great distances without
leaving the safety of home.
The Challenge for the Next Seventy Years
Unjust social structures that lead to hunger and marginalisation, racism
that devalues people because of the colour of their skin, and weapons
24 Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic and Center for Civilians in Conflict, The Civilian Impact
of Drones: Unexamined Costs, Unanswered Questions (2012), 20. Available at: http://web.law.columbia.
edu/human-rights-institute/counterterrorism/drone-strikes/civilian-impact-drone-strikes-unexamined-costsunanswered-questions,
accessed 1 August 2015.
25 ‘By late 1945, the death toll at Hiroshima stood at 120,000 to 150,000 …. Many tens of thousands
died years later due to complications from exposure to radiation.’ (International Encyclopedia of Military
History, edited by James C. Bradford [New York: Routledge, 2006], 608)

Lessons from the Spirit of Pedro Arrupe 19
that kill faceless victims on the
other side of the globe are all
still challenges for humanity in
the twenty-first century. In his
reflection, Arrupe narrowed down
the causes of injustice, explaining,
‘The diagnosis of war as well as
that of violence is the result of a
single violence, hatred’. It is not
that bombs or drones are evil, nor
developing the technology that
makes them possible. The enemy
is in the hearts of human beings
who preach hatred and use it as a
weapon of control and destruction.
Arrupe continues, ‘The antidote
for hate is called love … which is
the most precious quality of the
human person’. 26
While establishing a culture
Children praying at the Hiroshima memorial
of love may be a difficult task, the lesson we need to learn from Arrupe
may ultimately be to return to the insights of his Japanese internment.
There, he learnt the power of silence, the importance of listening and a
sense of internal completeness that transformed his captors into his friends.
In a world where war and hatred have not decreased in the past seventy
years, Arrupe challenges us to offer the love of Christ to all people,
regardless of their religion, culture or skin colour. Perhaps it is a simple
lesson from history that humanity is just not yet ready to learn but, as a
starting point, we cannot forget what was taught on 6 August 1945.
© Freedom II Andres @ Flickr
James Menkhaus is an assistant professor of theology at Gannon University in Erie,
Pennsylvania, USA. In 2013 he completed his dissertation, which examined
dimensions of solidarity in the thought of Pedro Arrupe. He has taught courses and
published articles on Ignatian spirituality and contemporary ethical issues.
26 Arrupe, Recollections and Reflections, 68.

PRAYING WITH IMAGES
Some Medieval Advice
Anne Mouron
I
N A PREVIOUS ARTICLE, I considered The Manere of Good Lyvyng, a
fifteenth-century translation of the Liber de modo bene vivendi ad
sororem (‘A book for a sister on the way of living well’) which in the past
was widely attributed to St Bernard of Clairvaux. 1 This text, which gathers
together ‘some small lessons of religious conversation taken out of
the writings of my forefathers’ 2
and is aimed at a female audience, is
remarkable for the absence of images, verbal or visual, which have so
often been seen as characteristic of medieval texts written by or for
women. The Desert of Religion is another fifteenth-century devotional
text which has been ‘taken from many books’ (l.922) but is in many ways
a very different work. 3 It is a Middle English poem, not a prose text; it
is a relatively brief work of only 943 lines; and in all likelihood is a text
originally aimed at monks, not female religious. Its greatest difference
from The Manere of Good Lyvyng, though, is the presence of illustrations
on each and every folio of the poem.
The Desert of Religion
Unlike The Manere of Good Lyvyng, which is extant in one manuscript
only, The Desert of Religion survives in three fifteenth-century manuscripts
from the north of England, now in the British Library: MS Add. 37049,
I would like to thank Ronald Richenburg for his many stylistic suggestions. This article is best read in
conjunction with the British Library online resource: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?
ref=Add_MS_37049, fols. 46 r –66 v .
1
Anne Mouron, ‘Praying without Images: Some Medieval Advice’, The Way, 51/4 (October 2012),
91–101. And see The Manere of Good Lyvyng: A Middle English Translation of Pseudo-Bernard’s Liber de
modo bene vivendi ad sororem, edited by Anne Mouron (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014).
2
Manere of Good Lyvyng, 41.
3
The present author is preparing an edition of The Desert of Religion (based on BL MS Add. 37049)
for the Early English Text Society. Henceforth, unless otherwise specified, references are made to this
forthcoming edition. All translations from the Middle English are mine, and subsequent references are
given in the text.
The Way, 55/1 (January 2016), 20–30

Praying with Images 21
MS Stowe 39 and MS Cotton Faustina B vi, part ii, all of which contain
illustrations. 4 Its title, The Desert of Religion, was given to the text by its
first editor, Walter Hübner, in 1911. 5 This is entirely appropriate, for the
concept of the desert (or wilderness) lies at the core of the poem, and is
frequently repeated throughout, as the beginning of the text demonstrates:
‘Lo, then, would I wander far off, and remain in the wilderness.’ David,
that was always a prophet, we hear him say thus in the Psalter: ‘Fleeing,
I fled from more and less, and dwelt in hard wilderness’. This wilderness
well betokens the hard penance that men who flee from the world
(that is the flesh) and grow in spiritual wilderness should feel, as
religious men do who flee the flesh and follow their soul …. He went
to dwell into the desert, as it is written in the Gospel: ‘Then was Jesus
led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted’. For the desert of
religion is called a field of temptation. Religion that good men should
hold may be called a desert by good reason. (ll.1–24; my emphasis)
The poem, written in rhyming couplets, describes itself as a ‘little
treatise of … vices and vertues’ (ll.926–927) and is divided into 22 short
sections which focus on the typical didactic concepts found in devotional
manuals of the period: the seven virtues, the seven deadly sins, the
creed, the ten commandments and so on. The ninth section of the poem,
for example, deals with the seven deeds of mercy:
Two are to feed the hungry and thirsty who need it with food and
drink. The third is, always when there is need, to clothe those that
are naked and without clothes; the fourth, as men understand, is to
visit men lying in God’s fetters; the fifth is to give shelter to the
destitute and to poor pilgrims that walk far and wide; the sixth is, as
it is found in books, to visit prisoners in chains; and the seventh is
to bury the dead. (ll.411–423)
But The Desert of Religion also emphasizes monastic preoccupations such
as humility, pride, accidia (a species of sloth) and the sins of the tongue,
all of which are given particular prominence in the poem.
4
For the provenance of MS Add. 37049, see James Hogg, ‘Unpublished Texts in the Carthusian
Northern Middle English Religious Miscellany British Library MS Add. 37049’, in Essays in Honour of
Erwin Stürzl on His Sixtieth Birthday, edited by James Hogg, Salzburger Studien zur Anglistik und
Amerikanistik, 10 (Salzburg: Institut für englische Sprache und Literatur, 1980), volume 1, 241–284
(here 252–258). For MS Stowe 39 and MS Cotton Faustina B vi, see Anthony Ian Doyle, ‘A Survey
of the Origins and Circulation of Theological Writings in English in the 14th, 15th, and early 16th
centuries’, unpublished PhD. thesis, Cambridge University, 1953, volume 2, 192–193.
5
‘The Desert of Religion’, edited by Walter Hübner, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und
Literaturen, 126 (1911), 56–74.

22 Anne Mouron
The Desert of Religion says that it is ‘taken from many books’. The
chief source is the Speculum vitae which, in spite of its Latin title, is a
Middle English rendering of Frère Laurent’s Old French Somme le roi, ‘an
international spiritual classic’. 6 Other texts include The Prick of Conscience,
a popular didactic, devotional and encyclopaedic poem, and Richard
Rolle’s Emendatio vitae, a Latin text which offers its readers ‘twelve stages
or “steps” of the spiritual life, from conversion to contemplation’. 7
Because of the formulaic, catechetical nature of its material and its
great reliance on the Speculum vitae, The Desert of Religion does not offer
much information on the identity of its author. The only possible reference
in the text to the author-compiler is that ‘a holy man sent it to his
friend(s)’ (l.928), and the poem’s Prologue alludes to ‘men of religion’
(l.10), implying that the author-compiler and his primary audience were
probably such men themselves. 8 The very first line of the poem, ‘Elongaui
fugiens, et mansi in solitudine’ (Psalm 54:8), seems to refer to a monastic
authorship. In his life of St Stephen, the twelfth-century prior of
Grandmont, Gerard Ithier, explains this verse as applying to monks:
The Blessed Stephen was asked whether he was a canon or a monk or
a hermit? … A monk is indeed said to be alone or a keeper of himself;
he is alone because in spiritual solitude he prepared for himself a
place to inhabit with God, so that he could in all truthfulness say:
Elongavi fugiens in solitudine et mansi (Ps LIV). 9
The insistence on the concept of ‘desert’ or ‘wilderness’ in The Desert
of Religion may more specifically hint at a Carthusian authorship. Although
the twelfth-century Renaissance generally emphasized a return to the life
of the Desert Fathers, as Clifford Hugh Lawrence noted, ‘it was the
6
Ralph Hanna, ‘The Yorkshire Circulation of Speculum vitae’, in Design and Distribution of Late Medieval
Manuscripts in England, edited by Margaret Connolly and Linne R. Mooney (Woodbridge: Boydell and
Brewer, 2008), 279. See Speculum vitae: A Reading Edition, edited by Ralph Hanna, 2 vols (Oxford:
OUP, 2008), introduction, lxx. Speculum vitae is organized around five sets of items: the seven petitions
of the Pater noster, the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, the seven deadly sins, the seven virtues and the
seven beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount. And see Frère Laurent, La Somme le roi, edited by
Édith Brayer and Anne-Françoise Leurquin-Labie (Paris: Société des Anciens Textes Français, 2008).
7
See The Prick of Conscience, edited by James H. Morey (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications,
2012); Richard Rolle, Emendatio vitae, orationes ad honorem nominis Ihesu, edited by Nicholas Watson,
Toronto Medieval Latin Texts, 21 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1995), 20.
8
The use of the first person plural pronoun at regular intervals within the work seems to indicate that
the author-compiler includes himself among its religious audience.
9
Vita S. Stephani auctore Gerardo priore Grandimontensi septimo, in Patrologia Latina, edited by Jean-Paul
Migne, volume 204 (Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 1855), col. 1024B–C (my translation).

Praying with Images 23
Carthusians who really succeeded in translating the ideal of the desert
hermits into a monastic fortress of stone’. 10 The twelfth-century Cistercian
William of St Thierry bears witness to this claim at the beginning of The
Golden Epistle, which he addressed to the Carthusians of Mont-Dieu:
The Brethren of Mont-Dieu introduce[d] to our Western darkness
and French cold the light of the East and that ancient fervor of
Egypt for religious observance—the pattern of solitary life and the
model of heavenly conduct. 11
It should also be noted that the Carthusians themselves regarded their
monasteries as heremi, or ‘deserts’. 12
If it is true that the meaning of
‘desert’ as a religious house is not exclusively confined to the Carthusians,
they are certainly the order which insists on it most.
Since the Speculum vitae and The Prick of Conscience were attributed
to Richard Rolle, since one section of The Desert of Religion was excerpted
from Rolle’s Emendatio vitae and since the poem contains an image of
Richard Rolle, some scholars have suggested that The Desert of Religion
was the work of a ‘follower of Richard Rolle’. 13 Although this is certainly
a possibility, there is no way of knowing one way or the other.
If The Desert of Religion was simply made up of 22 sections exploring
devotional subjects with conceptual lists, as the earlier quotation about
the seven deeds of mercy illustrates, it would hardly be different from the
numerous didactic manuals written after the Fourth Lateran Council
of 1215. The Desert of Religion certainly includes these lists, but it offers
its reader much more besides. Of particular interest is its presentation
of conventional didactic material within an allegorical framework and
with the help of two series of illustrations: tree-diagrams, and depictions
of saints and hermits—illustrations which feature in all three manuscripts
of the poem. In other words, and unlike The Manere of Good Lyvyng,
The Desert of Religion provides its reader with an abundance of images.
This may at first be surprising in a poem written for Carthusian monks,
10 Clifford Hugh Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism: Forms of Religious Life in Western Europe in the Middle
Ages, 3rd edn (Harlow: Pearson, 2001), 156.
11 William of St Thierry, The Golden Epistle: A Letter to the Brethren at Mont Dieu, translated by
Theodore Berkeley (Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1980 [1971]), 9.
12 This is already the case in the oldest acts of the Grande Chartreuse. See Recueil des plus anciens actes
de la Grande Chartreuse (1086–1196), edited by Bernard Bligny (Grenoble: privately printed, 1958), 3.
13 Peter Kidd, ‘Codicological Clues to the Patronage of Stowe MS. 39: A Fifteenth-Century
Illustrated Nun’s Book in Middle English’, Electronic British Library Journal (2009), 9 n. 23.

24 Anne Mouron
but one will note that, in its three components (text, tree-diagrams and
illustrations of praying hermits), the poem embodies the three stages of
the lectio divina: lectio (the text), meditatio (the tree-diagrams) and oratio
(the praying hermits).
Praying with Images
Tree-Diagrams
Although The Desert of Religion begins with a quotation from the Psalms
emphasizing the concept of wilderness and the desert, the Prologue ends
with a different verbal image, that of the forest:
In this spiritual forest trees grow with branches and boughs: some
grow to heaven and some down to hell, some to stand and some to be
felled; some grow in a spiritual enclosure, and some to be removed
by digging with the turf (ll.43–48).
It is worth observing that, from the early Middle Ages onwards, the desert
and the forest came to be regarded in the same way, that is, as an area
of solitude where life was hard. Jacques Le Goff, for example, mentions
that, according to Columban’s biographer Jonas of Bobbio (c.640), the
Irish saint was offered a place to live in the Vosges which he ‘liked …
because it was in the middle of a forest: “a vast desert, a harsh solitude,
a rocky terrain”’. 14 In this view, therefore, these two loci, the desert and
the forest, are not mutually exclusive.
In The Desert of Religion’s forest, twenty trees, good and bad, are
depicted, including a Tree of Virtues and a Tree of Sins, a Tree of
Humility and a Tree of Pride, a Tree of Abuses in Religious Places and
a Tree of Abuses in the World, a Tree of the Creed, a Tree of the Seven
Sacraments and of the Seven Virtues, and a Tree of the Seven Deeds
of Mercy. Indeed, apart from the Prologue and Epilogue, every other
section of The Desert of Religion begins and ends with a reference to a
tree, as the following lines illustrate:
The first tree of this beautiful forest is the tree of virtues which is
always pure and firmly plants its roots in meekness. Of this tree virtues
sprout forth and spring upwards and spread its leaves, and they grow
both with branches and boughs. (ll.49–54)
14 Quoted in Jacques Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago:
U. of Chicago P, 1992), 51 (my emphasis).

Praying with Images 25
© The British Library Board, Add. MS 37049, ff. 46v–47r
The Tree of Virtues, Add. MS 37049, fol.47 r

26 Anne Mouron
The section ends thus:
This is the tree of which we hear that David speaks in the Psalter:
‘The righteous is like a tree that stands beside the course of water
streams and he gives his fruit in the appropriate time; his leaf shall
neither fade nor wither’ (ll.83–88).
As this last quotation shows, the familiar image of the tree is not
taken from everyday life, but from the scriptures (Psalm 1:3). In The
Desert of Religion, this allegorical forest or verbal image is complemented
on the recto folio by a tree-diagram, which usually lists in its leaves the
concepts mentioned in the text itself. Such tree-diagrams are obvious
mnemonic devices and are certainly not unique to The Desert of Religion.
They are encountered elsewhere, but mostly in Latin, rather than the
vernacular.
In The Desert of Religion, tree-diagrams serve two functions: allowing
readers to memorise essential doctrine more easily, but also enabling them
to meditate on a particular subject. Indeed, readers are encouraged to
develop their own reflections according to other works they may have
read or heard, sermons they have listened to and images they have seen in
church painted on walls or inscribed on stained-glass windows. In other
words, the tree-diagram provides readers with links that their memory
can access, as though clicking on a hyperlink. The third tree-diagram,
for example, lists (without any acknowledgement) the twelve degrees of
humility from Bernard of Clairvaux’s De gradibus humilitatis et superbiae,
a text which attained immediate fame and may very well have been
known to the poem’s original readers. 15
Moreover, if one compares the section on the seven deeds of mercy
in The Desert with their treatment in the Speculum vitae—the source text
for this particular section—one sees that in the Speculum the deeds of
mercy are first named, but then each one is examined separately. 16 In The
Desert of Religion, however, readers are only given the list. It is up to
them to formulate their own meditation. This essential participation by
the reader makes each and every reading of the poem unique to that
reader.
15 The Desert of Religion, MS Add. 37049, fol. 49 r . For Bernard’s text, see De gradibus humilitatis et
superbiae, in St Bernard, Tractatus et opuscula, edited by Jean Leclercq and H. M. Rochais (Rome:
Editiones Cistercienses, 1963), 1–59.
16 For the first deed of mercy, for example, see Speculum vitae, volume 1, 253, ll. 7563–7582.

Praying with Images 27
Saints and Hermits
The Desert of Religion also includes a second series of illustrations, mostly,
but not exclusively, of saints and hermits. The first tree, for example, is
aptly illustrated by Paul the First Hermit, whose life has been written
notably by Jerome and later by Jacobus de Voragine in The Golden
Legend. 17 Paul the First Hermit, or Paul of Thebes, is believed to have
withdrawn to the desert in the fourth century to escape persecution. In the
illustration accompanying the first tree, Paul is praying in his cave and
looking towards a raven which brings him bread. The whole illustration
is framed by the following words:
For forty years, I dwelled in the wilderness in a cave, where God of
his great goodness granted me to have each day half a loaf of bread
which he sent me by a raven. There, my clothes were more and less
made out of leaves that protected me from the elements (fol. 46 v ).
In the original, this framing-text took the form of eight lines of rhyming
couplets. As these are written in the first person, the reader is obviously
meant to identify with Paul and to become a hermit like him by meditating
on the concepts listed in the text and tree-diagram opposite.
The allegorical framework of the forest, the tree-diagrams and the
illustrations of saints and hermits: these three features of the poem
provide readers with a virtual representation of themselves as hermits
in the forest. In other words, in The Desert of Religion, the very images
introduced in the poem redirect the readers’ thoughts towards God in
order to cut them off from the secular world. One could even go further
and claim that in The Desert of Religion the use of images actually negates
the world altogether.
The Manuscripts
I should like to conclude with a brief look at one of the individual
manuscripts of The Desert of Religion, MS Add. 37049. The poem, text
and images are spread out on the verso and recto folios for each section
of the poem apart from the Prologue and Epilogue. The verso folio is
17 See Jerome, Vita S. Pauli primi eremitae, in Patrologia Latina, edited by Jean-Paul Migne, volume 23
(Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 1845), cols. 17–28C; Bazyli Degórski, Edizione critica della ‘Vita Sancti
Pauli primi eremitae’ di Girolamo, dissertation, Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, Rome, 1987; Jacobus
de Voragine, De sancto Paulo heremita, in Legenda aurea, edited by Giovanni Paolo Maggioni, 2 vols
(Florence: SISMEL, 1998), volume 1, xv, 141–142.

28 Anne Mouron
© The British Library Board, Add. MS 37049, ff. 46v
Paul the First Hermit, Add. MS 37049, fol.46 v

Praying with Images 29
divided vertically into two halves, with the text on the left and the image
of the hermit or saint on the right; the recto folio is taken up entirely
with a tree-diagram. 18
Although the text of the poem and the tree-diagrams change very
little from one manuscript to the next, the same does not hold true for
the illustrations of saints and hermits. A consideration of the first section
of the poem, the first tree with Paul the First Hermit, may serve as an
example. In MS Add. 37049, unlike the other two manuscripts, above the
depiction of Paul the First Hermit there is an angel holding a shield with
the five wounds of Christ. The illustration contains two distinct areas: the
hermit in his cave and heaven above. There is an obvious interaction
between the two as the angel presents the hermit (and the reader) with
an image for devotion and meditation. This intervention of the heavenly
realm may be the result of the hermit’s solitude—throughout the poem
the hermit is never represented with a fellow hermit—but at the same
time, as represented in MS Add. 37049, he is never really alone. The
numerous angels featuring in the upper half of the verso folio in many
other sections of the poem in this manuscript show that the hermit is
part of a spiritual community. If in The Manere of Good Lyvyng the
addressee is told to ‘forget [her] own people and [her] father’s house’ 19
and is provided with a new and spiritual family (as I noted in my earlier
article), 20 in The Desert of Religion, readers are repeatedly advised to leave
the world for the solitude of the desert, but at the same time they are
also provided with a spiritual community to make up for the loss of the
secular one.
Focusing on God
When one compares The Manere of Good Lyvyng and its lack of everyday
images with The Desert of Religion and its numerous illustrations, one
may be reminded of two texts by two of the better known Middle
English mystics: the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing and Walter Hilton’s
Scale of Perfection. Alastair Minnis underlines the contrast between these
two works, with one text strongly advising the absence of images (Cloud
18 MS Cotton Faustina B vi follows the same layout. MS Stowe 39 divides the verso folio horizontally.
19 Psalm 44: 14. Although not translated in the The Manere of Good Lyvyng, this verse is actually
quoted in the Liber de modo bene vivendi ad sororem. See Patrologia Latina, edited by Jean-Paul Migne,
volume 184 (Paris, 1862), col. 1214D.
20 Mouron, ‘Praying without Images’, 99–100.

30 Anne Mouron
of Unknowing) and the other one advocating their presence (Hilton’s
Scale). 21
However, in The Manere of Good Lyvyng and The Desert of Religion the
situation is perhaps best looked at in a different way. For if The Manere
of Good Lyvyng has no visual illustrations, it has a number of verbal
images taken from patristic and scriptural sources rather than from
everyday life. These are images that separate readers from the world and
focus their attention on God. On the other hand, The Desert of Religion, in
all three manuscripts, offers the reader a multiplicity of images; but these
are not taken from everyday life either. These images also isolate the
hermit-reader from the world and, in MS Add. 37049, offer opportunities
for devotion and ultimately a spiritual community to which to belong.
Possibly the question, in both The Manere of Good Lyvyng and The
Desert of Religion, is not so much the presence or absence of images, verbal
or material, but rather one of control. By controlling the nun’s or hermit’s
environment, the text facilitates what The Desert calls the ‘austerity of
strict living’ (l.32), for as the poem’s Prologue indicates by referring to
another verbal image, which goes back at least to Cassian, ‘For when man
enters the religious life through devotion, he is as a man who should go
into the field to fight against the Fiend’ (ll.12–15).
Anne Elisabeth Mouron obtained her DPhil. from Lincoln College, Oxford, in
1996. She teaches medieval literature at Wycliffe Hall and is a member of Regent’s
Park College. She has published various articles on late medieval devotional texts,
has co-edited with Christiania Whitehead and Denis Renevey the Doctrine of the
Hert (2010), and is the editor of the The Manere of Good Lyvyng (2014).
21 Alistair Minnis, ‘Affection and Imagination in The Cloud of Unknowing and Hilton’s Scale of Perfection’,
Traditio, 39 (1983), 323–366, at 324. Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton and the Cloud author are known
as three of the Middle English mystics. The other two are Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. For an
assessment of all five, see Marion Glasscoe, English Medieval Mystics: Games of Faith (London:
Longman, 1993).

SAINTS, THE CHURCH
AND PERSONAL PRAYER
Robert E. Doud
T
HE JOB OF THE CHURCH is to help people become saints. 1 One of
the ancient names for the Church is the Communion of Saints.
Another very ancient, indeed biblical, name for the Church is the Body
of Christ. The Body of Christ is also what we receive in the sacrament
of the Holy Communion: it is the communion, the community and the
common unity of all Christians, local and worldwide. The Communion
of Saints is the Church, and the Body of Christ is the Church. The job
of each member of the Church is to help the other members to become
saints, while joining them in the same process.
All Christians are, in some sense, saints. 2 We have all been cleansed
in the waters of baptism; we have all thereby washed our robes in the
blood of the Lamb, as the biblical Book of Revelation says (7:14). We, as
members of the Church, are God’s Holy People. But we are still sinners.
No one of us on earth will be perfect until we die and go to heaven. In
this world, we are all saints and sinners at the same time.
Many Christians, especially Roman Catholics, also talk about saints as
those almost perfect people who have led lives of extraordinary holiness
in this world, and who have been canonized as saints by a Church. 3 Some
were considered to be saints long before there was a canonization process. 4
Thus, we have Mary, Joseph, John the Baptist, Stephen and Agatha. We
1
Karl Rahner, ‘Veneration of Saints’, Theological Dictionary (New York: Herder and Herder, 1965),
479: ‘The magisterium speaks of the significance of the saints when describing the Church as a sign
among the nations and basing her credibility squarely on her holiness …’.
2
Elizabeth A. Johnson, ‘Saints and Mary’, Systematic Theology: Roman Catholic Perspectives, edited by
Francis Schüssler Fiorenza and John P. Galvin, volume 2 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), 156. Johnson
quotes Lumen gentium thus: ‘in various ways and degrees we all partake in the same love for God and
neighbor, and all sing the same hymn of glory to our God’.
3
The Roman Catholic Church has a formal procedure for canonization; the Orthodox and Anglican
Churches also recognise and celebrate saints, and add feast-days for new ones.
4
Kenneth L. Woodward, Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint,
Who Doesn’t, and Why (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 50–52.
The Way, 55/1 (January 2016), 31–44

32 Robert E. Doud
name churches after these holy
people. Many others have been
exceptionally holy without ever
having been named as saints.
I always enjoy hearing the
epistles read in church, especially
when St Paul mentions his
travelling companions. Today, it
was Sosthenes. I often leave
church thinking about these
associates of St Paul. I am sure
Sosthenes is a saint, although
he was never canonized. Then,
I think of Sylvanus, Timothy,
Barnabas, Silas, Onesimus, John
Mark and Philemon. If they were
partners in the gospel with Paul,
it is highly unlikely that they
failed to become saints.
All Saints’ Day, by Johann König, 1599
I think that the early Church
stressed martyrdom too much. Of course, when we had so many martyrs,
they would take priority in becoming saints. At some point in church
history, however, with fewer martyrs around, monks and nuns started to
be canonized. By now, there may be too many canonized religious and
too few lay and married saints. We need role models for ordinary people
today who are not called to die for their faith but to live it.
Making Saints
To explore and to understand the idea of sainthood is to seek after the
idea of holiness itself. 5 The Church is there to make people holy. To probe
the nature of sainthood or holiness is to probe the nature of the Church.
Canonized saints are exemplary people who show that the Church has
done its job well. Saints show the Church to be the People of God, a
pilgrim people, the Communion of Saints and the Body of Christ. The
Roman Catholic Church’s process of canonizing saints, while generally
taken by Catholics to be inspired by God, may seem to be flawed in
5
Rahner, ‘Holiness, Human’, Theological Dictionary, 207–208: ‘Human holiness is an absolute surrender to
the God of eternal life as he is in himself’.

Saints, the Church and Personal Prayer 33
many ways. Maybe the Church makes too many saints. Maybe it takes
too long to become a saint. Maybe the Church misses some of the best
people when it makes saints. Maybe it is not necessary for saints to have
miracles attributed to them in order to be canonized.
We should all be looking around for people who are holy and who
can be examples of holiness for us as well. Is there someone in my
workplace who is not only a better worker but also a better person than
I am? Is there someone whose participation in the liturgy and in the
work of my parish makes him or her a person to whom I look up? Who
are the models of prayer, community service and social justice that I can
emulate? These people have characteristics of holiness that I can imitate
as I become holier myself. To some extent, saintliness or holiness is in the
eye of the beholder. The reason why the universal Church canonizes
saints is so that we will look around us and see examples of holiness for
us to copy.
Thomas Merton, Holiness and Modern Life
Thomas Merton (1915–1968) was a Trappist monk whose life story and
many writings are well known in the Catholic community, and far
beyond it among other monks of other traditions, such as Hinduism and
Buddhism, and among people interested in spirituality around the
world. Christian monasticism has maintained close contact with the roots
of Christian spirituality in the early Church. Merton has become the
best known, and perhaps also simply the best, interpreter and purveyor
of the early church tradition of prayer and mysticism. He has provided
many people in the modern and postmodern world with access to monastic
spirituality.
I first read Merton’s Seeds of Contemplation as a boy in high school.
At college I often carried a copy in my hip pocket, and used to get
together with a group of junior seminarians who would read it together
after confession on Saturday night. This was in 1961 or 1962, just before
the Second Vatican Council; after the Council Merton revised his book
as New Seeds of Contemplation. 6 Some of us were also interested in Zen,
yoga and the hip poetry of the Beat Generation. Merton’s ironic view of
the world and of worldly values resonated well with the budding interior
life of the Catholic seminarian of that time.
6
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1972), 65: ‘The more I
become identified with God, the more will I be identified with all the others who are identified with him’.

34 Robert E. Doud
The truest
part of
ourselves is
fused with
God at every
moment
A key notion in New Seeds of Contemplation is the contrast or
distinction between the true self and the false self. 7 Each one of us has a
true and a false self. Many people never get to know the true self at all.
They manage to spend an entire lifetime living out the agenda of the
false self, which builds an inflated existence for itself on strictly worldly
terms. 8 Inside, there is a shy, hidden and unexplored region called the
true self. The true self is a sanctuary in which God is always
present, like a private chapel within ourselves where we can
go to be closer to God than to our own breath. It is a great
consolation to the monk or contemplative person that, even
when we seem not to be praying at all, the truest part of
ourselves is fused with God at every moment and everything
else with which we busy ourselves is of secondary and finite
importance. Deep within us there is a self that is true and
real, a self that God creates, moment by moment, giving it love and
grace. God calls to us ever so gently just to walk or sit in the realisation
that God is there. A small and flickering candle of worship is eternally
lit within us. The tiny space in which that inextinguishable candle is lit
is the true self. 9
A saint is one who has managed to change the focus of attention,
in a habitual way, from the false self—which never disappears, even in
advanced sanctity—to the true self that is ever-present in perfect quiet
and humility. John the Baptist said of the coming of Christ: ‘He must
increase, but I must decrease’ (John 3:30). This is the wisdom of the
true self. The Jesuits say Deus semper maior, or ‘God ever greater’; the
interior experience is of the self shrinking away before God. It is an
experience of God becoming ever more wondrously, although perhaps also
more quietly and subtly, present. Mary’s prayer, the Magnificat, begins:
‘My soul magnifies the Lord’. Glory belongs to the Lord, and the ability of
the true self to rejoice in that truth and abide in that reality is the test,
proof and joy of the spiritual life.
7
Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 38: ‘This true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from
the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion ….’ Excellent subsequent material on the true self is
found in Anne E. Carr, A Search for Wisdom and Spirit: Thomas Merton’s Theology of the Self (Notre
Dame: U. of Notre Dame P, 1988), and in Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True
Self (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2013).
8
Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 21: ‘It is when we refer all things to this outward and false
“self” that we alienate ourselves from reality and from God’.
9
James Martin, My Life with the Saints (Chicago: Loyola, 2006), 387; Martin quotes Merton as
writing, ‘For me to be a saint means to be myself’.

Saints, the Church and Personal Prayer 35
Praying with the Saints
Sometimes when I am praying, I feel that Merton, or Bishop Fulton
Sheen, another charismatic figure in the Catholic spirituality of the 1950s,
is present with me. Bishop Sheen spoke occasionally at my parish church
in Brooklyn, New York, and I always tried to be present in the sanctuary
on these occasions, dressed in cassock and surplice. I still sometimes feel
the presence of these men. I know others who feel the presence of
Dorothy Day or Edith Stein. 10 I know a hairdresser who prays to St Rita
all day long. An old aunt of mine enjoyed constant communion with
St Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower. Some of the saints I know best
are canonized, and some of them are not. I think that the poet William
Wordsworth is a saint; I think that Gerard Manley Hopkins is a saint. I
feel a deep kinship with them, and if I go for long walks alone at night,
or in the day, I feel that saints and poets walk with me.
Eventually, Fulton Sheen became an archbishop, but we always
referred to him as Bishop Sheen. He was a prominent speaker on radio and
television from the 1940s up until the 1960s. It was quite chic among
some of the café society set in New York during those years to become
Catholic, that is, to be converted by Fulton Sheen. What was not
commonly known about Bishop Sheen is that he was a philosopher in
his youth. He had earned his doctorate at the University of Louvain in
Belgium and he went on to become a professor at the Catholic University
of America.
There were many Catholics in academic life who were dismayed
when Mgr Sheen gave up his academic post to become director of the
Society for the Propagation of the Faith (SPOF) in New York. He was
not yet thought of as an administrator and popular preacher. He brought
a kind of erudition to preaching that was uncommon in his era, and he
raised enormous amounts of money for the SPOF. As a child I loved to
read the jokes in his little booklet that came to the house every few
months. The good bishop himself appeared as a character in the cartoons.
It was from Bishop Sheen that I first heard of Teilhard de Chardin. 11
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit, was, in the 1950s, president
10 Woodward, Making Saints, 139; ‘[Edith Stein was] a modern intellectual [philosopher] who had
come to faith in the person of Jesus through the disinterested pursuit of truth’.
11 Walter J. Burghardt, Long Have I Loved You: A Theologian Reflects on His Church (Maryknoll: Orbis,
2002), 35: Burghardt notes ‘what Cardinal [Maurice] Feltin called his [Teilhard’s] marvelous seductive
“global vision of the universe wherein matter and spirit, body and soul, nature and supernature,
science and faith find their unity in Christ” ’.

36 Robert E. Doud
of the National Geographic Society in New York City. Teilhard had spent
many years in China as a palaeontologist, doing research on Peking (now
Beijing) Man. He had also helped evaluate the findings of anthropologists
in South Africa on early hominid discoveries. In addition, Teilhard de
Chardin was a mystic. Even before the Roman Catholic Church had
accepted the theory of evolution as scientifically true, Chardin had written
theological works presenting evolution as the way in which God creates.
Teilhard contemplated prayerfully the deep presence of God in matter
as divine love shaped that matter into the various living species on the
earth. His ideas were condemned by the Vatican, but his reputation for
sanctity, vision and scientific honesty grew among Catholic intellectuals.
As a college sophomore, I heard Sheen speak about Teilhard de Chardin
with great reverence as early as 1960. I now consider both Sheen and
Teilhard to be saints.
The writings of Teilhard de Chardin were extremely influential at the
Second Vatican Council which, as we well know, changed the Roman
Catholic Church radically and permanently. The Council was a New
Pentecost that poured out the Holy Spirit in ways that may not be fully
appreciated even now. Perhaps no one had more influence on the direction
of that visionary council than Pope John XXIII. 12 For me, John XXIII was
the greatest saint of the twentieth century. It was his incredible humanness
and inclusiveness that set him apart from and above the rest of us, and
at the same time brought him so very close to us.
The Saints in Art
Another aspect of the saints is the inspiration they have given to the
arts. 13 I think of my visit to the Cathedral of St Bavo in the city of Ghent,
in Belgium. This cathedral is the home of a huge work of art, a painting
originally created to go behind the main altar. The altarpiece is called
The Adoration of the Lamb, and it was painted by Jan van Eyck (1390–
1441). At the centre of the painting is the Lamb of God, standing on an
altar placed in the middle of a field, surrounded by nature. Blood is
flowing from the Lamb into cups, to be drunk as wine would be drunk,
12 Martin, My Life with the Saints, 184. Martin quotes Pope John XXIII thus: ‘The secret of life is to let
oneself be carried by God and so carry him [to others]’.
13 David Tracy, Dialogue with the Other: The Inter-religious Dialogue (Louvain: Peeters, 1990), 109: ‘The
philosophers and theologians … [are] demanding extra-biblical support for the [Christian] narrative
… through philosophical or cultural [artistic and poetic] arguments’.

Saints, the Church and Personal Prayer 37
The Adoration of the Lamb, from the Ghent Altarpiece, by Jan van Eyck, 1432
by streaming hordes of people who converge on the altar in long columns.
The people are kings and queens, lords and ladies, soldiers, priests, nuns
and monks, families, children, peasants, artisans of all kinds. There are
also saints and angels; the surface of the artwork is extremely busy.
What the artwork depicts is exactly what the cathedral itself
represents, a focus or destination towards which all humanity is called to
come. The three great divisions of humanity—or divisions of the
Church—are the Church Triumphant, including all the saints in heaven,
whether canonized or not; the Church Suffering, or all the souls in
Purgatory who are preparing to enter heaven; and us, the Church Militant,
the ones still on earth who are fighting the good fight and are yet to win
a permanent place in the Kingdom. All are in some sense saints, God’s
Holy People, participants in the Communion of Saints. We are enshrouded
or embedded in this Mystery, and in the reality of this gives us our identity.
There is another work of art, also Flemish and also famous, that I
would present as the perfect counterpoint to van Eyck’s The Adoration of
the Lamb. This other painting is called Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
It is a Dutch genre painting, typically droll and self-deprecating in its
depiction of Dutch life. The painter, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525–
1569), pictures the boy Icarus, who has fallen from the sky into the sea,
surrounded by many people, all of them going about their stolid business—
caring for animals, ploughing, driving a cart along the road—none of
them noticing that the boy needs help, or that this lad has accomplished

38 Robert E. Doud
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1555
something no one else has ever done. He has flown close enough to
the sun for it to melt the wax holding his wings together and cause him
to fall to earth before them. They fail, or they refuse, to be surprised,
impressed or enchanted by anything that confronts them. They are like
some people in the modern and postmodern world who are unable to
notice the marvellous and the miraculous, the mystery of being and life
that surrounds them.
There is a famous poem by W. H. Auden called ‘Musée des Beaux
Arts’. This poem reflects on two of Bruegel’s paintings, Landscape with
the Fall of Icarus and Census at Bethlehem, both of which hang in the
Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels. The first verse of Auden’s poem is
about Census at Bethlehem. This painting pictures a pregnant Mary, with
Joseph, awaiting her turn to seek admission to an inn. As with the boy
Icarus in the other painting, nobody seems to be paying any attention
to Mary and Joseph. The poem says:
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not especially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood. 14
14 W. H. Auden, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, in Collected Poems (London: Faber 2007), 179.

Saints, the Church and Personal Prayer 39
The Census at Bethlehem, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1566
There is something spiritual in how we compare or interpret works
of art. Allowing for differences, we see a likeness between indifference
and disenchantment in the age of Bruegel and in our own time. Some
people care about mystery and enchantment, and some do not. To van
Eyck, perhaps, the Eucharistic mystery drew towards itself the members
of all ranks of the secular and worldly community. To Bruegel, the worldly
community had come to disregard the sacred and the miraculous. It is
highly unlikely that the children in Census at Bethlehem or the adults in
Bruegel’s Icarus would ever line up to go and see, or join in contemplating,
The Adoration of the Lamb. The special and fallen boy Icarus is like the
slain and risen Lamb, but nobody notices him. The earlier painting (van
Eyck’s) draws out the meaning of the later paintings (Bruegel’s). Van Eyck
presents the reality of enchantment, while Bruegel gives us a picture of
disenchantment. A spiritual lesson is learnt in the contrast.
We live in a ‘destitute time’, as the poet Hölderlin and the philosopher
Heidegger say, because we have lost enchantment, this sense of wonder
and miracle. 15
Enchantment, here, is the eagerness to see holiness in
15 See Martin Heidegger, ‘What Are Poets For?’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert
Hofstadter (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001), 89 following.

40 Robert E. Doud
others and then to be holy ourselves. We miss a good deal of the
goodness, even greatness, constantly surrounding us. We miss even our
own goodness, the sense of the self as holy and as called to become
more holy. The fallen Icarus can be seen as a powerful figure of Christ just
as the ‘lamb that was slaughtered’ (Revelation 5:12, 13:8) is a figure of
Christ.
The job of the saints is to re-enchant our world and our surroundings,
to make us notice the divine agenda, which is all about our holiness, God
sharing divine life and grace with the likes of us, human beings. The
Church is the community of saints everywhere who treasure the reality
and possibility of transparency to divine light and grace. The individual
saints are people whom we recognise as having been personally transparent
to God’s grace and responsive to the will of God in their own times
and places.
The real communion with saints, spelt here without capital letters—
the (small ‘c’) communion or community of saints—involves awareness
of each other, dialogue with other persons, welcoming strangers, noticing
the new, the different, the wondrous and the miraculous, especially the
extraordinary goodness, in the ordinary people around us. This is what
making saints is all about: noticing specialness, noticing holiness in the
great saints, but also in ordinary people, and most especially in ourselves.
Noticing our own holiness makes us humble, because holiness brings with
it the knowledge that what we have belongs to God before it belongs to
us. It is a gift. Humility, then, is our point of connection with others;
the communion, if you will, with saints; the togetherness that makes us
God’s people, a covenanted people. With humility, mere individuality
becomes personality, and the person becomes capable of communion
with others.
The feast day of a saint is called in Latin the natalitia, that is, the
heavenly birthday, the day on which the saint is reborn into eternity—
the day on which the saint died. Death itself is looked on as a birthday
from the point of view of eternity. Just the other day I came across
another painting, The Death of the Virgin by Bartolomeo Vivarini (fl.
1450–1491). In the background of Mary’s death scene is a picture of
Jesus as an adult and as the Risen Lord, holding Mary on his lap as an
infant in swaddling clothes. It thus depicted Mary on her birthday as a
new saint in heaven, where her earthly son is fully manifest as eternal
Lord!

Saints, the Church and Personal Prayer 41
The Death of the Virgin, by Bartolomeo Vivarini, 1485
We Do Not Pray Alone
We think of saints as especially close to God and as influential for
others in their relationship with God. They are also capable of an
extraordinary number of close relationships with other human beings,
living and dead. Saints are friends. They are powerful, accessible and
helpful. Close relationship with God intensifies and multiplies our capacity
for loving relationships with one another. The saints love us; they care for
us; they intercede for us. They pray for us, whether we know who they are
or not, and whether we ask them to help us or not. They demonstrate
for us, in their exalted state, the true nature of the Church and of our
relationships with each other in this world as well. We are all called to
be saints; in some way, we are all already saints.

42 Robert E. Doud
Having a personal and basically Ignatian 16 spirituality myself, I pray
to certain saints in clusters. One of my favourite clusters contains
Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier, Robert Bellarmine, Isaac Jogues, Peter
Canisius, Edmund Campion, Eusebio Kino, the North American martyrs,
the Salvadorean martyrs and the English martyrs. Not all the saints in
these clusters are canonized. The Jesuits Teilhard de Chardin, Karl Rahner,
Walter Burghardt and David Hassel are also in my cluster. For me, they
are surely members of the Church triumphant, and they are available
for friendship and intercession. I have other deceased Jesuit mentors
and friends who are included in my prayers as well. I am sure that their
accomplishments in the world continue to shine in the everlasting
Kingdom of God.
Saints are not jealous or envious of one another. Giving more
honour to one saint does not mean giving less honour to other saints.
Many important friendships in my life have been with Franciscans. I am
a Californian, and the missions around my state remind me constantly
of the Franciscan padres and their legacy. Hence, I pray to another
favourite cluster: Francis of Assisi, Clare of Assisi, Anthony of Padua,
Bonaventure, Juan Crespi and Junipero Serra. I pray with, for and to
friends of mine, living and dead, who are OFMs, Conventuals, Capuchins,
Atonements or Third Order Regulars. I think it makes my own prayer
more powerful and effective if I link it to these contemplatives and
missionaries.
Another community of spiritual friends to which I belong is that of
the Missionary Servants of the Most Holy Trinity. Indeed, I am a
former member of that religious congregation. Founded in 1932, this
community is a new one in the Catholic Church, and has no canonized
members. Nevertheless, having known the traditions of that community,
and many of its members as well, I know it to be a channel of grace and
holiness opened up in the Church by God. Fr Thomas Augustine Judge
is the founder of that community and congregation. Sr Boniface Keasey is
the founder of the Trinitarian sisters’ community. Fr Lawrence Brediger
is revered by Trinitarians as another saintly member. I lived for a while
as a young religious with the venerable Fr Thomas O’Keefe. I often
unite my prayers to what is called the Missionary Cenacle Family.
16 Martin, My Life with the Saints, 98: ‘The path of St. Ignatius means searching for signs of God’s
presence in the stuff of the everyday’.

Saints, the Church and Personal Prayer 43
When I pray, I do not pray alone. I fancy that myriads of saintly figures
flow with me and around me in my own times of prayer. In my prayer, I
share the joy and glory of the saints. I squeeze myself into one of my
clusters of saintly friends. I remember many of the faculty who educated
me in Catholic schools. I remember my own schoolmates and classmates.
I remember my students and others who might have been influenced by
me. I pray that the influence I gave others might be in the long term
positive and not negative. I pray for blessings in the lives of people I may
have neglected or offended along the way. The Church community, always
at prayer, is a vast network of mutual enhancement that is based in patterns
of exchange and transference between members.
The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles does not
contain a very large number of statues. What it does have is a marvellous,
elegant, yet understated tapestry that surrounds the congregation. On
that tapestry, hundreds of saints are depicted in pilgrimage or procession,
towards the altar. This tapestry, I tend to think, is like a twenty-firstcentury
interpretation of van Eyck’s altarpiece in Ghent. The tapestry
was designed on computer in Ohai, California, and actually woven in
© Adam A. Sofen
The Communion of Saints, tapestry by John Nava, Cathedral of Our Lady of the
Angels, Los Angeles

44 Robert E. Doud
Bruges, Belgium. The tapestry depicts the Body of Christ in so far as it
depicts the People of God who are members of the Body of Christ. It
shows all the saints: the saints on earth, or Church militant, moving
with and among the Church triumphant, the saints already in the
Kingdom. It depicts the saints, not only as special individuals but, more
appropriately, in their unity and community with God in Christ. The
full meaning of the tapestry comes alive in the communion procession;
we are all drawn together as pilgrims as we move towards the altar.
The Communion of Saints is a mystery of faith and a doctrine of
the Church. It is also part of our prayerful and liturgical experience. We
all participate in the physical, spiritual and sacramental body of Christ.
The intimacy of that participation is far beyond what we as earthly saints
can understand or appreciate. Receiving the Eucharist has implications,
not only for a person’s friendship with Christ, but for his or her growing
intimacy with the entire Church. The most seemingly insignificant
member of the congregation enjoys a rich participation in the holy
mysteries we celebrate together. Going to communion in procession is
a sign of our communion and connectedness. Moving in line for
communion, I often say: ‘He must increase, I must decrease’. In procession,
the whole Church community moves as one body in one flowing motion;
this is the Body of Christ.
Robert E. Doud is emeritus professor of philosophy and religious studies at Pasadena
City College in California. He has a particular interest in bringing together philosophy
and poetry, using poetry as material offering insight into philosophy and using
philosophy as a tool in the interpretation of poetry. His articles have appeared in
Process Studies, Review for Religious, The Journal of Religion, The Journal of the American
Academy of Religion, Philosophy Today, The Thomist, Religion and Literature, Horizons,
Soundings and Existentia.

BEDE GRIFFITHS’S
ADVAITIC APPROACH TO
RELIGION
Ambrose Ih-Ren Mong
I
N HIS SPIRITUAL JOURNEY from Benedictine monk to Christian swami,
Bede Griffiths attempted to accommodate the Hindu Vedic tradition
within Christianity. Part of this Vedic teaching is the philosophy of
non-duality or advaita, which Griffith adopts and modifies in his theology.
This non-dualistic vision of the whole cosmic reality enables Griffiths
to appreciate other religious systems and eventually to view them as
complementary to Christianity. While he affirms the differences in
religions, he also perceives them as united in the one Spirit at the deepest
level achieved only through contemplation of the divine mystery. This
advaitic approach to understanding the Absolute led Griffiths to believe
that eventually all religions would converge without losing their distinct
identities.
Towards a Christian Advaita
Developed by the Hindu philosopher ankara in the eighth century AD,
advaita, or non-dualism, ‘expresses a relationship between God and the
world or between God and the soul’. This relationship is understood in
terms of ‘non-reciprocity, dependence, non-separatedness, non-otherness
and distinction’ between God as cause (Brahman) and creation as effect. 1
1
See Kuruvilla Pandikattu, Religious Dialogue as Hermeneutics: Bede Griffiths’s Advaitic Approach
(Washington, DC: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2001), 60–61. Pandikattu explains
these terms: ‘Non-reciprocity: .… There cannot be a relationship of mutuality between the cause and
effect …. Creatureship is intrinsic to creatures but creatorship is only extrinsic to [the] creator.
Dependence: Effect has no existence apart from the cause …. Non-separateness: … is due to total
ontological dependence on the cause …. Non-Otherness: … denies otherness strictly understood, that is,
mutual foreignness, heterogeneity and ontological independence from its cause .… Distinction: Though
ankara insists on the nondifference of Cause and effect, he denies at the same time their absolute
identity .… If absolute equality and identity were insisted on, the relation of cause and effect would be
done away with.’
The Way, 55/1 (January 2016), 45–56

46 Ambrose Ih-Ren Mong
Bede Griffiths sought to articulate
a refined Christian version of
advaita in his attempt to construct
a Christian theology that is
relevant to India. It is not a
theoretical construction based on
speculation but evolved from
his personal experience through
years of study and meditation. It
sprang from his practice of the
ascetic life in the tradition of
the Indian sannyasi, or itinerant
holy men. Even before he went
to India, during his childhood,
Griffiths had a vague intuition
of advaita on an evening walk
when he felt at one with nature. 2
Bede Griffiths, in the robes of a sannyasi For Griffiths, advaita is a
mystical intuition of being one
with the divine reality; his experience of non-duality in his encounter
with God is equivalent to the experience of the soul in its very centre,
beyond images and concepts. Hindus and Buddhists may express this
non-dual reality differently, but Griffiths believed that their experience
of the non-duality of the divine is fundamentally the same. Christians
have a lot to learn from Hinduism and Buddhism in their quest for the
Absolute. At the same time, Christians also have a lot to offer to
Eastern religions in terms of refinement and reinterpretation of the
advaitic experience. This involves seeing the Hindu notion of advaita in
the light of the Christian understanding of creation, the notion of the
person and the incarnation of Jesus Christ.
Rejecting the monism of pure advaita, which affirms the absolute
identity between Brahman and the soul, Griffiths describes a Christian
advaita characterized by intuitive knowledge, love and an affirmation
of the reality of the world. He believed that individuals do not lose
their identity, even in deep communion with God. Relationship with
God does not abolish the individuality of the soul. The relationship
cannot be one of total identity or complete absorption. Griffiths writes:
2
See Judson B. Trapnell, Bede Griffiths: A Life in Dialogue (Albany: SUNY, 2001), 13.

Bede Griffiths’s Advaitic Approach to Religion 47
For the Hindu and the Buddhist … in the ultimate state there is an
absolute identity. Man realizes his identity with the absolute and
realizes that this identity is eternal and unchangeable. In the Christian
view man remains distinct from God. He is a creature of God, and
his being raised to a participation in the divine life is an act of God’s
grace, a gratuitous act of infinite love, by which God descends to man
in order to raise him to share in his own life and knowledge and
love. In this union man truly shares in the divine mode of knowledge,
he knows himself in an identity with God, but he remains distinct in
his being. It is an identity, or rather a communion, by knowledge
and love, not an identity of being. 3
In his Christian interpretation of advaita, Griffiths was influenced
by Meister Eckhart’s mystical experience: ‘As Eckhart says, God only
speaks one Word, and in that word the whole creation is contained. In
God the whole Creation exists externally in identity with him.’ 4
For
Griffiths, advaita is the intuitive power of the mind that Eckhart described:
This power has nothing in common with anything else, it knows no
yesterday or day before, no morrow or day after (for in eternity there
is no yesterday or morrow); there is only a present now; the happenings
of a thousand years ago, a thousand years to come, are there in the
present and the antipodes the same as here. 5
In Eckhart’s view, ‘in God’s own knowledge of himself in his Word there
are no real distinctions …. In this sense it is true to say that the knowledge
of God is “advaita”, without duality.’ 6
Another important influence on Griffiths was Thomas Aquinas, who
also speaks of the unity of God:
He is supremely undivided inasmuch as He is divided neither actually
nor potentially, by any mode of division; since He is altogether
simple …. Hence it is manifest that God is ‘one’ in the supreme
degree. 7
3
Bede Griffiths, Christ in India: Essays towards a Hindu–Christian Dialogue (Springfield: Templegate,
1984), 36.
4
Bede Griffiths, The Marriage of East and West: A Sequel to the Golden String (Springfield: Templegate,
1982), 84.
5
The Works of Meister Eckhart: Doctor Ecstaticus, translated by C. de B. Evans (London: John M.
Watkins, 1952), volume 1, 228, quoted in Griffiths, Marriage of East and West, 168.
6
Griffiths, Christ in India, 204.
7
Summa theologiae, 1. 11. 4.

48 Ambrose Ih-Ren Mong
But in this oneness of God there are three Persons to be understood in
terms of relationship and procession—that is, the way in which one divine
Person originates in another. This brings us to Griffiths’ understanding of
the Trinity.
The Trinitarian God
Griffiths applies his understanding of advaita to the divine mystery of
the Trinity, first in the relationship between the Son and the Father:
We could then speak of God as Saccidananda—Being, Knowledge,
Bliss—and see in the Father, sat, Being, the absolute eternal ‘I am’,
the ground of Being, the source of all. We could then speak of the
Son, as the cit, the knowledge of the Father, the Self-consciousness
of eternal Being, the presence to itself in pure consciousness of the
Infinite One. 8
Here we see Griffiths interpreting Jesus’ relationship with the Father in
a modified advaitic sense: Jesus experienced himself as one with God
the Father, and yet distinct. It is an ontological unity that nevertheless
preserves the identity of Jesus so that he can relate to the Father as a
distinct Person. As we have seen, Griffiths rejects a pure advaita that
erases distinctions completely. He clearly explains his understanding of
advaita in the context of John’s Gospel:
But there [in John’s Gospel], Jesus reveals this inner mystery of His
openness with the Father. This to me is the climax of it all, that
this Son of Man, this man knows Himself in this unity with the
Father. He can say, ‘I and the Father are one’. And that is the
mystery of unity-in-distinction. This is the point that is generally
missed …. Jesus does not say, ‘I am the Father’. That would be pure
advaita, pure identity, but says rather, ‘I and the Father are one’,
which is unity-in-distinction …. And He also says, ‘I am in the Father
and the Father is in me’. That is the proper way of expressing advaita
in Christian terms. 9
The focus here is on the human consciousness of Jesus Christ as Son to
the Father—this is ‘unity-in-distinction’.
8
9
Griffiths, Marriage of East and West, 190.
Bede Griffiths, ‘The Personal God: The Trinity’, lecture given to the Ojai Community, 17 September
1983, quoted in Wayne Teasdale, Bede Griffiths: An Introduction to His Interspiritual Thought (Woodstock,
Vt: Skylight Path, 2003), 116.

Bede Griffiths’s Advaitic Approach to Religion 49
For Griffiths the Holy Spirit is ‘the eternal uncreated energy of God
the Father and the Son as well’. 10 He says that the Spirit,
… manifests itself in the energies in matter, in the energies of life,
the energies in our whole human being …. The Spirit is the Love of
God acting in us as an energy, bringing us into being, and calling us
back to Himself. Love is working in us to return. 11
In sum, the love between the three persons of the Trinity is deep and
mutual, but they are neither merged into one nor separated as individuals.
It is their mutual interdependence that gives rise to a wholeness that is
greater than the sum of their parts. This is the fundamental idea behind
Griffith’s formulation of the Christian advaita.
Towards a Convergence of Religions
Griffiths’s reflections on advaita
as an experience of the divine
mystery also allow him to have
a vision of how different religions
can converge, how they can
complement and cooperate with
one another, moving beyond
mistrust and rivalry. Such
convergence, based on advaitic
experience, does not diminish
the importance of the differences
among the diverse religious
traditions, but joins them in a
‘unitive pluralism’. 12 This phrase
describes the harmonization of
religions based both on the
acceptance of differences and
an advaitic commonality. He
writes, stressing the importance
of religious integration:
Marble relief of the Holy Trinity from Sé
Cathedral, Goa, early seventeenth century
10 Teasdale, Bede Griffiths, 119.
11 Griffiths, ‘The Personal God’, quoted in Teasdale, Bede Griffiths, 119.
12 Bede Griffiths, Return to the Center (Springfield: Templegate, 1976), 24.

50 Ambrose Ih-Ren Mong
On this depends the union of East and West and the future of
humanity. We must try to see the values in each of these revelations,
to distinguish their differences and to discover their harmony, going
beyond the differences in an experience of ‘non-duality’, of transcendence
of all dualities. 13
While acknowledging that in each religious tradition there is an
experience of the transcendent reality, Griffiths also respects their diverse
interpretations or expressions of that reality.
It is important to note that Griffiths does not say that all religious
experiences are experiences of the same thing, but that they converge
in the transcendent mystery. At the same time, he believes in the presence
of a vision of non-duality occurring at some point in these various
religious experiences. This means that the universal mystical experience
in all authentic faiths possesses this one advaitic insight.
Complementarity
After many years of study, reflection and meditation at the Shantivanam
Ashram in India, Griffiths began to realise that the cosmic revelation
found in eastern religions is not a mere preparation for the gospel but
actually complements Christian revelation. In Vedanta and Christian Faith,
he writes:
The divine Mystery, the eternal Truth, has been revealing itself to all
men from the beginning of history. Every people has received some
insight into this divine mystery—which is the beginning of human
existence—and every religion, from the most primitive to the most
advanced, has its own unique insight into the one Truth. These
insights, in-so-far as they reflect the one Reality, are in principle
complementary. 14
It was Griffiths’s understanding of advaitic mystical experience that
eventually led him to understand the complementarity of religions. He
believed that,
… to share in the vision of God means … to pass beyond all concepts
of the rational mind and all images derived from the sense. We must
pass into that world of non-dual, in which our present mode of
13 Griffiths, Marriage of East and West, 177.
14 Bede Griffiths, Vedanta and Christian Faith (Clearlake: Dawn Horse, 1973), vii–viii.

Bede Griffiths’s Advaitic Approach to Religion 51
consciousness is transcended …. In this view of the ultimate mystery
of being, which is the beginning and the end of all our human
aspiration, Hindu and Christian unite not only with one another but
also with the Buddhist and the Muslim. 15
For Griffiths, this experience is universal in the mystical tradition of all
faiths, and our study of all the different religions will lead us to a deeper
understanding of the divine mystery.
Griffiths’s thought underwent a radical shift from his early ‘fulfilment
theory’, according to which other religions found their completion and
fulfilment only in Christianity, to a belief that the purpose of interreligious
dialogue is not to convert but to understand the other. Thus Christians
must be open to listen to the Word that is present in other
faiths. He claims: ‘It would seem that in time to come it will
become impossible to be Christian in any complete sense, if
one is ignorant of the measure of wisdom and knowledge to
be found in the traditions of other religions’. 16
Accordingly
interreligious dialogue must play a significant role in Christian
mission. In our effort to foster an ‘integral Catholicism’, Griffiths insists
that Christianity must integrate the insights of all religions into a
comprehensive vision of Christ. This final integration, however, will only
take place in the parousia when we will realise God as God is.
In dialogue the differences between religions can be explored more
deeply. Griffiths insists that dialogue is not a compromise but a common
search for the truth that revealed itself in different religions:
Each religion has to hold the fundamental truth in its own tradition
and at the same time to allow that tradition to grow, as it is exposed
to other aspects of the truth. Thus we begin to realize that truth is
one, but that it has many faces, and each religion is, as it were, a face
of the one Truth, which manifests itself under different signs and
symbols in the different historical traditions. 17
Griffiths asserts that, at the deepest level of religious experience, there is
nothing incompatible among the different religious traditions. The deeper
you go into Buddhism and Hinduism, the more you will realise their
Not to
convert but to
understand
the other
15 Griffiths, Vedanta and Christian Faith, 162–163.
16 Bede Griffiths, ‘Where World Religions Meet’, The Tablet (1 April 1972), 315, quoted in Pandikattu,
Religious Dialogue as Hermeneutics, 167.
17 Griffiths, Marriage of East and West, 25.

52 Ambrose Ih-Ren Mong
fundamental unity with the Christian faith. In this comparative study of
religion, Griffiths gains further insights into the non-dual nature of the
divine reality. He stresses the need to understand the passing forms of this
world through the transformation of our present mode of consciousness
into a deeper level of consciousness: to transcend,
… the dualities external and internal, subject and object, conscious and
unconscious, and become one with the non-dual Reality, the Brahman,
and the tman, the Tao, the Void, the Word, the Truth, whatever
name we give to that which cannot be named. It is this alone that
gives reality to our lives and a meaning to our human existence. 18
Griffiths advocates cooperation and dialogue, which he understands
as mutual enlightenment rather than compromise, as it is no longer
possible for religions to exist in
isolation. He warns against the
danger of an exclusivism that
neglects the unifying foundation of
all faiths. Recognising the relative
values of rites and dogmas, Griffiths
holds that each religion springs
from a profound experience of the
Spirit, which is expressed differently
in each tradition. We seek dialogue
with other religions in order to
recover this original inspiration
of the Spirit. It is by returning to
the source that different religions
can find their unity. 19 This meeting
of religions cannot even be based
on a shared belief in God, since
in Buddhism and some other faiths
there is no such concept. It can
only take place on the basis of
advaita.
Christ the Saviour, Mughal, c.1630–1640
18 Bede Griffiths, A New Vision of Reality: Western Science, Eastern Mysticism and Christian Faith, edited
by Felicity Edwards (Springfield: Templegate, 1990), 226.
19 Griffiths, New Vision of Reality, 103–104.

Bede Griffiths’s Advaitic Approach to Religion 53
Unsurprisingly, this complementarity of religions has not been
generally accepted in the Roman Catholic Church, and thus Griffiths
has received widespread criticism. He was accused of uniting incompatible
teachings regarding Christian theology, Indian mysticism, philosophy
and monasticism without any systematization. Some accused him of
fostering syncretism, but he vehemently denied this:
We are not seeking a syncretism in which each religion will lose its
own individuality, but an organic growth in which each religion has
to purify itself and discover its own inmost depth and significance and
then relate itself to the inner depth of the other traditions. Perhaps
it will never be finally achieved in this world, but it is the one way in
which we can advance today towards that unity in truth, which is
the ultimate goal of mankind. 20
Against syncretism, Griffith’s theological approach stresses convergence,
which is based on openness to various traditions. It is an openness that
allows ‘an organic, natural assimilation of all that is of value in other
traditions and that somehow enriches and illumines the Christian mystery
without contradicting its essential meaning and value’. 21
In Griffiths’s
advaitic approach to religious experience, both differences and similarities
between various faiths are clearly maintained. And he tries to create a
distinction between the original experience and the effect of its historical
conditions.
Thus, as we have observed, Griffiths’s understanding of other religions
is characterized by complementarity, avoidance of syncretism, and dialogue
based on contemplation which springs from his advaitic approach.
Nonetheless, his preference for Christianity is obvious. Griffiths appreciated
the importance of creation and the notion of the person taught in
Christianity, which he found lacking in Eastern religions. He hoped that
in the future all religions would converge on their source, returning to
the original mystical vision that they have lost through modernisation
and secularisation.
Criticisms
There are critics who dismiss ‘ashramic spirituality’ of the kind that
Griffiths promoted as an ‘irrelevant bit of religious colonialism’ packaged
20 Bede Griffiths, ‘The One Mystery’, The Tablet (9 March 1974), 7.
21 Teasdale, Bede Griffiths, 70.

54 Ambrose Ih-Ren Mong
for middle-class Western tourists. 22 The Hindu swami Devandanda asks
by what authority Christian priests wear the robe of the sannyasin and
celebrate Mass using Hindu symbols and customs. Devandanda thinks
that Griffiths had no real grasp of Indian mentality and was meddling
with the souls of the people by his experiments at Shantivanam. Calling
him a ‘spiritual colonialist’, the swami accuses Griffiths of perverting
Hindu symbols and traditions for the purpose of converting the local
people to Christianity. Griffiths defends himself by asserting that great
individuals such as Gandhi and Ramakrishna appreciated Christianity
without changing their own faith. He also claims that his religion is
Christian but his spirit is Hindu. 23
Griffiths has been accused of ‘dubious integration’. If his spirit is
truly Hindu, he cannot be considered a Christian in the orthodox sense:
he seems to be opposing religion and the spirit. Griffiths ‘constantly uses
Christian language to interpret Hindu concepts and Hindu language to
interpret Christian concepts’. 24
To his critics, he is creating a hybrid
that is neither Christian nor Hindu, and his interpretation of the Trinity
in terms of Hindu categories is distorted and misleading. In addition,
his understanding of Hinduism is limited, because he read the Vedas,
Upanishad and the Gita in English translations by Vivekananda and
Ramakrishna, who were influenced by Western philosophy. Shaped by
neo-Hinduism and Western scholarship in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, Griffiths’s understanding of Indian tradition is bound to be
one-sided. There seem to be some similarities between the Christian
logos and Hindu consciousness, between Christian agape and Hindu
bliss, but these are not exactly the same, they loosely correspond with
each other. In the end, for some, Griffiths only succeeds in distorting
both Hinduism and Christianity, and his spirituality is theosophical
rather than Christian. 25 According to his opponents, Griffiths’s writings
lack the rigour demanded by serious theological study; the critical
mind needed to analyze religious theories is absent. For them, his
approach to Christianity and Hinduism is indeed merely syncretic.
22 Michael Barnes, ‘From Ashrams to Dalits: The Four Seasons of Inculturation’, The Way, 41/1
(January 2001), 62.
23 Victor M. Parachin, ‘Bede Griffiths: Christian Guru’, Spiritual Life, 56/4 (Winter 2010), 227.
24 José Pereira and Robert Fastiggi, ‘The Swami from Oxford: Bede Griffiths Wants to Integrate
Catholicism and Hinduism’, Crisis, 9 (March 1991), 24.
25 Pereira and Fastiggi, ‘Swami from Oxford’, 25.

Bede Griffiths’s Advaitic Approach to Religion 55
Another criticism of ‘ashramic
spirituality’ is that it is addressed
only to the Brahminic culture. It is
elitist and ignores the social reality
of India. The Sri Lankan Jesuit
Aloysius Pieris, for example, takes
a quite different approach to
interreligious dialogue by focusing
on the ethical basis of Buddhism. 26
Critical of Western obsessions with
Eastern mysticism, which is actually
foreign to the indigenous religious
experience of the people, Pieris insists
that theology must take into account
poverty and religious pluralism, two
dominant characteristics of the Asian
landscape. Not denying the value
of contemplative theology, he argues
Crucifixion, Rural Theological Institute,
Tamil Nadu
that the shift in Indian Christian theology should be towards dialogue
with the non-Sanskritic religion of the dalits, the broken and poor
people who live on the margins of India’s caste system. The focus
should be on the liberating praxis of the gospel, which is relevant to
these people.
© Matteo @ Flickr
Liberating Openness
There are those, however, who think that the experience of the Christian
ashram has also been a liberating one. Bede Griffiths impressed people
by his humility, warmth and hospitality. His success in his attempt to
assimilate Indian culture into his spirituality was due to his gracious
nature and openness to others. Griffiths understood that the Christian
faith could not be explained in the language of another culture without
being deeply rooted in human relationship. 27 Griffiths possesses experiential
depth and what emerges in his writings is a refreshing view of the
world. He is able to capture and convey the enchantment that is missing
in our daily existence, providing his readers with an inspiring vision
26 See Aloysius Pieris, Love Meets Wisdom (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1990).
27 Barnes, ‘From Ashrams to Dalits’, 62.

56 Ambrose Ih-Ren Mong
and a new orientation through his ability to adapt, absorb and integrate
ideas from Christianity and Hinduism.
With the hindsight of Vatican II and new insights into missiology,
it is easy to criticize Griffiths’s attempt at inculturation. But this is not
fair. Griffiths was among the first to attempt to bring Hinduism and
Christianity together, in the 1950s, and we should look at his sincere
effort to make the gospel relevant to people in India. Impressed by
Griffiths’s holiness and honesty, many followers and admirers, Christians
and non-Christians alike, from India and all over the world, flocked to
his Shantivanam Ashram to learn from him.
Long before Vatican II, Griffiths understood that the future of the
Church in India lies not in the exclusive claims of its beliefs but in the
dialogue with other religions. Thus the Church cannot isolate itself or
remain ignorant of the faiths and cultures of other people. It has to
appreciate and respect the validity of other religious systems without
sacrificing the truth of Christianity. Griffiths remained faithful to the
belief in Jesus as the incarnate Son of God, the Trinity, sacraments and
the historical importance of the Church. At the same time, he sought
change and adaptation in the liturgy, ecclesial structures and theology
by incorporating Hindu customs and categories so that Christianity
would not be an alien religion in India. Like the early fathers of the
Church, Griffiths, in his advaitic approach to religion, was a pioneer in
inculturation and accommodation in modern times.
Ambrose Ih-Ren Mong, a Dominican priest, is also a research associate at the
Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Spirituality and Living
PRAY ANYWHERE
Matt Kappadakunnel
W
ITH NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS being pronounced and attempted,
many people are looking to bring about a change within themselves
through diet plans and exercise regimes. While these goals certainly have
merit, a more important resolution would be one to bring about interior
change in the form of metanoia, or conversion. In the coming year we
should consider placing greater emphasis on fostering (and continuing
to foster) a daily prayer life.
Choosing to follow through on this resolution might appear daunting.
When would I have time to pray? Where would I pray? How would I pray?
Also, words such as those of from St Paul instructing us to ‘pray always’
(1 Thessalonians 5:17) might be discouraging. Without discussing, or
dismissing, Paul’s words, we may find greater ease with this New Year’s
resolution by making one change in his exhortation—from pray always
to pray anywhere.
Anywhere?
Anywhere. We should pray on our commute to and from work or school;
on a park bench during our lunch break; at the beach, standing on the
shoreline; on a mountain cycle path; out shopping while resting our feet.
Whether in nature, in the city or indoors, God is with us and is eagerly
awaiting our response to the invitation to allow God’s love to enter into
our lives. God will most surely meet us wherever we are.
What is being suggested is not novel. Finding God’s active love in
daily life has been promoted by a variety of saints, including Francis of
Assisi, Francis de Sales, Jane de Chantal and Ignatius of Loyola. Jerónimo
Nadal called the spirituality of Ignatius contemplative likewise in action.
Prayer does not need to be limited to churches, readings and devotions
(while noting that these are all wonderful in themselves). We therefore
The Way, 55/1 (January 2016), 57–59

58 Matt Kappadakunnel
cannot use the excuse that we cannot pray because we need to be in a
conventional place to do so.
The freedom to pray anywhere helps us with another common
impediment to prayer—time. Finding time to pray is possible when we
allow ourselves to be flexible about our place of prayer. It will be the most
suitable to each person, according to his or her schedule and individuality.
But this place of prayer is most assuredly holy ground.
For several years I had a morning commute that could vary from
thirty minutes to an hour and thirty minutes. I began to discover the
Spirit’s presence with me most particularly during these mornings. Perhaps
it was the time of day and the regularity of the route, but that became holy
ground for me. Amid the lane-changing and stop-and-go, I became greatly
aware of the movements within my heart as well as God offering me
peace, comfort and love that morning—all while I was driving to work.
I would often experience God’s voice as readily as if I had been praying
in a conventionally religious place. On several occasions I experienced
the gift of the Spirit in the form of tears, which brought much healing
and consolation. The place I chose to pray did not inhibit God from
doing a mighty work within me.
How can we find our best place to pray? One suggestion is to use the
Ignatian Examen (which, in itself, is an excellent form of prayer). During
the evening, we can spend ten to fifteen minutes reflecting on that
day—hour by hour, location to location—with the aid of and the eyes
© Jay Parker @ Flickr

Pray Anywhere 59
of the Spirit. We can ask the Spirit for the grace to discover not only
how God was communicating throughout the day and how we responded
to God’s invitation, but also what particular place in our day is being
set aside by God as holy ground. The burning bush was holy ground only
because God spoke to Moses there; otherwise it was just a bush in the
desert. When that particular place becomes revealed in our prayer, we
can test that place, trusting that God will truly meet us where we are.
St Ignatius describes God as labouring on our behalf in and through
the elements and our surroundings (Exx 236). God can and will do a
mighty work within us wherever we discern where it would be best to
pray. The freedom to pray anywhere allows us to pray more regularly,
which will lead to a change that is far more lasting than any diet plan
or exercise regime. This is a wonderful opportunity for all of us in this
new year. The practice of daily prayer will better dispose us to become
‘contemplatives in action’ as well as to live St Paul’s command to ‘pray
always’.
Matt Kappadakunnel is an investment management professional who graduated
from Creighton University with a Bachelor of Science in Finance. He was a Jesuit
scholastic for more than three years, and studied graduate philosophy at Fordham
University. Matt currently lives in Los Angeles, California, with his wife, Bryana.

A REFLECTION ON THE
CHARISM OF
RELIGIOUS LIFE
Loan Le
I
N HIS APOSTOLIC LETTER to ‘all Consecrated People on the occasion
of the Year of Consecrated Life’, Pope Francis invited religious to reflect
on the life they have been given to live. 1 In response to this invitation I
would like to explore the thought of the Dominican theologian Jean-Marie
Roger Tillard on charism in relation to religious life. Tillard was a
significant participant in the developing theological conversation, before
and after Vatican II, about questions relating to the nature and function
of religious life in the life of the Church. His contribution, as he said,
was not ‘to say anything new, but rather to emphasize one essential
aspect: how religious life exists at the very heart of the mystery of the
Church’. 2
For Tillard, the nature of religious life cannot be studied outside
the context of Church. Therefore I shall start from his ecclesiology. As
he wrote,
When the Holy Spirit quickens religious families and personal
vocations, he makes them all part of his general aim for God’s People.
Their charism is a charism of the Church, given by the Church, for
the Church. Their specific mission represents, in fact, but one facet
of the mission of the whole Church. And since the Church is born of
the communion of various local churches, each retaining its specific
features and having its own particular needs, the charism and mission
1
Available at https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_letters/documents/papa-francesco_
lettera-ap_20141121_lettera-consacrati.html, n. 1.
2
Jean-Marie Roger Tillard, ‘Religious Life in the Mystery of the Church’, in The Mystery of Religious
Life, edited by R. F. Smith (St Louis: Herder, 1967), 3. This article first appeared in French as ‘La Vie
religieuse dans le mystère de l’église’, Sciences Ecclésiastiques, 14 (1962), 89–107. It was then translated
into English by M. Susanna and published in Review for Religious, 22/6 (November 1963), 613–633.
The Way, 55/1 (January 2016), 61–77

62 Loan Le
of religious cannot find their fulfilment elsewhere than in the tasks
and undertaking of the very concrete Christian environments in which
these communities choose to implant themselves. 3
Given that Tillard believed the charism of religious institutes to be
granted for the Church, how does he understand that charism? I shall
begin by outlining Tillard’s thought on charism generally and move on to
how Tillard relates the concept of charism to religious life in particular.
Tillard’s Notion of the Term ‘Charism’
Tillard acknowledges that the term ‘charism’ has provoked some
confusion. In his book There Are Charisms and Charisms, he briefly clarifies
that the adjective ‘charismatic’ relates to grace and spiritual experience:
the Greek prefix charis signifies grace. With reference to the writings of
Paul the Apostle, he adds that ‘charisms’ denote the gratuitous gifts of the
Spirit. 4
For Tillard, the term encompasses a broad range of personal
spiritual experiences, as well as states of life: as he says, ‘Paul has given to
the married state the name of charism, just as he does for the celibate
state’. 5
Moreover, particularly in his examination of Paul’s writings,
Tillard discovers that charism is not just a gift for the benefit of the
community but also a gift for the believer’s personal relationship with
the Lord:
Paul does use the word charism in a way that instantly evokes a pause
to contemplate the inner experience. In particular, he does so in 1
Corinthians 7. There the fact of being agamos (unmarried) is indicated
as a charism (1 Corinthians 7:7). The context shows that what
makes this gift of the Spirit meaningful is not primarily its usefulness
to the community but the believer’s personal relationship with his
Lord (see also 7:32–34). 6
When commenting on the so-called charismatic renewal movement
of his time, Tillard affirmed that ‘for the great majority of its followers,
the charismatic movement simply expresses a sincere desire to renew the
inner life, and more particularly the experience of God’. 7 But when ‘the
3
4
Jean-Marie Roger Tillard, ‘The Paths of Obedience’, Lumen Vitae, 31/3–4 (1976), 282.
Jean-Marie Roger Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms: The Religious Life, translated by Olga
Prendergast (Brussels: Lumen Vitae, 1977), 12 .
5
Jean-Marie Roger Tillard, Devant Dieu et pour le monde: le projet des religieux (Paris: Cerf, 1974), 147.
6
7
Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 67.
Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 16.

A Reflection on the Charism of Religious Life 63
© David Butcher @ Flickr
charismatic renewal movement presents itself as an absolute’, its followers
might involve themselves in a kind of experience of spiritual enthusiasm
to which everything else had become subordinated. 8 In their desire to
highlight the role of the Holy Spirit in the Church’s life, certain groups
within the movement introduced confusion and even misrepresentation
in relation to the terms ‘charismatic’ and ‘charism’.
Among such groups, these terms were essentially ‘linked with an
extraordinary manifestation of gifts, attributed to the outpouring of the
Spirit: glossolalia, interpretation, prophecy, healing’ and miraculous
phenomena. Tillard objected to this orientation. Associating charismatic
experience only with such manifestations was, for him, ‘an extraordinarily
myopic view’. 9 If the terms were given their true meaning, the charismatic
life and the experience of the Spirit were considerably broader than
the usage of these groups implied. 10 Tillard was firmly convinced that
charisms do not just consist of extraordinary experience, nor are they
necessarily exclusive or astonishing. Rather, they are all the gifts of the
Holy Spirit that are bountifully given to all the baptized. As he states,
8
9
Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 17.
Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 13.
10 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 13–15.

64 Loan Le
Every authentic Christian life is a life in the Spirit and fully charismatic,
even without glossolalia, prophecy, interpretation or any other
extraordinary gift. Every Christian eucharistic assembly is charismatic,
even when there is no external manifestation of the outpouring of the
Spirit. Every Christian prayer is a prayer in the Spirit, even without
the enthusiasm of a communicative experience. And I venture to
add that every Christian suffering lived in Christ is charismatic,
even if it is not the object of healing. 11
However, Tillard did believe that there was a valid role for enthusiasm
in the domain of spiritual experience. He proposed two ways of
interpreting enthusiasm in relation to religious matters. On the one hand,
‘like artistic enthusiasm—which has been compared to an intoxication
that carries man far away from the rational and the normal—religious
enthusiasm, if not kept under control, can lead to the worst excesses’.
This kind of enthusiasm is associated with fanaticism and all kinds of
illuminism, and at times borders on insanity. On the other hand, when
rooted in a genuine experience of the divine, religious enthusiasm is
‘the mainspring of those bursts of inspiration which restore to mankind
its sense of the transcendent and its thirst for God’. 12
This is ‘the
enthusiasm born of an experience of the Spirit’. 13
Concerning this latter enthusiasm, Tillard distinguished between
two levels. The first level is what he called a ‘wholly personal and inward’
experience, that is, ‘the person experiences God’s power filling him, he
feels that he is being seized by the Spirit and urged to place his living
strength under the power of the Spirit’. It is an experience of faith, for an
enthusiasm that comes from the Spirit must needs be one that is
grounded in faith. This is the sense in which Tillard applies the term
‘enthusiasm’ when developing his argument on the charism of religious life.
The second level is ‘more external’. That is, the person feels an encounter
with the Spirit through extraordinary phenomena and gestures such as
glossolalia, prophecy, ecstasy, thaumaturgy and the gift of healing. Tillard
observes that these phenomena, which are found in all religions, are not
in themselves typically ‘evangelical’. 14 In some excessive cases they may
11 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 15.
12 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 36.
13 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 37.
14 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 37.

A Reflection on the Charism of Religious Life 65
even demonstrate traces of an extreme trust in the value of human effort
or self-satisfaction. 15
For Tillard, genuine charisms need to be recognised and discerned.
He considers love to be an essential characteristic. Reflecting on St
Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 13, he writes,
The Christian criterion in this domain is neither the quantity nor
the extraordinariness of the individual or collective experience, but
the quality of the love of God and mankind that surrounds the
experience. 16
Supernatural phenomena and spiritual gifts cannot be acknowledged
as genuine charisms unless they actualise love for God and neighbour.
Furthermore, a genuine charism will lead people to praise and service.
As Tillard says, ‘the charism has to transcend the level of experience
confined to the person or the group—including all the joy and peace one
may derive from it—and lead on to the service of the Lord’s glory’. He
emphasizes that charisms are not predominantly ecstatic but doxological—
giving praise to God. ‘They are not primarily a privilege but a service
(1 Corinthians 12:5–7).’ 17 Praising God and serving God and God’s
people are the expression of authentic charisms.
Significantly, Tillard believes that love, praise and service will find
their expression in the result of koinonia (communion) which is ‘the
essential fruit of the Spirit’. 18 According to him, the desire to praise God
and serve others cannot find itself in exclusiveness. He observes that
those who form coteries that are more fascinated by the ecstatic experience
than by love can cause unease and a disturbed atmosphere
in the community, and where such coteries exist in a
community the Lord’s Spirit is not at work. Attitudes that
undermine the spirit of koinonia do not come from the Spirit
of God. Tillard’s concept of charism can be interpreted as a
gratuitous gift of the Spirit given for the benefit of the community but
also, and above all, for the believer’s personal relationship with the
Lord. Born of an experience of the Spirit, charisms are seen as spiritually
linked to an enthusiasm grounded in faith. They are the gifts of the Holy
The kind of
love that
leads to praise
and service
15 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 37–41.
16 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 25.
17 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 25.
18 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 25.

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Spirit bountifully given to all the baptized according to their state of
life. Genuine charisms will be signified by the kind of love that leads to
praise and service expressed in koinonia, an essential fruit of the Spirit.
Tillard on Charism of Religious Life
Tillard believed that the Christian life is innately related to the Spirit
and that ‘every authentic Christian life is a life in the Spirit and fully
charismatic’, whether it be lived in the single, married or religious state. 19
The question then arises as to what distinguishes the charism of religious
life from other charisms in the Christian community. Tillard starts from
the premise that religious life is a state of life within the Church whose
primary component is a relationship built on faith and expressed in a
charismatic call and a charismatic response. I will look more closely at
the three elements making up this premise: religious life as a state of life
in the Church; charismatic call as a primary component of religious
life; and charismatic response as a primary component of religious life.
Religious Life as a State of Life
Tillard centres his teaching on religious life in the theology of koinonia.
Through baptism, believers are initiated sacramentally into communion
with God and, at the same time, into the life of the Church—sharing
© Dmitry Boyarin @ Flickr
19 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 15–16; Jean-Marie Roger Tillard, Religieux aujourd’hui
(Brussels: Lumen Vitae, 1972), 55; Tillard, ‘Religious Life in the Mystery of the Church’, 21–25.

A Reflection on the Charism of Religious Life 67
in the mystery of the ‘communion of life’ with the Father and with others
in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. 20 Although it is made
up of sinners, the Church is always holy, because it belongs to God, who
alone is holy. This is ‘where the drama of the Church is situated’: it is
holy in God’s love, but sinful through human weakness. 21 The reality is
that Christians live in a state of tension as they follow the call to ‘the
perfection of charity and hence of communion’ in the midst of the
demands and responsibilities of their state of life. 22
It is through its sacraments and different states of life that the Church
offers its members the means of responding to their particular call. 23
For each and every person, this call ‘consists in living according to the
charism’ they have received. 24 While none of the states of life constitutes
perfection, they provide a pathway to evangelical perfection in whatever
way the Spirit leads a person to that goal. 25 Tillard defines religious life
as ‘the tending towards perfection’. 26 He writes,
But the perfection of what? Quite simply, of the Christian life. Because
he wants to realize the mystery of charity perfectly, that is to say in the
terms we have been using the mystery of communion of life with God
and with one’s fellow men, the religious is not content merely to
observe the precepts; he freely and generously binds himself to the
narrow way which leads to the keeping of the evangelical counsels;
for the sake of this he cuts himself off from everything that could
place an obstacle between himself and God … he binds himself to a
state of perfection. The word ‘state’ implies stability and in this case
stability that implies an entire lifetime. 27
For Tillard, religious life does not belong to the hierarchical structure
of the Church but takes its source directly from the Holy Spirit. The
initiative for this life does not normally come from within the hierarchy
20 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 4–5.
21 Jean-Marie Roger Tillard, ‘Religious Life, Sign of the Eschatological Church’, in The Mystery of
Religious Life, 61–63. This article was also published in Review for Religious, 23/2 (March 1964), 197–
206.
22 Tillard, ‘Religious Life, Sign of the Eschatological Church’, 63–66; Tillard, ‘Religious Life in the
Mystery of the Church’, 15.
23 Tillard, ‘Religious Life in the Mystery of the Church’, 23.
24 Jean-Marie Roger Tillard, A Gospel Path: The Religious Life, translated by Olga Prendergast (Brussels:
Lumen Vitae, 1977), 17.
25 Tillard, Devant Dieu et pour le monde, 147.
26 Tillard, ‘Religious Life in the Mystery of the Church’, 8.
27 Tillard, ‘Religious Life in the Mystery of the Church’, 8–9.

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but from the faithful, the People of God. This point, Tillard insists, is
fundamental. Here, the action of the Holy Spirit is not confined to the
domain of the sacramental and hierarchical. It is essential to emphasize
this. 28
Inspired by the Holy Spirit, religious life is a particular way of
living the communal experience of grace in the kind of generous response
that is never satisfied with itself. Rather, it aims to move the heart to a
more solid commitment in a special and vigorous way, in light of the
totally mysterious dimension of the Christian experience. Normally it
appears because a person, seized by the Holy Spirit, joins with other
brothers and sisters to seek the Lord together in a particular state of life. 29
Tillard finds this state of life is essentially ‘characterized by the
three vows … and the practice of common life’. 30 However, he cautions
that its members do not ‘make vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity
to add new dignity or to graft a new function upon what Christian
initiation has written in the very depths of [their] being’. 31
The vows
are merely a means to permit the baptismal life to reach its full flowering. 32
One becomes a religious not for the sake of the vows, but for the sake
of the gospel. He writes,
Although the vows represent elements that are specific to the religious
life, and therefore indispensable to whoever feels called to that life
by the Holy Spirit, they are not the primary elements in the concrete
life of grace of the religious. They aim to liberate the Christian in
order to lead him gradually to the heart of the Gospel’s demands.
The vows and common life are thus ‘specific elements’, but not ‘primary
elements’, of religious life. Regrettably, says Tillard, ‘people tend to
confuse specific elements with primary elements’. 33
This raises the question of what the primary elements of religious
life are. After thoroughly researching its history, Tillard found that,
whatever form it has taken, religious life has always had ‘a special
28 Tillard, Religieux aujourd’hui, 56–58; see also Tillard, ‘Religious Life, Sign of the Eschatological Church’,
64; Jean-Marie Roger Tillard, ‘Are Teaching Brothers Still Needed?’ Review for Religious, 25/6
(November 1966), 1019–1022; Jean-Marie Roger Tillard, ‘Religious Women and Pastoral Work’, Review
for Religious, 25/1 (January 1966), 6.
29 Tillard, Religieux aujourd’hui, 56–57.
30 Tillard, ‘Religious Life in the Mystery of the Church’, 21.
31 Tillard, ‘Are Teaching Brothers still Needed?’, 1020.
32 From his research Tillard discovered that the three vows did not exist at the beginning of religious
life. They appeared in the twelfth century, long after the religious state of life had been well
established. See Tillard, Devant Dieu et pour le monde, 121; Tillard, Gospel Path, 85, 94.
33 Tillard, Gospel Path, 101.

A Reflection on the Charism of Religious Life 69
feature’. 34 For Tillard it is no longer acceptable to say that this special
feature is ‘a higher degree of perfection or a more genuine “imitation”
of Christ’. 35 Every baptized person is called to be perfect. 36 The special
feature, he emphasizes, ‘does not stem from a moral or ethical hierarchy
but from an existential way of appropriating and living our common
kinship with Christ’. 37 In other words, this is a question of living a special
style of existence that enables one to embrace the whole of the gospel. 38
From the gospel, Tillard distinguishes between two ways in which
people may attach themselves to Jesus. The first is what he calls ‘the usual
way’: they are called to live the evangelical life without abandoning their
everyday life. The second is ‘a special way’, leaving their customary lifestyle
in order to live the evangelical life in a more concrete and public manner. 39
Donald Maldari observes that ‘without disparaging the “normal vocation”,
Tillard claims that the “special way” to follow Jesus literally required
those disciples to adopt a radical attitude which the others did not’. 40
For religious, this ‘special way’ seeks ‘the one thing necessary’, Jesus
Christ—‘he who suffices to fulfil what their whole life desires and yearns
for’. 41 Compared with ‘the one thing necessary’, all the other things that
a person might strive to obtain are relativised. Tillard emphasizes that,
in choosing religious life, people no longer base their lives on what is
relative, but on ‘the one thing necessary’. 42
The foundation of this
existence is the whole of the gospel charter seen from a radical perspective.
Tillard likens the gospel to an isosceles triangle whose inverted apex
represents the demands of the Sermon on the Mount. Not all Christians
base their existence on those absolute demands. 43 While every Christian
34 Tillard, ‘Religious Life in the Mystery of the Church’, 21. Tillard describes the various forms and
the evolution of this state of life: ‘the cenobitical life of St Pachomius in the fourth century, the
monastic institution of St Benedict around the sixth century, mendicant orders in the twelfth century,
congregations of clerks regular in the sixteenth century, institutes of simple vows in the following
centuries. All of these show that diversity is no stranger to the religious state’ (22).
35 Jean-Marie Roger Tillard, ‘Religious in the Workyards of Men’, Lumen Vitae, 31/1 (1976), 85.
36 Tillard, Gospel Path, 24.
37 Tillard, ‘Religious in the Workyards of Men’, 86.
38 Tillard, Gospel Path, 24.
39 Tillard, Gospel Path, 21.
40 Donald C. Maldari, ‘The Identity of Religious Life: The Contributions of Jean-Marie Tillard Critically
Examined’, Louvain Studies, 14 (Winter 1989), 329; see Jean-Marie Roger Tillard, Les Religieux aux coeur
de l’église (Montreal: Institut de Pastorale, 1967), 11; Jean-Marie Roger Tillard, ‘Sequela Christi’, Spiritual
Life, 18 (1972), 76–80; Tillard, Devant Dieu et pour le monde, 153–169 ; Tillard, Gospel Path, 19–26.
41 Tillard, Gospel Path, 22; see also Tillard, Devant Dieu et pour le monde, 193.
42 Tillard, Gospel Path, 24.
43 Tillard, Gospel Path, 24–25; see also Jean-Marie Roger Tillard, ‘Le Fondement évangélique de la vie
religieuse’, Nouvelle Revue Théologique, 91 (1969), 933–953.

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is called by the Spirit to witness to the Kingdom and to serve it in
various ways, religious locate their life
… in a state where everything that can be required of every baptized
person on certain occasions, becomes for [them] the daily norm,
and [they centre their] entire existence on the perception of this
transcendent and demanding value of the Kingdom. 44
For Tillard, the religious state of life is initially a gift of God given to
the Church by the Spirit. Born of the Holy Spirit of God, it shares in the
mystery of God’s communion with all people. Since it stems from divine
generosity, the primary concern of this state of life is the commitment
to the person of Jesus Christ, ‘the one thing necessary’, expressed in a
relationship built on faith. This faith is not the one conceived in a dogma
to be believed, but is an affirmation, a ‘yes’, embracing one’s heart and the
whole of one’s existence—‘Just like the bride’s “I do” to her husband’. 45
This relationship is constituted by a charismatic call and a charismatic
response of which the Spirit is the source.
© Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston
44 Jean-Marie Roger Tillard, ‘The Theological Viewpoint: Religious Life, a Choice Rooted in Faith’, in
Faith and Religious Life, edited by Jean-Marie Roger Tillard and others (Ottawa: Canadian Religious
Conference, 1971), 28; see also Tillard, Gospel Path, 2425; Tillard, ‘Le Fondement évangélique de la vie
religieuse’.
45 Tillard, Gospel Path, 20.

A Reflection on the Charism of Religious Life 71
A Charismatic Call
In Tillard’s view, religious life is charismatic from its deepest source,
beginning with a ‘charismatic call’. It is charismatic in the sense that ‘it is
the Spirit alone who takes the initiative in the experience that leads a
Christian to choose this type of life, and also that such an experience lies
beyond the rational’. 46 To clarify the meaning of this charismatic call,
Tillard turns to the experience of the Apostles, and links the very beginning
of religious life to the first apostolic call. 47 For him, this call was mysterious,
elusive and very demanding, as we see in the words of Scripture:
And Jesus said to them, ‘Follow me and I will make you fish for
people’. And immediately they left their nets and followed him.
(Mark 1:17–18; also Matthew 4:19–20)
Immediately he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in
the boat with the hired men, and followed him. (Mark 1:20; also
Matthew 4:22)
After this he went out and saw a tax collector named Levi, sitting at
the tax booth; and he said to him, ‘Follow me’. And he got up, left
everything, and followed him. (Luke 5:27–28)
Another of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my
father’. But Jesus said to him, ‘Follow me, and let the dead bury their
own dead’. (Matthew 8:21–22; also Luke 9:59–60)
Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will
have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me. (Mark 10:21; also
Matthew 19:21; Luke 18:22).
For Tillard, this call has ‘the extraordinary, abnormal and irrational traits
which characterize the irruption of the world of the Spirit’. 48
It is Jesus who initiates this call. That is, the chosen persons do not
ask to be chosen; rather it is Jesus himself who takes the initiative.
Moreover, those who receive the call are not necessarily perfect; they are
not necessarily better than others and may even be scandalous sinners.
It is Jesus who suddenly invades the life of a person. Such an encounter
challenges the whole of that person’s being, leading him or her to follow
46 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 35–36.
47 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 45.
48 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 43–44.

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An experience
arising from a
deep encounter
with God
Jesus in the service of the Kingdom. It is only through his Spirit that Jesus
intervenes in the form of a charismatic event. 49 As Tillard explains,
If we all agree that the word ‘charism’ signifies an activity of the Spirit
and not of man, that it is a humanly perceptible manifestation of God’s
grace, a gift presupposing no previous merit on the part of the receiver,
the experience of being seized by the Lord’s power, the consciousness
of thus entering into the mysterious economy of the eschatological
times, then we must admit that the calling of the apostles—including
Paul’s vocation—can be understood only in the perspective of God’s
charismatic realm. 50
For Tillard, the apostolic call in which the Lord, through his Spirit,
asked the Apostles to live as witnesses to the gospel, was a charismatic
call. A vocation to religious life is linked with this apostolic call. 51
A Charismatic Response
A religious vocation involves a free response to being called. Tillard
often describes this response as an act of faith coming from a charismatic
encounter with Christ. Through such an experience, God’s call
to leave everything and follow Christ awakens an initial reaction
that then becomes the soil in which a person’s decisions take
root. This reaction is not essentially of a moral and practical
order; it is primarily related to enthusiasm—an experience
arising from a deep encounter with God within the soul of
the person. For Tillard, the underlying ‘enthusiasm is fundamentally
doxological, adoring’ and empowers the person to respond in faith. 52
In order to discover how enthusiasm leads the person to decide to
respond to such a call, Tillard examines two New Testament passages:
the parables of the treasure and of the fine pearl (Matthew 13:44–46)
which ‘shed light on man’s attitude in the encounter with Christ which
reorients his life’. 53 Reflecting on the works of some exegetes on these
parables, Tillard concludes that, ‘because of the attraction of the Kingdom
and the joy it awakens’ everything else is relegated to the background. 54
49 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 41–43.
50 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 43.
51 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 44–46.
52 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 46.
53 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 47.
54 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 49.

A Reflection on the Charism of Religious Life 73
There is a mysterious enthusiasm created by discovering the inestimable
value of the Kingdom that brings joy to the person, and leads him or
her to leave everything else behind to follow Christ. To put it quite
simply, the radical decision the person makes at such a moment is akin to
discovering the Kingdom and to the joy of the discovery. 55 He quoted
Joachim Jeremias to support this point,
When that great joy, beyond all measure, seizes a man, it carries him
away, penetrates his inmost being, subjugates his mind. All else seems
valueless compared with that surpassing worth; no price is too high,
and the unreserved surrender of what is most valuable becomes a matter
of course. The decisive thing in the double parable is not what the two
men give up, but the reason for their doing so: the overwhelming
experience of the greatness of their discovery. So it is with the
Kingdom of God. The effect of the joyful news is overpowering; it fills
the heart with gladness, making life’s whole aim the consummation
of the divine community, and producing the most whole-hearted
self-sacrifice. 56
For Tillard, the enthusiasm created by the attraction of the Kingdom
and the joy that accompanies the call help us to understand Jesus’
apparently abnormal and irrational demand: ‘Whoever comes to me and
does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters,
yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple’ (Luke 14:26). The
mysterious enthusiasm and joy produced by their encounter with Jesus
can alone explain the actions of the Apostles when they left everything
and followed Jesus. Even when they would rather not follow him, as in
the case of Peter on the shore of the lake (John 21:18), or when they
rejected and excluded Jesus from their lives, as in the case of Paul, the
experience of their encounter with Jesus turned their lives upside down. 57
Such joy, Tillard emphasizes, is not to be equated with the kind of
excitement we associate with pleasure, but it is the ‘joy en kuriô’ (in
Christ); it is ‘not simply a joy whose object is Christ, but one that finds its
whole source and raison d’être in the dead and risen Christ’. Moreover,
this joy does not come from an experience of piety or inner delight. As
‘a manifestation of the Spirit’, it is:
55 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 47–48; see also Tillard, Devant Dieu et pour le monde, 61–67.
56 Joachim Jeremias, Rediscovering the Parables (London: SCM, 1963), 158, quoted in Tillard, There
Are Charisms and Charisms, 48.
57 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 49–50.

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… a realistic enthusiasm, if ever there was one; the enthusiasm
associated not with a lighthearted, youthful joy just brushing life with
its wings, but with a joy which—despite sufferings, failures and
disappointments—springs from communion with the Lord Jesus.
This communion in faith is attained through the experience of a new
life that springs from the paschal of Christ, ‘otherwise it would not be
the unquestionably triumphant joy which resounds here’. 58
Religious who are seized by Christ in a mysterious moment that
determines their life, immediately or gradually, in their ‘following of Christ’
will be embedded in a charismatic experience analogous to that of the
Apostles. It is perhaps difficult for religious to say what initially attracted
them to choose their state of life. The reasons may be different from
person to person, depending on individual backgrounds and cultures. 59
Whatever the reason may be, it is their experience of enthusiasm for
Christ which leads religious to put aside other realities and make a
decision to follow him. 60 This experience is ‘a moment of wonder before
Christ’ which inspires them to discover the key and compelling motivation
for making such a choice. This motivation must be,
… not a for … but a because of … and the object of this because of is
none other than Jesus Christ. One does not become a religious for
something, with a view to something; one enters the religious life
because of Jesus Christ and his ascendency. The for will come later,
© St Joseph @ Flickr
58 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 50–51.
59 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 29.
60 Tillard, Gospel Path, 34.

A Reflection on the Charism of Religious Life 75
necessarily, but in the radiance and as the evangelical fruit of the
because of. 61
For Tillard, the moment of wonder before Christ also inspires the
person’s choice of a particular religious institute or a particular form of
evangelical service of humanity that furthers a founder’s vision. 62 It is
through their understanding of the charism of a particular institute that
believers usually recognise their personal call and realise that the Spirit
is urging them to avail themselves of that grace to the best of their
ability. 63
If religious are not aware of this, they will never grasp the
raison d’être of religious life and, having made a merely external act of
profession, they will drag themselves through life in a meaningless way. 64
The sense of wonder before Christ in unquestionably bound up with
a significant aspect of the act of faith—that of contemplation; it is a
charismatic experience. 65
For Tillard, this ‘contemplative moment in
which the “following of Christ” is grounded leans more towards pure
faith’ and differs totally from ‘the tranquil, intellectual contemplation’
which ‘belongs to man’s efforts to penetrate more deeply into the mystery
of God’. 66 He sees the former as a charismatic event:
The encounter, possibly initiated in a group experience or in the
collective enthusiasm of a ‘charismatic’ event, will be sealed as a
profoundly genuine experience only in the silence, the joyful but
secret silence, of the I-Thou relationship. And it is this moment of
acknowledgement, of opening to the divine life, which is the
contemplative moment …. A moment so essential to faith that,
without it, faith becomes meaningless. 67
For Tillard, the vocation to live the religious life belongs to this level of
experience, an experience of faith. The nature of this experience, the
quality of the religious life, depends upon the gaze of the heart ‘that
contemplates God because the person has been “seized by Christ”’.
61 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 56.
62 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 56–57.
63 Tillard, Gospel Path, 162.
64 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 56–57.
65 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 57. Contemplation is not ‘interpreted as a kind of secret
attempt to remonasticize the religious life, ... not the level of rites, of forms of prayer; it is of a wholly
different level of existence ... that is, “the gaze of the heart, the mysterious presence of Christ in thick
of action” ’ (65).
66 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 91–92.
67 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 58.

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This gaze ‘belongs to a depth of the human mind that transcends the
habitual level of the reasoning intelligence’. 68 It belongs to the field of
intuition and, being bestowed by the Spirit, is entirely charismatic.
Therefore, the life of religious must be centred on faith; that is, faith
must underpin their total adherence to God. 69 In Tillard’s judgment, the
life of lay Christians, irrespective of any reference to faith, is orientated
towards the human adventure of marriage and of a profession or trade
through which they can live generous and upright lives. 70
By way of
contrast, religious life is centred on the core of faith; that is, faith must
come first. Faith must be seen as ‘the warp into which all the other
threads are woven .… The threads, which are celibacy, poverty, community,
obedience and austere living, presuppose that warp and cannot hold
together without it’. If the warp is cut off, the whole meaning of existence
for religious is lost. 71 Significantly, ‘faith must entail praxis and cannot
do otherwise; praxis is the sphere in which it unfolds and deepens’. 72
In short, the charism of religious life in Tillard’s teaching can be
interpreted as a charismatic experience in faith. It is God’s special gift
given, through the work of the Holy Spirit, to certain members of the
faithful. It is a gift of a contemplative moment between a person and
the Lord—‘an I-thou relationship’, calling that person to follow Christ
absolutely in a special way for the glory of God and the good of others,
while at the same time enabling the person to respond to the call
throughout his or her entire life.
‘Come, Follow Me!’
Every authentic charism implies a certain combination of genuine
originality and special initiative for the spiritual life of the Church. An
authentic following of Christ, for religious, must be continuously rooted
in the contemplative moment that is grounded in faith, not just in the
early days of living the religious life, but when, like Simon Peter, they
repeat with tears and in sufferings the initial ‘yes’ that determined the
course of their life. This is an experience of the enthusiasm of the mystic,
thirsting for the Lord even when frightened by the dark of doubt and
68 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 71.
69 Tillard, ‘Theological Viewpoint’, 36.
70 Tillard, ‘Theological Viewpoint’, 21.
71 Tillard, ‘Theological Viewpoint’, 22; see Tillard, Gospel Path, 26.
72 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 71; see Tillard, Gospel Path, 49–73.

A Reflection on the Charism of Religious Life 77
uncertainty. 73
‘Their enthusiasm has calmed down and become more
sober. It has matured. And at the same time it has endured …. There
has been a conversion, a deepening of enthusiasm for Jesus.’ 74 Religious
life ‘is not simply a matter of making each of its days harmonize with a
model outlined in advance, “once and for all”, on the day of profession’.
The Christ whom religious desire to follow cannot be immobilised in a
prearranged moment of time. Today is not simply an encore of yesterday,
although the latter unavoidably leaves its mark upon it. By deciding to
follow Christ, religious must continuously recreate themselves in their
unconditional attachment to the Lord. 75
Springing from a contemplative moment, the initial enthusiasm for
following Christ must perforce mature over time. Religious, for Tillard,
will need to return again and again to that initial ‘Come, follow me!’
which has determined their life commitment. Like Peter on the shore of
the lake, religious will thus rediscover themselves as they learn to discard
their illusions. In the end, the one thing that remains and matters is their
enthusiasm, which now rises from the deepest recesses of a genuine
poverty of heart. From the ground of this radical poverty, their enthusiasm
for Christ gradually becomes a mature faith. 76
Irrespective of whether
they belong to a contemplative order or to an apostolic congregation,
religious continually have ‘to honour and to observe that pause for the
contemplative moment, the moment when Christ’s call found an echo
in [them]’. 77
Loan Le is a sister of the Mary Queen of Peace Congregation in Vietnam, who has
recently completed a doctorate in theology at Sydney College of Divinity, Australia.
73 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 60.
74 Tillard, Gospel Path, 43.
75 Tillard, Gospel Path, 44.
76 Tillard, Gospel Path, 44.
77 Tillard, There Are Charisms and Charisms, 65.

A place of peace, prayer and beauty in North Wales
Away in the loveable west,
On a pastoral forehead of Wales,
I was under a roof here, I was at rest
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Jesuit poet
St Beunos is a Jesuit retreat house offering the Spiritual
Exercises of St Ignatius, silent individually guided retreats
and various themed retreats. We also provide courses
and training in spiritual accompaniment.
For the full programme of retreats and courses, see
www.beunos.com
Contact: The Secretary, St Beuno’s, St Asaph,
Denbighshire, N. Wales, LL17 0AS
Tel: +44 (0)1745 583444
secretary@beunos.com

PAYING ATTENTION TO
THE WISDOM OF OUR
SORROWS
Peter Wilcox
T
HE WELL-KNOWN AUSTRIAN lyric poet and noted spiritual writer
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a collection of ten reflective poems between
1912 and 1922 entitled Duino Elegies. These are intensely religious,
mystical poems that weigh beauty and existential suffering. At one point
in this poem sequence, he encourages the reader not to be a ‘waster of
sorrows’. 1 And in his more popular work Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke
encourages his young friend to use his sorrows in a positive way as a
means to help him grow in holiness. 2
Is this not the challenge for all of us? It is not a gentle world. Everyone
has sorrows in life of one kind or another. The important question is
not whether we have sorrows or not, but what can we do with them so
that we do not waste them? The reality is that what we do with our
sorrows can have a tremendous impact on our growth as a person, both
psychologically, emotionally and spiritually.
In over thirty years as a psychotherapist, I have listened to people’s
stories about their lives. Often, a part of the story involve sorrows of
one kind or another. How people handle them has truly been inspiring
and in some cases amazing to me. Listening to my clients over the years,
I have often wondered why some people become overwhelmed by their
sorrows and seem to buckle beneath them while others learn to integrate
them into their lives in a way that leads to growth. For each of us, the
real question and challenge is—how do we do this? How do we use our
suffering and sorrows in life to be a positive, growthful force so that we
do not end up wasting them?
1
Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, translated by J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender (New York:
Norton, 1963), 79.
2
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, translated by M. D. Herter Norton (New York: Norton,
1934), 63–67.
The Way, 55/1 (January 2016), 79–88

80 Peter Wilcox
Jesus and His Sorrows
Jesus certainly experienced sorrows in his life. He wept on at least two
occasions in the New Testament. We know that he cried when Lazarus
died:
When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet
and said to him, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not
have died’. When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with
her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.
He said, ‘Where have you laid him?’ They said to him, ‘Lord, come and
see’. Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, ‘See how he loved him!’
(John 11:32–37)
© Ron Doke @ Flickr
Jesus allowed himself to cry over the loss of a good friend. He also
experienced great sorrow in his agony in the garden. Luke says in his
Gospel, ‘In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like
great drops of blood falling down on the ground’. (Luke 22:44) All of
us experience personal sorrows
in life and sometimes we have
to struggle not to allow those
And Jesus Wept, statue at the Oklahoma City
National Memorial
sorrows to cause something
inside us to die. Our sorrow
might be the death of a family
member or friend, like Jesus’
sorrow for Lazarus. It might
be the failure of a relationship
or the loss of a job. For others, it
might be fighting an addiction
or struggling with a physical,
mental or emotional problem.
No matter what the source of
our sorrow, we certainly do not
want to waste it.
There are also other kinds
of sorrows that are larger than
our own personal ones. These
are rooted in communities, in
societies, in countries, in the
human condition. Sometimes,
they are so overwhelming that

Paying Attention to the Wisdom of Our Sorrows 81
they are difficult to fathom. How do we understand the immense suffering
of people in whole countries, in cities, in nations? And yet, these kinds of
problems also created a great sorrow in Jesus and caused him to cry. In
Luke’s Gospel, we read that Jesus actually wept over the immense suffering
in the city of Jerusalem. ‘As he came near and saw the city, he wept
over it, saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the
things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.”’
(Luke 19:41–42) How can we respond to this kind of suffering? How do
we react when we learn about the poverty of nations, children not having
enough to eat, hurricanes and tornadoes killing thousands of people and
destroying vast areas of land?
Pain in Things
In his 1943 novel The Human Comedy, William Saroyan tells the story
of a teenager growing up in poverty in an inner city with crime all around
him. He just cannot understand why life had to be so difficult. Why do
people have to struggle so much? Why is there so much suffering and
sorrow and violence all around him? As he ponders these questions, he
gets on a bus and rides all night around the city, crying. His mother is
panicking because he has not come home. Finally, in the morning, he
returns home and begins talking to his mother about his feelings. After
patiently listening to his questions, she responded with these words
that I have never forgotten after all these years:
It was pity that made you cry—pity not just for this person or that
person who is suffering, but for all things, for the very nature of
things. Unless a person has pity, he is inhuman and not yet truly a
person; for out of pity comes a bond that heals. Only good people
weep …. There will always be pain in things, she said. Knowing this
does not mean that a person shall despair. The good person will seek
to take the pain out of things. The foolish person will not notice it
except in himself and the evil person will drive the pain even deeper
into things and spread it about wherever he goes. 3
There is a great sadness in life when we ponder the immense tragedies
that occur in the lives of other people every day. They appear to be so
overwhelming that they can almost make us numb. Often, we are afraid
to stay with these thoughts, wondering how these situations are ever
3
William Saroyan, The Human Comedy (New York: Dell, 1971 [1943]), 131.

82 Peter Wilcox
going to change and become better. What can we do? How can we help?
How can we ‘seek to take the pain out of things’? How can we allow
these realities not to kill our dreams about life? Can we do anything to
avoid becoming a ‘waster of sorrows’?
Finding Meaning
The struggle to find meaning in our sorrows can be very challenging.
Usually, it does not require us to live differently; it requires us to see
our lives differently. Many of us already live far more meaningful lives
than we know. When we go beyond the superficial to the essential,
things that are familiar and even commonplace are revealed in new ways.
But discovering this takes time and patience. It requires a wisdom that
often comes from living and struggling with our sorrows. If we can learn
this wisdom about life, it will allow us never to waste those sorrows.
Finding meaning in our sorrows changes the way we see ourselves and
the world. Through sorrows, people come to know themselves for the first
time and recognise not only who they genuinely are but also what truly
matters to them. As a psychotherapist, I have accompanied many people
as they have discovered in themselves an unexpected strength, a courage
beyond what they would have thought possible, an unsuspected sense of
compassion or a capacity for love deeper than they had ever dreamed. I
have watched people abandon values that they never questioned before
and find courage to live in new ways.
Being Yourself
When I first met Kathy, her psychology practice was barely surviving. She
shared offices with a group of physicians and, desperate to be accepted
and to work under what she perceived as the umbrella of their credibility,
she took whatever crumbs fell from their professional table. Hers was the
smallest office in the complex and hers was the only name not listed on
the office door. It was obvious from the beginning how dedicated and gifted
she was as a therapist. Her lack of confidence troubled me, although I
did not say anything about it at the time. But Kathy felt validated by the
association and she was convinced that she needed referrals from the
doctors in order to have patients.
Kathy was a shy person, a little apologetic and sometimes hesitant
in trying to find the right words in a conversation. She was also just the
slightest bit clumsy. However, all this actually made her very endearing.
You felt somehow at home with her and safe. Her patients loved her.

Paying Attention to the Wisdom of Our Sorrows 83
One day she told me she was moving from her present office.
Although I was pleased, I asked her why she had decided to leave. ‘They
don’t have wheelchair access’, she said. I guess I looked surprised, so she
went on to say that she had not told me everything about herself. She said
that years ago when she was young, she had a very serious stroke and was
not expected to recover. I was astonished. ‘I had no idea’, I said. She
replied, ‘Nobody does’. I went on to ask her why she had kept this part
of her life a secret. Almost in tears, she said that for years she had felt
damaged and ashamed. ‘I wanted to put it behind me’, she said. ‘I
thought if I could be seen as normal I would be more than I was’. And
so she had guarded her secret closely. Neither her colleagues nor her
patients knew. She had felt certain that others would not refer to her
or want to come to her for help if they knew. However, now she was no
longer sure this was true.
‘So, what do you plan to do now?’, I asked her. She looked down at
her hands in her lap. ‘I think I will just be myself’, she told me. ‘I will
see people like myself. People who are not like others. People who have
had strokes and other brain injuries. People who can never be normal
again. I think I can help them to be whole.’ Over the past five years,
Kathy has become widely known for her work. She has been honoured
by several community groups and interviewed in newspapers. She often
speaks on these kinds of topics and consults for businesses and hospitals.
The many people she has helped refer others to her. Her practice is
thriving. Her own name is on the door. All Kathy needed in order to be
whole was the courage to face her own vulnerability. She had gradually
learnt to pay attention to the wisdom of her sorrow.
Life offers its wisdom generously to each of us. Everything in life
teaches, but not everyone learns. Life invites us to stay awake, pay
attention. But for most of us, paying attention is no simple
matter. It requires us not to be distracted by expectations,
past experiences, labels and masks. It asks that we not allow
ourselves to draw conclusions too early and that we remain
open to surprise. In fact, wisdom comes most easily to those
who have the courage to embrace life without judgment. Sometimes, it
will require us not to know, even for a long time. Moreover, it will also
require us to be more fully and simply alive than we have been taught to
be. It may often require us to suffer. But ultimately it will lead to wisdom
and growth.
The courage
to embrace
life without
judgment

84 Peter Wilcox
The Seed of God
There is a ‘seed’ of greater wholeness in everyone. The great Christian
mystic Meister Eckhart called this the ‘seed of God’. 4 Buddhists call it
the Buddha seed. It is that part of everyone that has the capacity for
wisdom. Wisdom is not simply something that we acquire; it is something
that we may become over time. It involves a change in our basic nature,
a deepening of our capacity for compassion, loving-kindness, forgiveness,
and service. Life itself waters this seed within us.
Knowing that a God seed is present in everyone
changes the way you see things. Many things
are more than they seem. Many things do not
show their true nature on the surface. For example,
what you can see and touch about an acorn, its
colour, its weight and its hardness, will never hint
at the secret of its potential. This secret is not
directly measurable, but given the proper conditions
over time, it will become visible. Within an acorn,
there is something waiting to unfold that will become
an oak tree. An acorn is defined by this capacity. Something
can be the size, shape, weight, texture and colour of an acorn,
but without this hidden power to become an oak tree, it is not
an acorn. In the same way, our essential humanity is defined by
this God seed in us, this capacity to grow in wisdom. Every acorn
yearns towards the full expression of its nature and uses every
opportunity to realise its capacity to become an oak tree. Similarly,
there is a natural yearning towards wholeness and wisdom in us
all as well. This varies in strength from person to person. It may
be quite conscious in some people and deeply buried in others. It
may form the focus of one life and lie on the periphery of another, but
it is always there. Wholeness is a basic human need.
Growing in Wisdom
None of us is born wise. Rather, becoming wise is a process and a struggle.
Everyone and everything are caught up in this process of growing in
4
See Meister Eckhart, ‘The Book of “Benedictus” ’, in The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises
and Defense, translated by Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn (Mahwah: Paulist, 1981), 241:
‘The seed of a pear tree grows into a pear tree, the seed of a nut tree grows to be a nut tree, the seed of
God grows to be God’.

Paying Attention to the Wisdom of Our Sorrows 85
wisdom, of becoming more transparent to what is going on within us
and all around us. The struggle is to become free from our illusions. This
is not usually a graceful or a deliberate process. We stumble forward—
often in the dark, like the acorn planted in the earth—to become more
of who we are. In others it is clearly an effort worthy of our patience,
our support, our compassion and our attention.
Possessing wisdom is very different from just having knowledge.
Our life experiences can teach us this. When I was a graduate student,
I studied very hard and learnt how to be a therapist. Although it might
sound simplistic, I truly wanted to help people and be the best therapist
I could possibly be. In class, I learnt many theories of counselling and
even had the opportunity of practising them during my internships. I
would meet clients, listen to them, establish a rapport, diagnose them,
decide what counselling strategy would be most beneficial, and go to
work. I was putting my knowledge to work. The model I was taught
focused on what I as a therapist had learnt about the particular problem a
person was experiencing, and supposedly gave me the tools, the strategies,
to help that person. I was implementing my knowledge. But I did not
have much wisdom then. I was young and did not have much life
experience. What gave me some wisdom was the death of my son and my
struggle through the years of trying to make sense of that reality. This
experience enabled me gradually to understand so many things about
loss, sorrow, life and healing. In the final analysis, I believe this type of
struggle enabled me to become a wise and helpful grief counsellor for
others. Even back then, I did not want to be a ‘waster of sorrows’.
Presence and Listening
Over the years, I have discovered that basically I do not know what is
needed much of the time and, even more surprisingly, I do not need to
know. But now I also know that if I listen attentively to people, to their
essential self, their soul, as it were, I often find that at their deepest
level, they can sense the direction of their own healing and wholeness.
If I can remain open to that, without expectations about what someone
is ‘supposed to do’, how he or she is supposed to change in order to ‘get
better’, or even what that person’s wholeness looks like, what can happen
is amazing. For me, this approach is much wiser and healthier than any
way of fixing a person’s situation or easing pain and sorrow that I might
devise on my own.

86 Peter Wilcox
So, I no longer have many theories about people. I do not simply
diagnose them or decide what their problem is. I do not even believe that
I have to fix them. I simply meet them and listen. As we sit together, I do
not have an agenda, but I know that something will emerge from our
conversation over time that is a part of a larger coherent pattern that
neither of us can fully see at this moment. So, I sit with them and wait.
James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy offers a simple and helpful
description of the possibility within all human relationships. It says that
there is a way of relating to others that encourages a person deliberately to
listen to the hidden beauty in themselves. 5 The place of their beauty is
often the place of their greatest integrity. When you listen, the integrity
and wholeness in others move closer together. Your presence and attention
strengthen that integrity and wholeness, and helps them to hear it in
themselves. It has been my experience that presence and listening are a
more powerful catalyst for change than analysis, and that we can know
beyond doubt things we can never fully understand.
Many years ago, when I prepared for the final session with a client,
I used to review in my mind the milestones and turning points in our work
together that had led to that person’s healing. I would come up with a
list of these, in which I played a rather central role. Carefully, I would
go through my notes and document the insightful interventions I had
made. But when I asked my clients themselves to talk about their own
experience of healing, they would rarely come up with more than half of
my list. The rest of the time, they would share things that surprised me—
chance remarks and facial expressions of mine that they had interpreted
in ways that evoked in them some important and liberating insight.
Then, they would give me examples of how they were able to use this
insight to change their lives. Nodding sagely, I would often have no
recollection of the event at all! Clearly, I had been used to delivering a
message of healing to them that I did not fully understand at the time.
Turning Sorrow into Wisdom
Learning from life takes time. Becoming wise usually takes a lot of time.
Most of us rarely recognise life’s wisdom at the time it is given. Sometimes,
5
James Redfield, The Celestine Prophecy (London: Bantam, 1994), 232: ‘Of course, the first step is to
keep our own energy high, then we can start the flow of energy coming into us, through us, and into
the other person. The more we appredate their wholeness, their inner beauty, the more the energy flows
into them, and naturally, the more that flows into us.’

Paying Attention to the Wisdom of Our Sorrows 87
we are too distracted by something else that has caught our wandering
eye, and not every gift of wisdom comes nicely wrapped. I have often
received such a gift only many years after it was offered. Sometimes, I
needed to receive other things first, to live through other experiences
in order to be ready. Much wisdom is like a hand-me-down … it may be
too big at the time it is given.
Similarly, gaining wisdom from our sorrows takes time. The writer and
physician Rachel Remen invites us to look closely at the example of the
oyster as a guide to seeking wisdom from hardships:
An oyster is soft, tender, and vulnerable. Without the sanctuary of its
shell, it could not survive. But oysters must open their shells in order
to ‘breathe’ water. Sometimes while an oyster is breathing, a grain
of sand will enter its shell and become a part of its life from then on.
Such grains of sand cause pain, but an oyster does not alter its soft
nature because of this. It does not become hard and leathery in order
not to feel. It continues to entrust itself to the ocean, to open and
breathe in order to live. But it does respond. Slowly and patiently, the
oyster wraps the grain of sand in thin translucent layers until, over
time, it creates something of great value in the place where it was most
vulnerable to its pain. A pearl might be thought of as an oyster’s
response to its pain and suffering. But not every oyster can do this.
Oysters that do are far more valuable to people than oysters that do
not. Sand is a way of life for an oyster. If you are soft and tender and
must live on the sandy floor of the ocean, learning to make pearls
becomes a necessity if you are to survive and live well. 6
We are all invited to grow in wisdom and learn how to integrate our
sorrows. As we each do this in our own way, we slowly become a blessing
to those around us and a light in our world. We will not become a ‘waster
of sorrows’. Perhaps the final step in the healing of our sorrows is
wisdom. Perhaps no sorrow really heals completely until the wisdom of
its experience has been found and appreciated. We will not return from
the journey into sorrow to the same house that we left. Like the oyster,
something in us has changed and the house that we return to and live
in will be different as well.
Disappointment, loss and sorrow were a part of the life of Jesus. They
are a part of everyone’s life. Sometimes, we can put these things behind
us and get on with the rest of our lives. But not everything is amenable
6
Rachel Remen, My Grandfather’s Blessings (New York: Riverhead, 2000), 139–140.

88 Peter Wilcox
to this approach. Some things are too big or buried too deep within us to
do this, and we will have to leave important parts of ourselves behind
if we treat them in this way. This is where wisdom begins to grow in us.
It begins with the suffering and sorrow that we do not avoid or
rationalise or put behind us. It continues with the realisation that our
loss, our sorrow, whatever it is, has become a part of us and has altered
our lives so profoundly that we cannot go back to the way it was before.
Just as an oyster turns a grain of sand into a pearl, something in us can
transform such loss and sorrow into wisdom. This process of turning sorrow
into wisdom often looks like a sorting process. First, we experience
everything. Then, one by one we let things go, the anger, the blame, the
sense of injustice, and finally even the pain itself, until all we have left
is a deeper sense of the value of life and a greater capacity to live it.
The grain of sand has become a pearl in us.
After thirty years of accompanying people as they deal with their
sorrows, I would say that the experience of sorrow and the wisdom we
find there will belong completely to each person in their own way.
Often, it will help us to live better. Sometimes, it may help us to die
better as well.
Peter Wilcox has been a psychotherapist and spiritual director for over thirty years.
He holds a doctorate in theology from the Catholic University of America and
has taught at the Washington Theological Union, Loyola University Maryland and
St Bonaventure University. For many years he has directed retreats and conducted
seminars on personality development and spiritual growth.

THE EXPERIENCE OF THE
ABSENCE OF GOD
ACCORDING TO JOHN OF
THE CROSS
Louis Roy
T
HROUGHOUT SACRED HISTORY, Jews and Christians have addressed
the experience of ‘the absence of God’ or ‘the silence of God’ as
they endured periods of adversity: the painful sense that God is absent or
silent just at the time when believers most long for God’s consolation.
The words ‘absence’ and ‘silence’ seem negative, at least initially: they
give rise to disappointment, scandal, perhaps even to revolt. They hint
that God may not even exist. But there are many people who have
maintained their relationship with God while daring to question God’s
incomprehensible silence. Their audacity is striking. The authors of the
Psalms come to mind, along with Jeremiah, Job and other biblical figures.
Beyond these, we think of John Tauler, John of the Cross, Madame
Guyon, Thérèse of Lisieux, Mother Teresa of Calcutta—and, above all,
the Jewish victims of Nazi extermination camps during World War II.
Here I would like to focus on the sixteenth-century Carmelite John
of the Cross (1542–1591), a great mystic and doctor of the Church who
gave us poems that are among the treasures of Spanish literature and,
formed by systematic theology, who teaches us the deepest principles of
the mystical life. He experienced the absence of God in the most
profound way and accepted this affliction. It was his acceptance that
enabled him to grow in faith and love.
An Unwelcome Reformer
When he joined the Carmelites in 1563, John took the religious name
‘John of Saint Matthias’, but after meeting Teresa of Ávila and becoming
involved in the movement for reform of his Order he adopted instead
the name ‘John of the Cross’. In so doing he was already preparing himself
The Way, 55/1 (January 2016), 89–98

90 Louis Roy
St John of the Cross, by Francisco de Zurburán, 1656
to confront the sufferings that the struggle for reform would bring. His
non-reformed Carmelite brothers violently opposed the movement and
persecuted him, imprisoning him in a tiny cell without light or ventilation,
hot in summer and freezing in winter, where he was whipped, starved,
forced to wear filthy rags and to endure lice, kept in almost total isolation
and deprived of books apart from his breviary. After eight-and-a-half
months of such captivity he managed to escape.
It was in the context of this persecution that he lived the experience
of the absence of God, and the following year he began to write his
great poems. He used the phrase ‘dark night’ (noche oscura) in referring
to this absence, and he subdivided the dark night into three phases: the
‘night of the senses’, the ‘night of the spirit’ and the ‘night of pre-dawn’.
The first of these three phases, which corresponds to the early hours of
darkness, purifies the senses, the imagination and the understanding—
by which John means the part of the understanding that depends on
corporeal sense and imagination. The second night is utterly black: the

The Experience of the Absence of God 91
deep night, the heart of darkness. It purifies the spirit, which includes the
understanding, the memory and the will. In the third night, the darkness
is lessened by the first hints of dawn. To quote the saint himself:
The third part, that period before dawn [el antelucano], approximates
the light of day. The darkness is not like that of midnight, since in
this period of the night we approach the illumination of day …. God
supernaturally illumines the soul with the ray of his divine light.
This light is the principle of the perfect union that follows after the
third night. 1
In this third (and final) night, the darkness is attenuated: dawn is near.
The Great Trial
John tells us that, even in the first night, ‘the memory ordinarily turns
to God solicitously and with painful care, and the soul thinks it is not
serving God but turning back, because it is aware of this distaste for
the things of God’. 2 He adds:
Spiritual persons suffer considerable affliction in this night, owing not
so much to the aridities they undergo as to their fear of having gone
astray. Since they do not find any support or satisfaction in good
things, they believe there will be no more spiritual blessings for them
and that God has abandoned them. (1.10.1)
The second night turns out to be even more painful than the first. John
uses the most dramatic terms to convey what one experiences:
[God] so disentangles and dissolves the spiritual substance—absorbing
it in a profound darkness—that the soul at the sight of its miseries
feels that it is melting away and being undone by a cruel spiritual
death. It feels as if it were swallowed by a beast and being digested
in the dark belly, and it suffers an anguish comparable to Jonah’s in
the belly of the whale. (2.6.1)
He explains: ‘What the sorrowing soul feels most is the conviction that
God has rejected [desechado] it, and with abhorrence cast it into darkness.
1
‘The Ascent of Mount Carmel’, 2. 2. 1, in The Collected Works of St John of the Cross, translated by
Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez, rev. edn (Washington, DC: ICS, 1991). The translation has
sometimes been modified here, after checking the Spanish text in San Juan de la Cruz, Obras completas
(Madrid: Editorial Apostolado de la Prensa, 1966).
2
‘The Dark Night’, 1. 9. 3, in Collected Works of St John of the Cross (subsequent references in the text).

92 Louis Roy
The thought that God has abandoned [dejado] it is a piteous and heavy
affliction for the soul.’ (2.6.2)
We can observe here the theme of abandonment by God, with
which that of emptiness is intertwined:
The soul experiences an emptiness [vaco] and poverty in regard to
three classes of goods (temporal, natural, and spiritual) which are
directed toward pleasing it, and is conscious of being placed in the
midst of the contrary evils (the miseries of imperfections, aridities
and voids [vacíos] in the apprehensions of the faculties, and an
abandonment of the spirit in darkness). (2.6.4)
John speaks of an ‘oppressive undoing’ (grave deshacimiento), and he asserts
that ‘the soul must, as it were, be annihilated and undone [se aniquele y
deshaga]’ (2.6.5). Readers with some knowledge of Buddhism will be
struck by this language of the void, annihilation and undoing.
In the same chapter, John offers a reflection of extreme importance
that touches on the role of other humans in the soul’s conviction of
being abandoned: ‘Such persons also feel forsaken and despised by
creatures, particularly by their friends’ (2.6.3). The loss of the support
and comfort of friends intensifies the soul’s distress; I would insist even
more than the saint does on rejection by other people as a factor either
causing or accompanying that distress.
Does God Reject Anyone?
A tricky question poses itself: did John of the Cross actually believe
that he was, in fact, rejected by God? If we examine his language closely,
the answer to this question must be ‘no’. He speaks of the feeling of
being without God and of being rejected:
When this purgative contemplation oppresses a soul, it feels very
vividly indeed [muy a lo vivo] the shadow of death, the sighs of death,
and the sorrows of hell, all of which reflect the feeling of being without
God [sentirse sin Dios], of being chastised and rejected [arrojada] by
him, and of being unworthy of him, as well as the object of his anger.
The soul experiences all this and even more, for now it seems [le
parece] that this affliction will last forever. (2.6.2)
What John talks about is a powerful impression, but not an affirmation
of rejection. Such an affirmation would mean that John had lost his
faith in a God who is wholly faithful. What he appears, rather, to have
lived through was uncertainty, a piercing doubt accompanied by fear

The Experience of the Absence of God 93
that God had rejected him. He mentions ‘doubts and fears’ (dudas y
recelos). 3 His faith was certainly shaken, but it did not fail. Elsewhere,
John associates this direly tried faith with the second night, the darkest
and most difficult—that of the spirit: ‘Faith, the middle [medio] [of the
night], is comparable to midnight’. 4 We find ourselves here face-to-face
with a struggle of faith—but not with the loss of faith. John asked
himself if God had rejected him; but there is no indication, in any of
his descriptions of the dark night, that he wanted to teach that God
had in fact done so.
This interpretation is corroborated by a passage where John stresses
that God is offended by people who, through curiosity and presumption,
seek to know the future by supernatural means. Speaking of ‘those who
were desirous of knowing what was naturally unattainable’, he states:
Provoked by this, God allowed [dejó] them to go astray and gave no
enlightenment concerning this matter in which he did not want them
to meddle. Thus Isaiah proclaims that by way of privation God
commingled in their midst that spirit of dissension. Accordingly,
God is the cause of that harm; that is, the privative cause [causa
privativa] which consists in his withdrawing [quitar] his light and favor
to such an extent that they necessarily fall into error. 5
It is evident that the sin John exposes here is entirely different from
the dark night, since in this case there is culpability on the part of the
presumptuous seeker, whereas in the dark night the contemplative soul is
innocent in face of the scourge that strikes and crushes it. In both cases
John, always the student of Augustine and Thomas, remains convinced
that God is never the direct cause of evil, but permits it—he uses the
verb dejar, ‘to allow’—in the hope that the person thus afflicted may
profit from it. Further, towards the end of his life, probably in 1590, he
wrote to a Carmelite nun:
Live in faith and hope, even though you are in darkness, because it
is in these darknesses that God protects the soul. Cast your care on
God, for he watches over you and will not forget you. Do not think
that he leaves you alone; that would be an affront to him. 6
3
4
5
6
‘Ascent of Mount Carmel’, 2. 11. 6.
‘Ascent of Mount Carmel’, 2. 2. 1.
‘Ascent of Mount Carmel’, 2. 21. 11.
Letter 20, to an unknown Carmelite nun, shortly before Pentecost, 1590, in The Collected Works of
St John of the Cross.

94 Louis Roy
Towards the End of the Night
The idea that God could abandon or reject someone was terrifying, and
John lived through that painful experience during the second phase of the
dark night. However, it was also the sign of a closely related phenomenon:
an increase in light and love. This began with a supernatural illumination,
received as a major insight: those who accept trials with joy are able to do
so thanks to the discovery that, far from displeasing God, this suffering,
fully accepted, pleases God, who uses it as an instrument for their
spiritual progress (2.13.5). An increase in supernatural love follows: those
who allow God to purify their motivation perceive that their natural
desires cease to distract and divide their souls, leaving them free to focus
their desire entirely on God, with an intense longing (2.11.3). God strips
away every natural attachment from the soul, ‘that they may reach out
divinely to the enjoyment of all earthly and heavenly things, with a
general freedom of spirit
in them all’ (2.9.1).
But what does the
third part of the dark
night bring, when the first
hint of dawn begins to
break? John distinguishes
between three states. The
first state is called the
purgative way; for the
most part, it is described
in The Ascent of Mount
Carmel and in The Dark
Night. The second state,
which he calls the spiritual
betrothal (desposorio), is
obtained in ‘the tranquil
night at the time of the
rising dawn’. 7
The third
state is called the spiritual
marriage (matrimonio). The
Sunrise in Winter, by Ludwig Munthe,
mid-nineteenth century
7
‘The Spiritual Canticle’, commentary on stanzas 14 and 15, n. 1, in The Collected Works of St John of
the Cross; see n. 2.

The Experience of the Absence of God 95
betrothal and marriage are described in The Spiritual Canticle and in
The Living Flame of Love.
In The Spiritual Canticle, John shows us that the great affliction of the
dark night opens into an overwhelmingly joyous love, filled with peace
and light:
She [the soul] does not say that the tranquil night is equivalent to
a dark night, but rather that it is like the night that has reached the
time of the rising dawn. This quietude and tranquility in God is not
entirely obscure to the soul as is a dark night; but it is a tranquility
and quietude in divine light, in the new knowledge of God, in
which the spirit elevated to the divine light is in quiet. 8
In The Living Flame of Love, the light is even brighter: ‘The soul with its
faculties is illumined within the splendors of God’. 9 Accordingly, Edith
Stein comments: ‘The union [marriage] seemed to be achieved in the
night, indeed on the Cross. Only later, it seems, did the saint have the
happy experience of just how wide heaven opens itself even in this life.’ 10
She uses the verb ‘to seem’ twice, probably because John remained
imprecise about that subject matter.
Two Objections
It could be asked whether, in dwelling on his afflictions, John of the Cross
falls into masochism. Twentieth-century thinkers, under the influence
of contemporary psychology, distrust any tendency to take pleasure in
suffering. This danger was not, however, invented in our time. In a letter
written in 1536, Ignatius of Loyola warns a Benedictine religious to be
on her guard against this very temptation:
When the enemy [the devil] has produced in us a fear through a
semblance of humility (a humility that is spurious), and has gotten us
not to speak even of things that are good, holy, and profitable, he
then inspires an even worse fear, namely, that we are separated,
estranged, and alienated from our Lord. 11
8
‘The Spiritual Canticle’, commentary on stanzas 14 and 15, n. 23, in The Collected Works of St John
of the Cross.
9
‘The Living Flame of Love’, commentary on stanza 3, n. 10, in The Collected Works of St John of the Cross.
10 Edith Stein (Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross), The Science of the Cross, translated by Josephine
Koeppel (Washington, DC: ICS, 2002), 217.
11 Ignatius to Teresa Rejadell, 18 June 1536, in Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises and Selected
Works, ed. George E. Ganss (New York: Paulist, 1991), 335.

96 Louis Roy
So there is a spiritual danger in every trial: it may turn us towards
ourselves, in making us too focused on what is negative in our own lives.
However, there is no evidence that John of the Cross desired to remain
in darkness. Certainly, he accepted his tribulations, in union with the
passion of Jesus; but he did not actively entertain morose thoughts. His
balance and his deep joy are impressive.
The second objection applies directly to John’s teaching that the
dark night is something temporary, and is followed by the light of dawn.
In contrast to Thérèse of Lisieux and Mother Teresa, who entered the
dark night and remained there for the remainder of their lives, John lets
it be understood that it is normal to emerge from it. Is their experience,
therefore, inconsistent with his?
Consider the last months of John’s life. With Teresa of Ávila, he had
been the soul of the Carmelite reform movement, and he was removed
from any responsibility within it. Given his acute sensitivity, he suffered
greatly, both psychologically and spiritually. Marginalised and calumniated,
he felt abandoned by his own; he was incurably ill, and was to die of
erysipelas, an infectious skin condition. Consequently, he experienced a
second great trial: at the beginning of his religious life, John was rejected by
the non-reformed Carmelites; but at the end of his life he was rejected
by his own reformed brethren. What a devastating disappointment this
must have been!
Is it not possible that, during the last months of his life, as he was
set aside by his reformed Carmelite brothers and had become a prey to
a painful illness, John underwent once more certain aspects of the dark
night? In fact, four months before his death, he confessed to his
confidante, Doña Ana: ‘The soul [my soul] fares very poorly. The Lord
must be desiring that it have its spiritual desert.’ 12 We can say, nevertheless,
that this ‘spiritual desert’ is compatible with the deep peace brought by
the third night, at the coming of dawn. His acceptance of the will of God
is further illustrated in a letter to a Carmelite nun, where he wrote:
Do not let what is happening to me, daughter, cause you any grief,
for it does not cause me any. What greatly grieves me is that the one
who is not at fault [a reforming Carmelite friar, Jerónimo Gracián]
is blamed. Men do not do these things, but God, who knows what is
12 Letter 28, to Doña Ana del Mercado y Peñalosa, 19 August 1591, in The Collected Works of St John
of the Cross.

The Experience of the Absence of God 97
suitable for us and arranges things for our good. Think nothing else
but that God ordains all, and where there is no love, put love, and
you will draw out love. 13
Complete acceptance of what God wills here coincides with lasting peace
and love for one’s enemies.
The Trial of Faith
In conclusion, I propose three observations.
First, as a man of the Renaissance, John concentrated on the
individual. He does not refer to the collective tragedies of the Spain of
his day—for example, Philip II’s repression of Protestants in Flanders,
or the oppression of indigenous peoples by the Conquistadors, which
was denounced by Bartolomé de las Casas. There were certainly many
instances of spiritual darkness in those situations.
Secondly, from this brief discussion, we can extrapolate some
characteristics of the experience of God’s silence. In the beginning, it is
triggered by a negative event: adversity assails us. The trial also takes us
by surprise, so that we lose our normal means of coping with adversity.
Then comes acceptance of the idea that God alone can enable us to
overcome the trial. Finally, we discover the peace and the joy of being
united to the passion and death of Jesus, who also lost everything to find
everything. So the silence of God is lived in four stages: the encounter
with misfortune; disarray as an initial reaction; the complete giving over
of the self to God; and resurrection with Christ. These stages can overlap:
they are not always sequential.
My third observation is more general. John of the Cross took it for
granted that the experience of the absence of God was typical of mystics.
However, if by ‘mystics’ we mean those who cultivate, on a
daily basis, the continual or almost continual presence of
God, we have to distinguish mysticism from the sense of God’s
absence, which touches anyone who must live through an
experience of faith that comes up against wrenching questioning.
In my view, we can be holy without being mystics, but we
cannot be holy without experiencing, because of painful events, the trials
of faith that involve anxious questioning with respect to the silence of
We cannot be
holy without
experiencing
… the trials
of faith
13 Letter 26, to Mara de la Encarnación, 6 July 1591, in The Collected Works of St John of the Cross.

98 Louis Roy
God. This leads me to my final conclusion: this terrible—and beautiful—
challenge of faith is addressed, not just to mystics, but to all believers.
Louis Roy OP holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge. After teaching for
twenty years at the Jesuit university of Boston College, he is now professor of
theology at the Dominican University College in Ottawa. He has published books in
English, French and Spanish. He is interested in intellectual, affective and mystical
approaches to God, in religious experience and revelation, and in interreligious
dialogue.
translated by Jeremiah Bartram, with a few changes and additions by the
author and by the editors of The Way

The Spirit in Contemporary Culture
THE ‘ORDINARY’
CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE AND
THE ‘LITTLE WAY’ OF
SOCIAL JUSTICE
Meredith Secomb
I
HAVE BEEN REFLECTING for some time now on an inspiring seminar I
attended in 2014, describing groundbreaking work at the interface of
the arts and public health. The presenter, an ethnomusicologist, human
rights activist and professor of music, is engaged, among many other
things, in taking the arts to a Peruvian slum and a US prison. His work
is focused on the deeply impoverished people of our world, impoverished
both materially and spiritually. It is work that transforms people’s lives,
their sense of self and their feeling of significance and value. It is work
that contributes to social justice.
The seminar unsettled me, leading me to wonder what commensurate
work I now do, as one who identifies herself as a contemplative, to
contribute to alleviating the world’s desperate inequities and pain. 2 While
I had in the past sought to relieve the suffering of others, in both formal
and informal ways, when these particular activities came to an end so,
too, it seemed, did the fulfilment derived from the effort to integrate my
contemplative prayer life with loving concern for the suffering of others. 3
1
André de Quadros, ‘From American Prisons to Peruvian Shantytowns: Rescuing the Arts from the
Realm of the Elite’, The Victoria Institute, Melbourne, 21 May 2014.
2
Note that The Way recently published a paper which nicely situates the historical background for
those pursuing contemporary contemplative lives: see Carol McDonough, ‘Christian Hermits and
Solitaries: Tracing the Antonian Hermit Traditions’, The Way, 54/1 (January 2015), 76–89.
3
My formal activities comprised working in a private psychological practice and writing theological
papers that sought always to address the heart even while being presented in an academic context. In
both cases I was aware, however, that these were merely stages on the contemplative journey. My
subsequent informal exercise of being a ‘cycling missionary’ in the Australian countryside seemed best
The Way, 55/1 (January 2016), 99–109

100 Meredith Secomb
© auntjojo @ Flickr
Hence my present question: how can I live authentically as a
contemplative open to God and to the suffering of my neighbour in the
comfort of Western suburbia? A number of assumptions are implicit in
this question. The first, which I accept, is that we are called to love and
to serve others; the second, which I investigate, is that a life that prioritises
contemplative prayer in the ordinary circumstances of the ordinary world
is a valid one; the third, which I reject, is that we all have to do ‘big’
things to fulfil the call to social justice and loving our neighbour.
I shall begin by considering the emphasis on social justice within the
Christian tradition, referring briefly to scripture and then to the work of
theologians who have considered the significance for Christian living of the
most marginalised in our world. Their call has been to action, including
action that challenges the social structures that sustain inequities. Set
against this activist engagement is the seemingly incompatible life of the
ordinary contemplative living an ordinary life in suburbia. I then propose
a rapprochement between the urgent need for all Christians to exercise
active compassion in the face of the suffering of others and the genuine
limitations of people living ordinary, if prayer-filled, lives in developedworld
circumstances. I propose, in ways consistent with the contemplative
tradition, that this rapprochement is found in valuing the little ways in
which love can be expressed to the needy around us.
to ‘fit’ the foundational contemplative call to love of God and neighbour, as remarkable encounters
on the roads and in the caravan parks testified. It was the ending of this period that most exposed me
to the self-questioning I explore here.

The ‘Ordinary’ Contemplative Life 101
The Christian Imperative for Social Justice
The theme of social justice is an integral part of the Christian tradition.
In the Old Testament it is perhaps summarised most beautifully by Micah,
who unequivocally states that the Lord requires us to ‘do justice, to love
kindness, and to walk humbly with your God’ (Micah 6:8). In the New
Testament, Jesus is even more forthright when he insists that we will
not enter the Kingdom of God unless we have fed the hungry, given
drink to the thirsty, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked and visited
the sick or imprisoned (Matthew 25:31–40). Christ commands us to love
our neighbour (Mark 12:30–31); and the parable of the Good Samaritan
(Luke 10:30–37) shows us that our neighbour appears in all guises. As
Christians, indeed as human beings, we are all called to reveal in some
way God’s love for the poor and the needy, the sick and the wounded.
Moreover, relieving our neighbour’s pain and the development of our
own authentic humanity are intrinsically entwined, for we are to love our
neighbour as ourselves (Mark 12:31). As Jon Sobrino insists, human
beings only come to be fully human by facilitating the liberation of
those who suffer oppression and defeat.
The many theologians who have explored how our love of God must
have a demonstrable impact on the needs of our neighbour all insist that
contemplative or mystical prayer must have a compassionate and merciful
expression in prophetic or political or economic action. Often it is a
personal encounter with extremes of suffering that generates such
theological reflection. So it was for Johann Baptist Metz and Jon Sobrino,
both of whom were confronted by devastating examples of suffering and
oppression. For Metz it was the Holocaust; for Sobrino, the appalling
poverty in South America. These personal experiences heightened their
sensitivity to the world’s shocking history of violence and oppression,
leading them to insist that we must take greater cognisance of the suffering
of innocent victims of oppression and injustice.
Yet, sadly—grievously—so many of us are asleep to their plight.
Although scripture calls us in so many places to awake, we are often too
complacently comfortable to respond to Christ’s call to love others as
4
Jon Sobrino, The Principle of Mercy: Taking the Crucified People from the Cross (Maryknoll: Orbis,
1994), 1.
5
For the list of Edward Schillebeeckx, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Dorothee Soelle, David Tracy, Leonardo Boff,
Ignacio Ellacuría, Johann Baptist Metz and Jon Sobrino, see Matthew T. Eggemeier, ‘A Mysticism of
Open Eyes: Compassion for a Suffering World and the Askesis of Contemplative Prayer’, Spiritus, 12/1
(2012), 43.

102 Meredith Secomb
ourselves. Given the imperative for all Christians to be alert to the
demands of social justice, how can we responsibly follow a call to a
relatively simple life which gives priority to prayer? Do we not run the
risk of camouflaging an essentially egocentric existence with the label
‘contemplative’? Could this not be, rather, merely a ‘cop-out’, avoiding
the ‘real’ concerns of Christian living?
The ‘Ordinary’ Contemplative Life: Call or Cop-Out?
Early in his account of life in a Cistercian monastery, Thomas Merton
addresses the commonplace, but mistaken, view that the contemplative
life is merely a strategy for avoiding the mundane and often burdensome
reality of ordinary, everyday life. Forcefully, he asserts,
Let no one justify the monastery as a place from which anguish is
utterly absent and in which men ‘have no problems’. This is a myth,
closely related to the other myth that religion itself disposes of all
man’s anxieties. 6
He goes on to indicate something of the nature of the struggles
encountered by one pursuing a contemplative life:
Faith itself implies a certain anguish, and it is a way of confronting
inner suffering, not a magic formula for making all problems vanish. It
is not by extraordinary spiritual adventures or by dramatic and heroic
exploits that the monk comes to terms with life. The monastery teaches
men to take their own measure and to accept their ordinariness; in
a word, it teaches them that truth about themselves which is known
as ‘humility’. 7
Another mistaken notion about the contemplative life is that it is
self-focused and individualistic. Elsewhere Merton opposes this idea,
noting that prayer exposes its practitioner to self-searching and to the
‘sham and indignity of the false self that seeks to live for itself alone and
to enjoy the “consolation of prayer” for its own sake’. 8 Those called to
such a way of living are responding to a vocation to journey inwards, to
encounter the self in the demands of intimate engagement with God.
They are responding to an internal imperative which calls them to carve
out a contemplative life.
6
7
8
Thomas Merton, Cistercian Life (Spencer: Cistercian, 1974), 2–3.
Merton, Cistercian Life, 3.
Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1969), 25–26.

The ‘Ordinary’ Contemplative Life 103
As Mary Frohlich observes, the authenticity of that imperative will
be determined by its outcome, by the extent to which it ultimately issues
in a life expressive of God’s love. 9 Onlookers need to be patient as they
wait to assess that outcome, always remembering that the contemplative
life is a demanding one in which people of prayer are exposed to
interior pressures not known by those preoccupied and distracted by
more mundane concerns. Whether the contemplative life is lived in a
monastery or in the ordinariness outside monastic enclosures, it is not
a ‘cop-out’. It is a call. There can be ‘a sense of divine immediacy, a
call to live out of that immediacy and a sense of all things and events
as transparencies for divine presence’. 10
Just as the physical reality of
the world can be a ‘glasshouse, transparent and translucent to God's
grace’, so too the spiritual reality of the contemplative’s life can be
experienced as transparent to God’s gracious intervention. 11
Those within monastic enclosure, or within active communities that
prioritise the contemplative life, have the support of a community, a rule
of life that gives structure and a socially recognisable label. These things
provide an institutional body that supports self-identity. In contrast,
people who live as contemplatives ‘in the world’ often need courage to
pursue a pattern of life that is usually at odds with that of those around
them. There are numerous factors that lead people to consider that they
have a contemplative call when they live in the ordinary circumstances
of the world outside an institutional setting. Some point to their
contemplative experience, others to their contemplative practices, yet
others to their contemplative lifestyle. Some only have an awareness
that calling themselves ‘contemplatives’ is the most coherent way to
articulate their self-understanding. 12
Kathryn Damiano characterizes the experience of living a contemplative
life as a solitary person as one of ‘relevant irrelevancy’. 13 Pursuing the
contemplative life in the context of marriage creates yet other challenges. 14
9
Mary Frohlich, ‘A Roman Catholic Theology of Lay Contemplation’, in The Lay Contemplative:
Testimonies, Perspectives, Resources, edited by Virginia Manss and Mary Frohlich (Cincinnati: St Anthony
Messenger, 2000), 50.
10 Tilden Edwards, ‘Foreword’, in The Lay Contemplative, edited by Manss and Frohlich, v.
11 Johann Roten, ‘The Two Halves of the Moon: Marian Anthropological Dimensions in the Common
Mission of Adrienne von Speyr and Hans Urs von Balthasar’, Communio, 16 (Fall, 1989), 443.
12 Frohlich, ‘A Roman Catholic Theology of Lay Contemplation’, 45.
13 Kathryn Damiano, ‘The Call to Life “on the Margins” ’, in The Lay Contemplative, edited by Manss
and Frohlich, 25.
14 See Ann G. Denham, ‘God in Flesh and Spirit’, in The Lay Contemplative, edited by Manss and
Frohlich, 33–36.

104 Meredith Secomb
The contemplative dimension of living in a L’Arche community reveals
more of the multifaceted wonder of this way of life: ‘From the slow
lane, one is encouraged to take another look, to seek out the details,
delicacy and even beauty of what we thought was ugly’. 15 Only a heart
sensitised to compassion and alert to beauty in the ordinary details of
daily living can ‘look’ in this way. Ann Denham describes her initial
misunderstanding of a life devoted to intense prayer, expecting ‘some
cosy chats with the Lord’. She vividly depicts her actual experience of
opening up to the depths within: ‘thrust into light and a landscape out
of Vincent Van Gogh; a strong visual sense of multilayered reality and
a howling fear-storm straight from a dank, black hole’. 16 Denham reveals
the fear that often goes with surrendering familiar ego-based strategies
for engaging with the world and taking the risk of opening up to a larger
self of which the ego is merely a part. Like Thomas Merton, Denham
confronted her inner suffering and anguish with faith.
As Mary Frohlich notes, there is such a rich variety in the ‘raw
material of gifts, opportunities and choices’ for contemplative expression
that there is no ready way to account for a person’s choice of the
primary self-identification as ‘contemplative’. 17 Whatever leads to this
identification, its expression is not world-denying; the spirituality that
emerges from the authentic contemplative life lived in the world is still
‘for others’. 18 It can take many forms for the ordinary person living an
ordinary life in the ordinary circumstances of home and work.
Transforming Prayer and the ‘Little Way’ of Social Justice
The tendency to think that we are of value only if we do big things to
help others is everywhere. Those living in developed countries whose lives
have kept them insulated from extremes of suffering often find that a
subtle guilt is at work, a guilt which undermines the joy of the call to a
contemplative life, a guilt which insinuates they are not doing enough
to relieve the burden of the less fortunate. The implicit, unconscious
assumption is that we only have value if we are seen by others to be
making a big contribution to a needy world. For those with the gifts and
15 Robert A. Jonas, ‘Daybreak’, in The Lay Contemplative, edited by Manss and Frohlich, 37.
16 Denham, ‘God in Flesh and Spirit’, 33.
17 Frohlich, ‘Roman Catholic Theology of Lay Contemplation’, 45.
18 Edward P. Hahnenberg, Awakening Vocation: A Theology of Christian Call (Collegeville: Liturgical,
2010).

The ‘Ordinary’ Contemplative Life 105
capacities, and with the power to effect structural change, such actions
are indeed just and appropriate. For those less gifted, however, demands
of this kind hide the value before God of the little that they are called to
do and can do. Even for those more gifted it can take courage to stand
up to a community’s criticism for valuing the ‘little’ rather than the
‘big’ social needs—as Mother Teresa of Calcutta demonstrated when she
was criticized for not adequately challenging India’s social structures in
her focus on the needs of the individual.
For many the journey to self-acceptance for the little they are able
to do can be long. Parker Palmer at one time thought that he had to
live ‘a life like that of Martin Luther King Jr or Rosa Parks or Mahatma
Gandhi or Dorothy Day’ to fulfil the exigence of ‘high purpose’. 19 As St
John of the Cross reflects, we can find it a special suffering to find that
we do not suffer. 20 What can be done to sensitise people to the value of
the ‘little’ needs before them? While there is indeed a genuine risk that
the comforts of a Western way of life can blind us to the pain suffered
19 Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,
2000), 3.
20 St John of the Cross, ‘The Ascent of Mt. Carmel’, in The Collected Works of St John of the Cross,
edited by Kieran Kavanagh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, DC: ICS, 1979), 2. 26. 7.

106 Meredith Secomb
The Good Samaritan, by the Master of the Good Samaritan, 1537
by the less fortunate, those same comforts, and the often unconscious
guilt accompanying them, can also blind us to the value of the ‘little’
ways in which we can lovingly serve those around us.
The problem of sensitising ourselves to the needs of others is, for Metz
and Sobrino, a question that reaches to the depths of our relationship
with God. It is a question that challenges the nature of our spirituality.
Our spirituality is only authentic if we are awake, alert and responsive
to the reality of suffering. Yet how are we to awaken? For Metz and
Sobrino, and also for Simone Weil, we can find answers to this question
in the parable of the Good Samaritan. For them this parable is the
‘foundational biblical narrative’ for an authentic spirituality which is
compassionately responsive to the suffering of others. 21
Metz and Sobrino see the priest and the Levite as so preoccupied
with apparently weighty matters of the Law that they passed by the needy
person. 22 In contrast, they argue that the Samaritan responded with a
viscerally felt compassion which motivated him to act. His action entailed
21 Eggemeier, ‘Mysticism of Open Eyes’, 49.
22 Eggemeier, ‘Mysticism of Open Eyes’, 49–52.

The ‘Ordinary’ Contemplative Life 107
a kenotic abandonment of egocentric attachments to comfort and security.
Yet such an embodied sense of compassion, experienced in a way that
impels us action, is unfortunately all too rare. Self-interest and distractions
so readily leave us in a complacent slumber which prevents us from
seeing the suffering of others. 23 Eggemeier argues that an ascetic practice
of contemplative prayer is required to open the eyes of the heart and to
develop the accompanying embodied sensitivities to the needs of others. 24
He cites the work of Sarah Coakley and Simone Weil as pointing towards
ways in which such sensitivity can be developed.
Coakley has written powerfully about the transformative effects of a
discipline of contemplative prayer and its capacity to generate a prophetic
dynamic of compassionate action. 25 Her work with prisoners, for example,
revealed that regular periods of silence can transform their experience of
self as well as providing a healing, alternative ‘space’ to the oppressive
regime around them. Simone Weil observes that a contemplative discipline
was very necessary for the focused attention which enabled the Good
Samaritan to perceive the plight of the man by the road. She describes
such attention as knowing how to look at a person in a particular way:
This look is first of all an attentive look, when the soul empties itself
of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being that
it is looking at, just as it is, in all its truth. It is only capable of this if it
is capable of attention. 26
Weil goes on to observe, ‘Love for our neighbour, being made of creative
attention, is analogous to genius’. 27 So it may well be, for without practices
to stimulate the abandonment of egocentric attachments we do not
naturally drift into self-sacrificial awareness. Another testimony to the
transformative value of prayer comes from the theologian Sebastian
Moore who insists, ‘Prayer is the most radical therapy for our culture’. 28
Eggemeier, Coakley, Weil and Moore are just some of the many voices
that point to the benefits of silent prayer for making us alert to the need
23 Eggemeier, ‘Mysticism of Open Eyes’, 52.
24 Eggemeier, ‘Mysticism of Open Eyes’, 52–57.
25 See Sarah Coakley, ‘Jail Break: Meditation as a Subversive Activity’, The Christian Century, 121/13
(2004), 18–21; Sarah Coakley, ‘Prayer as Crucible: How My Mind Has Changed’, The Christian Century
128/6 (2011). See also Religion and the Body, edited by Sarah Coakley (Cambridge: CUP, 1997).
26 Simone Weil, Waiting on God, translated by Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001), 63.
27 Weil, Waiting for God, 90.
28 Sebastian Moore, ‘The Universe at Prayer: What does It Mean to Pray?’, in A Hunger for God: Ten
Approaches to Prayer, edited by William A. Barry and Kerry A. Maloney (Kansas City: Sheed and
Ward, 1991), 1.

108 Meredith Secomb
for compassionate and loving action in the pursuit of justice. There is,
moreover, much evidence-based literature to support the understanding
shared by these thinkers that meditative practices are needed to effect
the neurophysiological changes that enable heightened, embodied,
intersubjective sensitivity. 29 The question now arises as to the form that
action might take in the life circumstances of those of us who are less
gifted and empowered to make ‘big’ differences, but nevertheless called
by God to make our ‘little’ difference.
An important premise for understanding how we can serve others in
our humble and homely circumstances is the insight that love and justice
are synonymous. Often the term ‘social justice’ can be intimidating. If,
with Simone Weil, we reframe Christ’s call to justice as one of a call to
love, then the perceived possibilities for justice and social action multiply
under the widened horizon generated by contemplative prayer. Weil
insists,
Christ does not call his benefactors loving’ or ‘charitable. He calls
them just. The Gospel makes no distinction between the love of our
neighbor and justice …. We have invented the distinction between
justice and charity. 30
Augustine also challenges the notion that we must travel far to serve
our needy neighbour: ‘All people should be loved equally. But you cannot
do good to all people equally, so you should take particular thought for
those who, as if by lot, happen to he particularly close to you in terms of
place, time, or any other circumstances.’ 31
The teaching of Brother
Lawrence, Pierre de Caussade and Thérèse of Lisieux, to name just a
few in the contemplative tradition, also alerts us to the need to recognise
God’s providence and calling in the little opportunities before us. 32 Our
29 Cristina Gonzalez-Liencres, Simone G. Shamay-Tsoory and Martin Martin Brüne, ‘Towards a
Neuroscience of Empathy: Ontogeny, Phylogeny, Brain Mechanisms, Context and Psychopathology’,
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 37/8 (2013), 1537–1548; Giorgia Silani and others, ‘Right
Supramarginal Gyrus Is Crucial to Overcome Emotional Egocentricity Bias in Social Judgments’, The
Journal of Neuroscience, 33/39 (2013), 15466–15476. See also Christopher Bergland, ‘The Neuroscience
of Empathy’, Psychology Today (10 October 2013), available at http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/
the-athletes-way/201310/ the-neuroscience-empathy, accessed 6 June 2014.
30 Weil, Waiting for God, 83.
31 Augustine, On Christian Teaching, translated by R. P. H. Green (Oxford: OUP, 1997), 1.29.29.
32 See Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence, translated by John Beevers (New
York: Image, 1966); Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God (London: Burns and Oates,
1977); St Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St Thérèse of Lisieux (Washington: ICS,
1976).

The ‘Ordinary’ Contemplative Life 109
needy neighbour is there beside us, perhaps conversing with us, if only
we have eyes to see.
It is important to draw actively on faith to experience our lives as
channels for God’s grace and to understand that others can be touched
by love and blessedness as we pursue our contemplative calling. While
the greatest of the theological virtues is love (1 Corinthians 13:13), yet
without faith we cannot please God and fulfil God’s will for our lives
(Hebrews 11:6). It is imperative that we have faith that God’s grace
can flow through us to others in ways that are loving, healing and
freeing.
Foundationally I have sought here to encourage those who live a
contemplative life in the pursuit of their calling. Recognising that many
feel unable validly to contribute in major ways to the pressing needs of
the world around them, I have sought to heighten their awareness of the
value of the smallest opportunities for bringing good news to the oppressed,
for binding up the broken-hearted, for proclaiming liberty to captives and
release to the prisoners (Luke 4:18). A haiku nicely expresses this vision:
To see small matters
And to see that small matters
Are not small matters. 33
Meredith Secomb has worked as a clinical psychologist in both the public and
private sectors, in the latter specialising in the interface of psychology and spirituality.
She has a PhD in theology from the Australian Catholic University, has published
in the fields of spirituality, psychology and theology, and has presented papers at
conferences on Bernard Lonergan and on psychology in Australia and overseas. After
completing her doctorate Meredith travelled into various parts of rural Australia
as a missionary on a bicycle with a particular concern for the ‘little ones’ she met
along the way. Meredith now lives a simple life as a contemplative in suburbia
and serves in her local parish.
33 This haiku was heard on an ABC programme some years ago. I would appreciate knowing the
author.

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Features include: Notes for preaching; Chronicle of current
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Editor: Ronan Drury, St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, to whom editorial correspondence
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Back numbers and advertising rates are available from the Secretary.

RECENT BOOKS
Luke Larson, Keeping Company with Saint Ignatius: Walking the Camino
de Santiago de Compostela (Brewster: Paraclete, 2014). 978 1 6126 1519 6,
pp.196, $19.99.
Brendan McManus, Redemption Road: Grieving on the Camino (Dublin:
Orpen, 2014). 978 1 9098 9539 3, pp.170, £12.95.
St Ignatius considered himself nothing if not a pilgrim. It is unmistakable
from his Autobiography that, after his conversion, Ignatius viewed the rest
of his life both as an actual and as a spiritual pilgrimage. The idea of
pilgrimage was so central to the spiritual experience of Ignatius, and so
much at the core of his own spirituality, that he mandated an experience of
pilgrimage for all novices of the Society of Jesus. His travels to visit the
shrine of Our Lady at Montserrat, his journey to Jerusalem, and the
original desire of the early Jesuits to return to the Holy Land all attest to
this root principle of the spirituality of Ignatius. Around Europe, from
Aranzazu to Loreto, Marian shrines bear markers attesting to the fact that
the pilgrim Ignatius once visited. When he finally took up residence in
Rome he would often still visit the tombs of the saints and martyrs,
choosing to celebrate his first Mass in front of what is believed to be the
original crèche where the infant Christ rested at St Mary Major, and taking
the original companions to the tomb of St Paul, as a newly formed
missionary order, to pronounce their vows before the great missionary of
early Christianity. He often crossed paths with the great pilgrim trails of
Europe in his travels and, on at least one occasion between the towns of
Navarette and Logroño in Spain, Ignatius crossed paths with the Camino
de Santiago as well.
It is precisely because pilgrimage was so central to the life of Ignatius
that it serves as a fruitful means of understanding his spirituality. Two
recent books, Keeping Company with St Ignatius by Luke Larson and
Redemption Road by Brendan McManus, describe how the experience of
pilgrimage, especially on the pilgrim paths of Saint James, can put us in
touch with the spirituality of Ignatius in a profoundly rich manner. Larson
recounts a trek on the more popular French way, while McManus
chronicles walking along the less populous, though starkly beautiful,
Primitive and Northern paths. The experiences of pilgrimage offered by

112 Recent Books
both authors, with all of the attached challenges, simplicity, silence and
contemplation, offer perspectives which can both introduce the casual
reader into the life of Ignatian spirituality and take that reader deep into
the fiercely compelling personal nature of the pilgrim path.
In Keeping Company with Saint Ignatius, Luke Larson details his journey
down the most popular of the pilgrim ways, the Camino Francés, along
with his wife, in the autumn of 2010. Larson points out from the beginning
that the invitation to take a walk with someone is an invitation to a certain
intimacy in conversation. Thinking of his pilgrimage as a walk and
conversation with God, Larson provides his reader with various anecdotes
from his experience, the better to illustrate various points of Ignatian
spirituality. Embracing the concept that Ignatius himself was walking the
pilgrim path along with him, Larson treats Ignatius as one of his
interlocutors in the prolonged conversation of the pilgrimage. Larson’s
book is an enjoyable read, easily accessible, and a wonderful introduction
to both the Camino Frances and Ignatian spirituality. He uses his
experiences on the Camino and at the Ignatian sites that he visits
afterwards, as a sort of contemplation of space and as an attempt to draw
close to Ignatius by understanding him through travelling in his homeland
and through the experience of pilgrimage. Larson fruitfully uses his own
experiences on the Camino to consider what Ignatius might have been
thinking or feeling at various points in his life and to invite us into just that
type of consideration as well.
Where Larson offers us a wonderful introduction to the concepts of
pilgrimage and Ignatian spirituality, in Redemption Road Brendan McManus
involves us in the drama of the lived reality of that spirituality, particularly
in the face of adversity. With unflinching honesty, McManus recounts the
times when he felt discouraged along the pilgrim trail, whether because of
the physical or the emotional weight of what he was carrying with him.
Often enough, his recounting of the daily practice of the Examen carries
him forward in gratitude, despite the numerous physical struggles that he
encounters and his own experience of processing his brother’s suicide. The
great beauty of McManus’saccount of his pilgrimage is not in his struggle,
but resides, perhaps, in how he is borne up along the way by his fellow
Jesuits, by other pilgrims and by the memory of his brother. It is clear that
the struggles he encounters along the way open him up to healing from the
loss of his brother, and also deepen his own lived experience of his Ignatian
charism, as at each step people open their lives to him to support him as he
treks his pilgrim path.
Each of these works provide excellent windows to understanding the
spirituality of St Ignatius through the experience of pilgrimage—which

Recent Books 113
was, after all, a primary way in which Ignatius himself first understood his
own spirituality. Both Larson and McManus invite us into the path of the
pilgrim as that of St Ignatius who, in keeping company with others, in
listening to God’s voice along the way and in daring to live through the
struggles of everyday life, became the person we know him to be today. In
that light, the works of McManus and Larson stand as an invitation to
walk with them and to understand the spirituality of Ignatius with each
step along the well-worn path that leads to Compostela.
Michael Rogers SJ
Antonio Spadaro, Cybertheology: Thinking Christianity in the Era of the
Internet, translated by Maria Way (New York: Fordham UP, 2014).
978 0 8232 5700 3, pp.172, £16.99.
Carolyn Reinhart, A Fruit-Bearing Spirituality (Alresford: Circle Books,
2013). 978 1 7809 9441 3, pp.179, £11.99.
Ever since the historic and fascinating interview he conducted with Pope
Francis in the late summer of 2013, Antonio Spadaro has been a familiar
media figure. He is director of La civiltà cattolica, which serves both as the
Italian Jesuits’ cultural review, and also as a semi-official organ for the Holy
See. His intellectual background is in literature and theology—he is the
author, for example, of a work on the theology of Karl Rahner and its
implications for our reading of poetry.
Cybertheology is a short book, originally published in 2011. Synthesizing
Spadaro’s more recent academic work, it explores the new questions raised
for Christianity by the transformations in telecommunication that have
gathered such pace following the invention of the World Wide Web in the
late 1980s.
Correctly, Spadaro sees that we are not dealing here simply with a new
field of concern for moral or pastoral theology. More is at stake than
working out how Christianity can best use Facebook and Twitter as means
through which to communicate the message, and how the Internet can be
used ‘as an instrument of evangelization’ (viii). The new technology, rather,
is transforming the lived reality of Christianity itself. We now live in digital
as well as physical space, and our understanding of the Word dwelling
among us needs to be adapted accordingly. ‘The technologies are new, not
simply because they are different from those that preceded them, but
because they profoundly change the very concept of having an experience.’

114 Recent Books
(xii–xiii) Presence and communication are essential to Christianity; if
those human realities change, then Christianity must change as well.
After introducing the general problem, Spadaro offers chapters on the
theology of grace, on ‘the mystical and connective body’, on ethics and on
liturgy, concluding with some reflections in the spirit of Teilhard de Chardin.
Spadaro’s book highlights, in quite disconcerting fashion, the close
connections between the gospel’s promise of universal communion and
changing technologies of communication. A clear example, now historical,
that he gives is Marshall McLuhan’s account of how the invention of the
microphone drastically simplified the experience of liturgy. Previously, the
priest’s voice was one element among many in ‘a context made up of
sounds, colours, scents, orientation, objects and movements’, only
discernible by those who were near; the microphone creates ‘a direct
relationship between the celebrating the individual, between the centre
and a point in the congregation’, diminishing the importance of space, and
creating ‘a sound bubble’ that overpowers the other senses (p.72). The
official theology was unchanged, but the lived reality became radically
different.
More contemporary examples, from technologies still in development,
are properly tentative, but no less provocative. The Christian concept of
being saved is often linked with the idea of sin being effaced. How is this to
sound in a world where no information, once it has been posted, can ever
be definitively and securely removed from the web? ‘Save’, moreover, is not
the only example; ‘sharing’, ‘community’ and ‘conversion’ are also concepts
with a rich theological heritage that are now being unpredictably modified
as a result of new usages in a digital context.
It has to be said that Spadaro’s book does not effectively address the
questions he evokes so provocatively. Such answers as he gives are
defensively conventional. Can we participate in a liturgy transmitted to us?
No, says a document from the US bishops’ conference: to celebrate
sacraments requires ‘physical’ and ‘geographical’ presence, contact with the
reality rather than ‘an image or an idea’ of Christ’s saving presence (p.79).
Spadaro is content simply to mention that ‘many affective relationships,
even the most ordinary ones, are mediated by machines’ (p.80), leaving
unresolved, and even unspoken, the implication that the conventional
episcopal position just ignores the new question about what, in a digital
world, can count as real and personal participation.
Such indirectness can only be frustrating to the Anglo-Saxon mind,
but, particularly in a theological context, it has its place. Faithful Christian
theology cannot but be conservative in the root sense, even when we are

Recent Books 115
often in a situation where we can only preserve the tradition by changing
it. To ask the hot questions too directly merely cuts a brutta figura.
Spadaro’s allusions, by contrast, open them up through a kind of moodmusic
that might presage some future change or development.
Spadaro’s Italian academic style, rich in abstractions, well suits this
human reality. Unfortunately, a translator into English has an impossible
task in reproducing such thought forms for a different intellectual culture.
Maria Way’s option in handling Spadaro’s prose remains close to the
original style, with results that are often obscure. A bolder approach, and
also some competent editing, might have yielded something more intelligible.
Carolyn Reinhart’s A Fruit-Bearing Spirituality resembles Spadaro’s work
in its conviction that new cultural developments necessitate drastic reform
in Christianity’s self-understanding. The book comes across as a passionate
plea for a spiritual understanding rooted in human embodiment, in
ecological thinking, in quantum physics and in the overcoming of patterns
of mutual oppression. The narrowness of denominational Christianity is to
be overcome by a shared praxis, with inclusivity a watchword.
Readers of Reinhart’s book trained in conventional theology and in
churchy ways of doing things will probably find it exasperating in its
frequent oversimplifications of the tradition, and its uncritical use of buzz
words. But that is probably an unworthy response. The fact that there are
intelligent and committed people who write in this way, and that they can
find publishers who think the book will sell, says something important
about how conventional Christianity is failing to communicate to at least
some people of palpable good will. Though neither of these books is a
wholly satisfactory piece of work, both raise questions worth pondering.
Philip Endean SJ
Oxford Textbook of Spirituality in Healthcare, edited by Mark Cobb,
Christina M. Puchalski and Bruce Rumbold (Oxford: OUP, 2012).
97 8 0199 5713 90, pp.512, £125.00.
This astonishing book provides a comprehensive introduction to so many
issues concerning spirituality and healthcare that any attempt at listing
them all would be counterproductive. Basic concepts of health and of
spirituality, the relationships between spirituality and religion, the ways in
which different religious and non-religious traditions respond to those
needing healthcare: this list does not begin to span the range of topics
dealt with in the seven sections of the book.

116 Recent Books
It is important to note that ‘spirituality’, as used here, has a much wider
reference than traditional Christian usage: indeed, while some authors do
attempt to provide inclusive meanings for the word itself, other authors
welcome the fact that the term ‘spirituality’ has no one agreed meaning,
seeing this is mirroring the varied ways in which individuals relate to the
‘spiritual’ as they understand it and encounter it in their particular lives.
The book has six sections: the first two, ‘Traditions’ and ‘Concepts’,
explore the ways in which different traditions of belief (ranging from
Buddhism to Judaism) have related to healthcare, and the different
concepts that have emerged as significant in these aspects of human
concern (such as personhood, hope and suffering). This provides a very
helpful way into the third section, which looks at different aspects of
‘Practice’. This section explores how different models of healthcare take
account of the spiritual, as well as examining different dimensions of
healthcare such as nursing, the care of children, palliative care and
counselling (to name but a few), and discussing how each of these
encounters the spiritual dimension of human experience and behaviour.
The fourth section deals with ‘Research’, with sensitive evaluations of
the impact of religion and spirituality on healthcare outcomes, and wellargued
critiques of studies which are too simplistic in their reductionist
approaches to, for example, the measurable consequences of being prayed
for. Section five looks at ‘Policy and Education’, while section six, headed
‘Challenges’, is almost worth the price of the book by itself. Its first two
chapters explore ‘Contemporary Spirituality’ and ‘The Future of Religion’,
presenting the magisterial discussions one might expect from David Tacey,
Grace Davie and Martyn Percy. The third and final chapter sets out its
approach clearly:
The discourse of spirituality and healthcare is open at the edges, orientated
around core organizing principles, but containing levels of disorder,
indeterminacy and tension that provide meaningful interactions and suggest
creative opportunities. This chapter looks forward and suggests points for future
development, rather than issues brought to closure; questions rather than
conclusions. (p.487)
This book is remarkable in its range and in its depth. The contributors
are all leading experts in their particular fields, and anyone who masters
the richness and detail of the 64 chapters will have acquired a genuinely
comprehensive knowledge of the increasingly important area of
intersection between spirituality and healthcare. While the book provides
an all-inclusive survey of the field (as a good textbook should), it is also
possible simply to take one section or one chapter, and learn from its
precision and focus.

Recent Books 117
Who should read it? Certainly anyone involved in spirituality and
healthcare, whether directly or (by proxy, as it were) in a retreat or
spiritual-direction setting. But its relevance reaches beyond that more
particular area to anyone thinking about how to articulate what spirituality
has to offer in an increasingly ‘materialised’ world. As a resource for training
in spiritual direction, it will be the benchmark for many years to come.
Brendan Callaghan SJ
Graeme Watson, The Song of Songs: A Contemplative Guide (London:
SPCK, 2014). 97 8 0281 066902, pp.156, £12.99.
The point must be made that it is possible to enjoy and appreciate the
Song of Songs without the benefit of any introduction or commentary. Your
reviewer recalls reading the Song aloud to a group of sixth-form students
none of whom had heard—or indeed heard of—the text before. They were
thrilled by it. The poetry of the Song set their pulses racing. And that is
what this extraordinary text does to you. The Song may indeed mean
much more than it meant to my enraptured teenagers—and for that ‘much
more’ we need wise guides such as Graeme Watson—but no amount of
instruction would have made the response of those young people to the
Song more authentic.
Graeme Watson—an Anglican priest—recognises that my sixthformers
were not mistaken: that the Song of Songs is about erotic love and
sexual desire. But the view that the poem is about sex and nothing else is
relatively modern. Watson is a courteous writer. He does not point out that
the assumption that we moderns know much more about sex than the
ancients and so do not need to spiritualise the Song’s literal language is
really very conceited.
Watson believes that the Song is open to a diversity of interpretations.
He holds—as Jews and Christians from antiquity have held—that the Song
‘is as much about divine love as it is about human love’ (p.7). Drawing on
the work of Margaret Barker (The Gate of Heaven, 2011), he sees much of
the language of love in the Song as relating to the Temple understood as a
symbol of God’s love for Israel and of Israel’s love for God.
This illuminating study is informed by his wide-ranging reading of
mystical writers who have seen the Song as a depiction of the spiritual
marriage between God and the Church, or between God and the
individual soul. Watson warms to Origen, for example, welcoming his
reading of the Song as an account of the interior life of the Christian.

118 Recent Books
However he does not remind us of Origen’s act of self-castration, a proceeding
suggesting that this Father’s efforts to hold together the sexual and the
spiritual were not entirely successful. Others in the same Christian mystical
tradition have been inspired by the Song without recourse to the knife,
most notably St John of the Cross, whose own Spiritual Canticle, Watson
suggests, comes closest in its literary and spiritual mastery to the Song itself.
Most of these pages are devoted to an extended devotional
commentary on the text of the Song. These lovely lyrics forbid a plodding
verse-by-verse exposition. Instead Watson divides the Song into fifty
sections and, on each, offers a searching reflection on one or more of the
text’s images, suggesting what they might mean to the Christian reader. A
particularly happy feature of these reflections is the frequent choice of a
pertinent hymn or poem—more than once from the works of George
Herbert—to illuminate one or other of the Song’s great themes.
The songs of the Song of Songs, like the parables of Jesus, are
mysterious and, again like the parables of Jesus, they leave the last word on
what they mean to those who read them. ‘Those who have ears to hear, let
them hear.’ Watson does not try to banish the book’s many mysteries. He
makes his own suggestions and he will not mind if we do not always follow
him. A mention in the Song of an ‘orchard of pomegranates’ (4:13), for
example, sets Watson off on a treasure hunt through the scriptural
references to pomegranates. Moses, we are reminded, ordered Aaron to adorn
the hem of his ephod with woven pomegranates. Ephods call to mind—at
least to Watson’s mind—‘garments such as the surplice, stole and vestments’
(p.100) and the worthiness or otherwise of the minister of the sacraments.
We have come a long way from the lady whose ‘lips distil nectar’ (4:11).
Graeme Watson recognises that the Song of Songs celebrates both
divine and human love. The question—there is no harder one—is how
these loves relate. The Song is about the relationship between the soul—and
the fellowship of souls—and the love that hung the stars. It is also about
the love between a boy and the girl next door. It was Dante who taught us
that—the source of all our loves being a single fountain—the latter love is
in principle no less lofty than the former. Watson robustly affirms that a
literal reading of the Song is an entirely proper one. He insists, however,
that, if read exclusively as a paean in praise of human love, it becomes
almost impossible to make sense of much of the Song’s language. (But is
not most pillow-talk gobbledegook?) For Watson the Song’s ‘less obvious
meanings … can transcend even the finest and deepest of human
relationships’ (p.5) and so it is on these obscurer connotations he broods.
There is much, much, for our profit in his reflections. But the commentary

Recent Books 119
on the Song of Songs that pays equal attention to its obvious and its less
obvious meanings has yet to be written.
John Pridmore
Dominic White, The Lost Knowledge of Christ: Contemporary Spiritualities,
Christian Cosmology, and the Arts (Collegeville: Liturgical, 2015).
978 0 8146 8269 2, pp.234, £18.99.
This is a beautiful and timely book. As his subtitle suggests, the Dominican
priest Dominic White has a profound conviction that contemporary spiritual
movements (which may owe little or nothing to traditional Christianity),
and the performing arts find a meeting point in the neglected insights of
ancient Christian cosmology. This cosmology, which was largely lost in the
rise of scientific knowledge about the universe after the end of the Middle
Ages, was a body of highly developed spiritual knowledge about a cosmic
Christ, perhaps most familiar to us now in the awe-inspiring images of
Christ ‘Pantokrator’ (‘ruler of all’) to be found in so many Greek Orthodox
churches. Having given an account of the theology of this cosmic Christ,
which includes a powerful set of beliefs about the cosmos—hence, ‘Christian
cosmology’—White then considers a number of aspects of present-day
spirituality, such as belief in angels, heavenly ascents or journeys, the chakras,
the zodiac, musical sound and bodily movement, and, in each case, suggests
fascinating and compelling connections with this ancient cosmology.
Clearly this is a huge undertaking and, by his own admission, the author
can do no more than sketch out a few areas for further investigation and
reflection. This does not mean, however, that his grasp of this very diverse
subject matter is at all sketchy. In terms of scholarship, research and spiritual
insight, this is a genuinely impressive book, which consistently draws the
reader into further exploration, both through the copious references and
the visual and aural examples available on the accompanying website.
At the same time, it is true that the thesis advanced in the book will
challenge many readers. Uncovering the ‘lost knowledge of Christ’ is a
complex and delicate matter, often involving arguments from silence, which
are always hard to evaluate; and it has to be said that some of Fr White’s
convictions seem open to question. Especially when dealing with the
accounts of heavenly or astral ascents and the origin and meaning of the
astrological knowledge of the zodiac, the fluidity and obscurity of the beliefs
involved seem ultimately to defy any convincing explanation. Furthermore,
the shift away from the ancient focus on the cosmic Christ was also

120 Recent Books
accompanied by a shift towards the quest for the historical Jesus that has
so dominated Christian thought in more recent times, and many Christians
will feel that this latter quest constitutes a more meaningful approach for
them. It is worth pointing out, though, that this book is not necessarily
directed at the mainstream Christian believer. Those who describe themselves
as ‘spiritual but not religious’ will find much that is intriguing and
challenging here—precisely because of the even-handed and sympathetic
way in which various alternative beliefs and therapies are considered.
Speaking personally, I find the author most illuminating in the areas of
music, dance and liturgy, for here one can really appreciate the power of
an analysis that is centred on a cosmic cross, stretching out in six, rather
than four, directions: past and future, above and below, in the dimensions
of the earth itself, and in the network of human societies. The symbolism
of musical tones and ritual movement really does take on a new
significance when seen in this light, and one feels that the author is
correct in characterizing the loss of this cosmic knowledge as a loss of
Wisdom. One tiny, but telling, example of such a loss is the way that the
boy-dancers of the Blessed Sacrament in Seville (the so-called ‘Seises’)
exchanged the angel costumes that they wore in medieval times for the
garb of conquistadors at the start of the seventeenth century. A whole
cosmological, spiritual and even ecological shift is implied in this change.
This is a timely book because, confronted by what many mainstream
Christians might see as an infuriating syncretism in contemporary spiritualities,
Dominic White plunges in with infectious enthusiasm, dismissing nothing
out of hand, but seeking to understand and integrate them within a wider
Christian knowledge. Such enthusiasm bears two fruits in particular: a
more serious consideration of the arts at the centre of Christian life and
worship, and a deeper engagement with what it is really to know Christ.
Ian Coleman
William James and the Transatlantic Conversation: Pragmatism, Pluralism,
and Philosophy of Religion, edited by Martin Halliwell and Joel D. S.
Rasmussen (Oxford: OUP, 2014). 978 0 1996 8751 0, pp.256, £69.00.
William James was the first professor of psychology at Harvard University
and is widely credited with taking an innovative approach to religion—in
particular in his landmark study The Varieties of Religions Experience, which
offered a systematic but non-reductive examination of religious experience.

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Reflecting the wide reach of James’s work, this twelve-essay volume includes
a variety of approaches to James from authors with diverse disciplinary
backgrounds. It is divided into two parts, the first of which treats James’s
intellectual contexts and the second of which is dedicated to the
philosophy of pluralism.
Both parts are likely to interest readers of The Way, albeit for different
reasons. Although all twelve chapters offer reflections on the ways James
engaged (personally and philosophically) with European intellectuals
during the Victorian and Edwardian periods, the first part of the book is
more historical in character, with chapters on the reception of James’s
work in Europe, his relationship to ecumenical Protestantism, and ‘the
woman question’. Several of these chapters offer family portraits of the
Jameses—a transatlantic family with a dominant and tormented paternal
figure in Henry James, Sr, and two offspring of genius in William and
Henry Jr (the novelist who wrote Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians,
among other works). Henry Sr is portrayed as a ‘theological eccentric’
(p.81), whose focus on death cast lasting shadows over his children’s lives.
The second part, on the philosophy of pluralism, gives more focus to
James’s ideas themselves, and their applicability to debates today, than to
setting them in biographical or historical context. As someone who teaches
James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience to undergraduates, this part was
especially interesting and useful to me for, as the editors state in the
introduction, James ‘did not just speak to the late nineteenth century’ (p.11).
That his insights are still worthy of study is attested by the range and
quality of approaches taken in this latter part. David C. Lamberth’s chapter
‘A Pluralistic Universe a Century Later: Rationalism, Pluralism, and
Religion’ discusses James’s objections to ‘vicious intellectualism’—a
‘philosophic sin’, as Lamberth calls it, that preferred concepts (as products
of the intellect) to percepts (products of sensation or experience).
Thinking of this kind prioritises ‘knowledge about’ over ‘direct
acquaintance’. For James, as Lamberth writes,
Thinking is not generally best understood along the traditional lines of
contemplation or theoria. Rather, thinking is a form of adaptive behaviour
oriented most basically to action in and on a relatively stable but also
continuously evolving environment. (p.135)
The implications of James’ rejection of ‘vicious intellectualism’ for the
philosophy of religion—especially for current debates about atheism and
theism—are developed in Sami Pihlström’s excellent essay ‘Jamesian
Pragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of God’. Pihlström argues that ‘we

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need Jamesian insights in order to argue that the issue of God’s reality is
not exhausted by the narrowly intellectual (evidentialist) considerations
one might advance in favour of either theism or atheism’ (p.191).
This tension between the intellectual and experiential is also evident in
the chapter by Joel Rasmussen on the old ‘quarrel between philosophy and
poetry’. James acknowledges that life in many ways ‘exceeds conceptual
logic and often obliges us to proceed with hypotheses rather than strictly
logical syllogisms’ (p.161). The line between philosophy and poetry is thin
under his gaze: ‘Philosophers are after all like poets’ (James, cited p.166).
In sum, James—whose prose is poetic and whose philosophy permits
percepts—is a fascinating thinker, and any reader wishing to be better
acquainted with him would be well advised to consult this book.
Kate Kirkpatrick
Felix Burda-Stengel, Andrea Pozzo and Video Art (Philadelphia: Saint
Joseph's UP, 2013). 978 0 9161 0178 7, pp.177, $70.00.
This work was first published in German in 2001; the author, Felix Burda-
Stengel, did not live to see the publication of this translation. This was
championed by John O’Malley, editor of the Early Modern Catholicism
and the Visual Arts series produced by St Joseph’s University Press. It richly
deserves the wider audience which, it is hoped, will arise from the English
version.
The book provides a unique perspective on a remarkable man and his
largely overlooked work, simultaneously bringing him out of the shadows
and placing him in an entirely contemporary and unexpected context.
I must admit that my immediate reaction on being asked to review the
title was mixed. I am an admirer of Andrea Pozzo’s work, and have taken
many groups of students to S. Ignazio and the Rooms of St Ignatius, and
enjoyed their unfailing surprise and wonder at his technical ability and
vision. I am not a great fan of contemporary video installations, on the
whole finding them to be, perhaps, more flash than substance. It is challenging
to suspend pre-existing judgements, but I find myself acknowledging the
power and validity of Burda-Stengel’s argument—namely that the need for
illusion is a timeless phenomenon, and that the moving observer of Pozzo’s
day was faced with the same questions as to the nature of art and reality
that the present day gallery visitor encounters.
The early chapters of the book place Pozzo firmly in his historic and
cultural milieu, examining the optical, perspectival and scientific work of

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Galileo, Leon Battista Alberti and Athanasius Kircher; the latter had a
particular influence on his fellow Jesuit. Kircher and Pozzo shared the view
that human ingenuity and intelligence were a divine gift, to be exercised
for the greater glory of God. Kircher’s famous museum at the Collegio
Romano was one of the wonders of Rome in his day, and Pozzo was
intimately familiar with the optical machinery and illusionistic effects
created there. Chapter six is particularly significant, concentrating on
Pozzo’s work Prospettiva de pittori e architetti, which provides a close insight
into how the artist worked. In a humble acknowledgement that his work
deals with complex mathematical theories, Pozzo pleaded with the reader
to experience his work in practice: ‘Just try it, for understanding is
achieved perhaps more easily in practice than in lengthy speculation’.
In addition to its mathematical and optical observations, the Prospettiva
reproduced many engravings of Pozzo’s now-lost stage designs, demonstrating
how familiar the artist was with the world of theatre and scene painting.
The association between the Spiritual Exercises and Jesuit drama has been
commented on before; both encourage a mental suspension of place and
time, allowing the individual to experience a deeper connection with the
gospel. Pozzo’s illusionistic stage designs added a further layer of complexity
to the effects achieved by music, costume, lighting and pyrotechnics.
The key to understanding Pozzo’s art, according to Burda-Stengel, lies
in the fact that the illusion is perfect from one particular standpoint. In the
floor of S. Ignazio the artist placed an orange marble disc, so that the
viewer could experience the full effect of the magnificent ceiling, apparently
open to the heavens, and the coffered ‘dome’ which is, in fact, a flat canvas
stretched across the crossing point of the nave and transepts. It has been a
constant criticism of commentators, even in Pozzo’s own lifetime, that his
art only ‘works’ from a single point of view. Burda-Stengel argues, and I think,
convincingly, that this is intentional. The experience of physical space is
enhanced as the observer moves through the church, now seeing the painted
anamorphic illusion for what it is, and now suddenly convinced that it is reality.
The author argues that Pozzo was not only painting for the general public, but
particularly for an educated Jesuit audience who understood the spiritual
nuances raised by experiencing illusion and reality, namely that where the
senses are deceived then certain knowledge can be found only in God.
The book takes an unexpected turn in chapter ten, when the issue of
time and place is addressed, examining the extent to which historical
reflection on past eras is always bound up with the observer’s own time. At
this point, Burda-Stengel invites the reader to contemplate the essence of
Pozzo’s art, and its influence on video installation art of the twentieth and

124 Recent Books
twenty-first centuries. Pozzo’s observers could ‘see’ the illusion at certain
points and not at others, in effect giving them the sense that the illusion
was switched on and off, depending on the viewer’s position in the church.
This idea of transitional illusion is central to the art of video installation, in
which a moving image is installed by an artist in a public space. The
modern artist relies on current technology, which allows projection of
moving images on walls, ceiling and floor—unlike Pozzo, who was
restricted to the painted surface—but in both cases the observer enters
into the space, moves through it and becomes part of it. Burda-Stengel’s
theory is that video art transgresses boundaries between the art space and
the observer in the same way that Pozzo’s painted surfaces did.
This is a complex and challenging book, which intelligently and
thoroughly makes the case for a link between the Jesuit artist of the
seventeenth century and the installation artist of the twenty-first century. I
recently visited Bishop Auckland Castle where a powerful installation by
Bill Viola, Earth Martyr, Air Martyr, Fire Martyr, Water Martyr, had been
placed in the bishop’s chapel. With the arguments of this book clear in my
mind, the conjunction of image, movement, illusion and holy space
suddenly worked for me. I left wondering what further marvels Pozzo could
have achieved with a video camera.
Jan Graffius
Claire E. Wolfteich, Invitation to Practical Theology: Catholic Visions and
Voices (Mahwah: Paulist, 2014). 978 0 8091 4890 5, pp.352, $29.95.
What is ‘practical’ theology? The question has recurred ever since
Schleiermacher coined the term, and this volume aims to shed some
Catholic light on it. It enters a much needed conversation with the more
dominant Protestant practical theology tradition, in the same spirit as the
book edited by Heythrop College staff, Keeping Faith in Practice (2010).
Claire Wolfteich has assembled an impressive line-up of North American
authors (and a single European), some of them very well known, such as
David Tracy and Thomas Groome. The fourteen chapters and editorial
introduction and conclusion explore two dimensions of practical theology:
the practical fields of theological enquiry (liturgy, work for justice and
social solidarity, spirituality, mission and so on); and the fundamental
underlying topic of practical theology ‘in itself’.
Given how largely ‘context’ figures in practical theology, it would be
surprising were this volume not to reflect the particularities of the United
States. It has important chapters drawn from Black Catholic Studies

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(Copeland) and on the increasing presence of Latino/a religiosity (Goizueta
and Cervantes, Deck and Johnson-Mondragón) which open up both the
practices of popular religiosity and theoretical issues of cultural aesthetics.
Bradford Hinze, on practices of dialogue, reflects Saul Alinsky-inspired
community organizing; while Julie Rubio, writing on family ethics (the one
ethics-based chapter), deals with the familiar challenges of modern family
life and the bewilderment, so typical in postmodernity, of finding one’s
children’s religious choices to be non-religious. Janet Ruffing situates the
practices of spiritual direction firmly within the challenge of making sense
of oneself (as ‘ego-driven’) and the world at large (coping with events such
as Hurricane Sandy). These chapters set description of direct practical
matters within theological themes typical of Catholicism such as
Trinitarian theology and the operation and experience of grace.
The chapters on practices can only provide, in a volume such as this, a
snapshot of the diverse practical fields of theology. The central point here
is to emphasize the grounding of theology in the varied ways of everyday
life and service in the Christian community, and more broadly its
grounding in the actual business of human living. These are so many
practical theologies. Edward Foley’s liturgical chapter, spanning from
patristic times to de Lubac’s groundbreaking work in the twentieth century,
charts the various evolutions of eucharistic theology within different
culturally situated and socially rooted historical practices. These have
expressed quite different eucharistic attitudes, each with its own
theological significance which is to be taken seriously; but as Terrence
Tilley explains, they sit within, and are part of, the unfolding of the great
Christian tradition. Coming from another perspective, Stephen Bevans
situates today’s much-transformed ecclesial practice of mission squarely
within the transcendent perspective of God’s practice, the missio Dei, in
which all ecclesial practices participate. By situating theology contextually
and historically, and thereby giving insight into the historicity and the
actual dynamics of the evolution of the tradition, practical theologies make
a central and crucial contribution to theology as a whole.
The second set of issues is about practical theology ‘itself’. Put bluntly,
the question is whether such a thing exists. Is there a practical theology
over and above the practical theologies? Several chapters make important
contributions to this vexed debate. David Tracy, in a typically impressive,
wide-ranging essay, reaffirms his original co-relational definition of theology,
adapted by Don Browning for practical theology, but sees the need now to
extend the range of conversational partners beyond ethics and politics and
social science to embrace art (here focusing on poetry) and mysticism.

126 Recent Books
Wolfteich picks this up in her concluding section, but insists on a critique
of mysticism, especially from a feminist perspective. Even though Tracy was
himself unable fully to develop a practical theology in his own substantive
theological writings, he still affirms it as truly ‘the apex of all theology’.
Plunging further into the issues, Annemie Dillen, Robert Mager and
Thomas Groome examine the intricate questions of methodology and pedagogy
that are central to the practical theology enterprise, while Colleen Griffith
carries the discussion into its epistemological status—the kind of ‘knowing’
we achieve via practical theology (on which Groome is also very helpful).
These essays go much of the way in drilling down to the essential
elements of practical theology in itself; but then … the picture somehow
loses focus and blurs against the whole luxuriant array of the practical
fields of theological enquiry. The enterprise seems to be covering too
much. What then is ‘practical theology’? Simply metadisciplinary enquiry
into the over-arching goals and methodologies of the practical theologies?
Or itself a focused enquiry into ‘practice and practices’—those key
practices that embody Christian existence and are constitutive of the
Church? Would it then be more properly pastoral theology than practical?
Should it in fact be looking further and envisioning all the practices of the
humanum within its theological lens?
This book does not make any such claim. Rather, as indicated by
Kathleen Cahalan’s and Bryan Froehle’s long historical sweep in the
opening chapter—from the eleventh-century foundation of the universities
to the transformative event of Vatican II, which enshrined a historical
theological method—practical theology is today still a ‘developing
discipline’, still malleable. These essays suggest an emerging turn to the
aesthetic and the mystical as among its primary means of expression, and
to spirituality as its key field. Others may wish to lean in a more political
direction, more focused on critique of contemporary economic practices
and their global and environmental impact. At any rate, this publication
reveals practical theology as an enterprise replete with energy.
James Sweeney CP
Music as Cultural Mission: Explorations of Jesuit Practices in Italy and North
America, edited by Anna Harwell Celenza and Anthony B. DelDonna
(Philadelphia: Saint Joseph's UP, 2014). 978 0 9161 0180 0, pp.229, $65.00.
For the reader interested in Ignatian spirituality this volume, Music as
Cultural Mission: Exploration of Jesuit Practices in Italy and North America,

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will provide interesting historical and scholarly details concerning Jesuit
history and spirituality, enriching the understanding of the global Jesuit
enterprise. While this book focuses on elements of Jesuit history from a
musicological perspective, it certainly reflects the historiographical change
that the study of Jesuit history and spirituality have undergone in the last
25 years. Scholars are now asking: what were the Jesuits like? How were
they similar or dissimilar to their contemporaries? One could describe
contemporary Jesuit historiographical method as vertical rather than
horizontal. For example, instead of looking at the Jesuits vis-à-vis the
papacy, the Counter-Reformation or ecclesiastical institutions, recent
studies—including this one—focus more on Jesuits as part of movements
associated with popular religion, confraternities and missions. Included are
the pious practices of the various localities Jesuits inhabited.
As more and more scholars who are not Jesuits write about the Society
of Jesus, these scholars are shaping Jesuit historiography. Scholars far from
traditional Jesuit disciplines such as theology, philosophy and spirituality
are now writing about Jesuits because they cannot help but encounter
them in researching the early modern period. These scholars now include
musicologists. In Music as Cultural Mission, Anna Harwell Celenza and
Anthony R. DelDonna are typical of the present trends in Jesuit
historiography. Their book is divided into two distinct parts. The first
consists of an introduction to the Jesuit mission in early modern Italy, while
the second shifts the focus of the study to North America. It also forms a
bridge from the pre-suppression, North American Jesuit missions outside
Europe to the restored Society of 1814 by means of exploring the musical
traditions of Georgetown University, founded in 1789.
The general reader, and especially someone interested in the history of
Western culture, may enjoy the studies of part 1. While it is not
kaleidoscopic in its presentation of music in the European context of this
cultural mission, several of the articles are thought-provoking and reflect
the depth of Ignatian spirituality underpinning the infrastructure of the
Jesuit missions. DelDonna’s text, especially, ‘The Society of Jesus and
Neapolitan Culture’, also reveals the many possibilities for rich
interdisciplinary work which the mission archives not only promise, but
indeed invite. Two other chapters in part 1 deserve mention, ‘The Musical
and Theatrical Activities of the Jesuits in the Kingdom of Naples:
Accounts from the Gazzetta di Napoli (1675–1768)’ by Ausilia Magaudda
and Danilo Costantini, and Emmanuele Colombo’s ‘“The Music Must
Serve the Poetry”: The Jesuit Oratorio in Eighteenth-Century Milan’. The
Gazzetta di Napoli is one of the few extant documentary sources in Naples

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that describes musical events at the seven Jesuit institutions in the city.
Beautiful plates accompany a richly woven text that brings to life again the
musical events of eighteenth-century Jesuit Naples. Not surprisingly, the
text in Jesuit oratorios, operas and cantatas was important in the apostolic
outlook of the Jesuits. Milan offers a paradigmatic outline for Jesuit musical
culture in general. Arguments stemming from the regole of the
confraternities echo other contemporaneous European Jesuit sources.
Problems abound around utilising music but not disturbing devotion,
controlling the noise of the musicians and, of course, the costs of the
musical enterprise. ‘Who will pay?’ was often a key question.
Anna Harwell Celenza’s introduction to part 2 briefly reviews concepts
of Jesuit mission in the context of teaching (as evangelization) and
consequently addresses the approach to missions outside Europe,
particularly in New France (Canada) and Maryland, and most particularly
the history of music at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. The
musical tradition of Georgetown in the early years reflected the tradition of
the pre-suppression colleges (sung catechism, drama, academic defences,
with serious theory and instrumental teaching) and in its passage to the
restored Society one can trace the shifting of music towards a more
extracurricular position, as humanistic subjects, especially the sciences,
came to the fore. Finally Michael Zampelli’s excellent paper, ‘Bridging the
Distance: Jesuit Performance Transposed to a Contemporary Key’, is
another paradigmatic essay linking early performance of Jesuit music and
theatre to its contemporary revival. Those readers who are especially
interested in the fine arts may find the various studies in Music as Cultural
Mission a new doorway to the myriad expressions of Ignatian spirituality
summed up in the phrase, ‘Finding God in all things’.
T. Frank Kennedy SJ