Looking at all these BIG questions
through the mind of a contemplative – Part I...

Fr Patrick W. Collins Phd has been quietly following the conversations here on Catholica Australia from his home in Michigan and has long been very supportive of our endeavours. Fr Collins retired from active ministry earlier this year but one suspects that "retirement" is the inappropriate descriptor. It's more like a change of direction as to how he continues his ministry. On his own website (www.vatican2.org/patrickcollins/) he describes himself as "author, preacher, musician and university professor. He senses that his principal vocation is to contemplative living — out of which his various ministries flow. In addition to numerous books and articles, Fr. Collins has produced forty-five TV programs, and a number of videos, among them Thomas Merton: Man, Monk, Myth with Music. Fr. Collins presents various kinds of retreats, missions, and workshops, including what he calls 'spiritual concerts' which combine texts and tunes for spiritual insight and growth. This approach gives a feelingful dimension to the meaning of the words and connects head with heart, reason and imagination. He calls it "Music with a Message."

Fr Collins has a deep love of the thinking of Thomas Merton. Over the next three days we invite you to immerse yourself in this very thoughtful reflection Fr Collins has submitted to us which not only addresses issues raised in a range of commentaries and posts in our forum but it poses a very different way of looking at the overview of where the Church has been heading since the Second Vatican Council. The broad thrust of his argument, following the thinking of Thomas Merton, is that not enough energy has been put into spiritual reform — the bread and butter matter of how we relate to and intersect with God. Read what Patrick has to say and, I mean it, if you can handle the mental gear shift that is involved, "start really living"...

Spirituality as the key to Ecclesial Reform and Renewal

Introduction

The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) called for church renewal and reform. Renewal is interior, reform external. As a first generation post-Vatican II priest, I recall the enthusiasm with which we went about implementing the insights and decrees of that Council. New winds were blowing and it was refreshing and exciting for us change-agents. At my 20th anniversary of ordination, I recall making a television program based upon which I considered to have been the principal energy of those two decades: Change in the Church.

Now, 42 years after my ordination and in the first year of my retirement, I look back and sense a missing piece. Or perhaps better said, the wrong ordering of things. We went about the external reforms but perhaps we neglected to some extent the interior spiritual renewal from which the external reforms should have flowed. We turned altars around ordered congregants to active participation in the liturgy.

We summoned laity into engagements in church governance and ordained permanent deacons. We questioned many church teachings and pressed for new theological insights. All well and good. But was all of this as well grounded as it should have been? I wonder.

Spiritual Renewal as the Basis of Ecclesiastical Reform

"The contemplative stays clear of movements, not because they confuse him, but simply because he does not need them and can go further by himself than he can in their formalized and often fanatical ranks."

Vatican II is often described as a theologians' council since they had such strong input in showing the bishops ways toward a new approaches of "being Church". An ancient dictum of our Catholic Traditions says that a theologian is one who prays and one who prays in a theologian. One person whose life affirms this aphorism is the American Cistercian monk, Thomas Merton. Merton's thoughts about the Church and its reform and renewal, born of his contemplative living and praying, can be instructive for those still striving to pursue the vision of Vatican II. His struggle to remain faithful in The Journey of Faith and in and with the Church both challenges us and gives us hope — or perhaps I should say Hope.

Near the end of his life he wrote: "The contemplative mind is, in fact, not normally ultra-conservative; but neither is it necessarily radical. It transcends both these extremes in order to remain living contact with that which is genuinely true in any traditional movement". Therefore he believed that contemplatives "will not normally be associated too firmly or too definitely with any 'movement' whether political, religious, liturgical, artistic, philosophical or what have you. The contemplative stays clear of movements, not because they confuse him, but simply because he does not need them and can go further by himself than he can in their formalized and often fanatical ranks."

Contemplatives, Merton contends, "will instinctively avoid becoming enmeshed in conceptual systems". Such persons become able to live within themselves, at home with their own thoughts and to an ever greater degree independent of exterior supports. Satisfaction is derived more and more from spiritual creativeness. "He derives strength not from what he gets out of things and people, but from giving himself to life and to others. He discovers the secret of life in the creative energy of love". (The Inner Experience, 290-291)

Well, if all of this is true for Merton, what did it mean to affiliate with a Church — especially in its interior renewal and external reforms? In 1963 Merton professed that "The Church is fortunately a mystery that is beyond the reach of bureaucracy, though sometimes one is tempted to doubt it". (CT 82) For him Church reform was not primarily a political endeavor of power sharing or power grabbing. For monk Merton spiritual renewal was always primary and the reform of church structures was to flow from that on-going interior transformation. As he wrote in 1963, "There is no question that the mystics are the ones who have kept Christianity going, if anyone has". (HGL 583) This is true because the Church for Merton was the Holy Spirit dwelling and acting in the Mystical Christ.

When Merton became a convert to the Roman Catholic Church in 1939, his life was in a chaotic state. Early on he had been afraid of Catholicism even though he admired it. But after some serious Catholic reading, he found the Church with its clarity and certitude to be a kind of life raft in a sea of the world's and his own confusion. After his baptism he said that he had "entered into the everlasting movement of that gravitation which is the very life and spirit of God: God's own gravitation towards the depths of His own infinite nature, His goodness without end. And God, that center Who is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere, finding me, through incorporation with Christ, incorporated into this immense and tremendous gravitational movement which is love, which is the Holy Spirit, loved me". (SSM 246) Throughout Merton's life the Church as The Mystical Body of Christ was the principal image and metaphor energizing his ecclesial faith.

Years later, in a letter to theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, the monk described his conversion as "marked by a pretty strong and dazzled belief in the Christ of the Nicene Creed. One reason for this was a strong reaction against the fogginess and subjectivity and messed-up-ness of the ideas about Christ that I had met with up and down in various types of Protestantism. I was tired of a Christ who had evaporated". (At Home in the World, 22)

This initial enthusiasm for the Church was tempered over the years by experience and study. Life in the Church was not about security stemming from the right questions and answers. It was about flowing in the stream of life's complexities with ever maturing faith and a certain detachment from the institutional Church. In 1959 he realized the purity of the Gospel often involved an admixture of error and wrong attitudes in the Church. He told a friend: "We cannot demand that our Christianity be absolutely pure ... There is inevitably plenty of prejudice and cant wherever there is a religion."

Quoting Jesus, he said that in the Church the weeds and the wheat grow together until the harvest. The temptation is to think that the Church is without such "cockle". Our task is to make distinctions between the good and the bad and to adjust to the reality ourselves "in order to make sure that we ourselves are wheat and not cockle. And of course the thing is that one never can tell. Because we are not the ones appointed to do the judging. To look for an absolute assurance that one is pure wheat is to fall, after all, into the same old pharisaism". (HGL, 387)

To D.T. Suzuki, the Buddhism scholar, Merton admitted that the Church could become a prisoner of its own formulas, laws and structures. Writing things down about the Christian faith is "fraught with ludicrous and overwhelming difficulties," he wrote. "No one cares for fresh, direct and sincere intuitions of the Living Truth. Everyone is preoccupied with formulas". (HGL 564) He was particularly critical of the bureaucratic ways of the Vatican, claiming that, while "the Church itself is a permanent miracle witnessed to her own divine origin by her manifestly divine qualities," the "Roman Curia does not always bear this out, unless the eternity of God is conceived as a vacuum without activity in it". (HGL 397)

Merton's sense of Church was much more than a matter of signing up with a group called religion as if mere gregariousness brought one closer to God. He decried such ecclesiastical gregariousness as a kind of "huddling together against God rather than adoration of His true transcendent holiness". (HGL 43)

In 1961 the monk wrote about the Church as "the Mother of Truth". Yet he asserted that truth cannot be equated with ecclesiastical formulas or rules nor any single school of theological thought. The Church mothers Truth by being open to all truth: "We must go straight to the truth without wanting to glance backward and without caring about what school of theology it represents". He contended that one must seek "to find the truth of love instead of the truth of formulas ... of laws, of programs, of projects ..." (HGL 560)

NEXT PART...

Dr Patrick W Collins

Fr Patrick W. Collins PhD lives in Michigan and has long been very supportive of our endeavours here at Catholica. Fr Collins retired from active ministry earlier last year but one suspects that "retirement" is the inappropriate descriptor. It's more like a change of direction as to how he continues his ministry. On his own website (www.vatican2.org/patrickcollins/) he describes himself as "author, preacher, musician and university professor. He senses that his principal vocation is to contemplative living — out of which his various ministries flow. In addition to numerous books and articles, Fr. Collins has produced forty-five TV programs, and a number of videos, among them Thomas Merton: Man, Monk, Myth with Music. Fr. Collins presents various kinds of retreats, missions, and workshops, including what he calls 'spiritual concerts' which combine texts and tunes for spiritual insight and growth. This approach gives a feelingful dimension to the meaning of the words and connects head with heart, reason and imagination. He calls it "Music with a Message."

What are your thoughts on this commentary? You can contribute to the discussion in our forum.

©2006Patrick W Collins

[Index of Commentaries by Dr Patrick Collins]