Bringing balance into our thinking...

The American constitution contains one great insight I think the world is indebted to. We all yearn for happiness. Deep, deep down though I am sure we all yearn for eternal happiness - a life beyond this one where all the injustices and unfairnesses of this life are redeemed and set at nought so that we can exist in perfect harmony, equilibrium and balance.

All the world's great religions are basically trying to articulate this dual yearning - happiness now and some kind of justice or "balancing out of everything" that allows us to look back on this life and say "it did all balance" in the end whatever mistakes I made, whatever mistakes my family made, whatever injustices or unfairness I was subjected to, and whatever transgressions I might have made I can now "rest in eternal peace". In the case of those religions that believe in re-incarnation this yearning is translated into a yearning that we'll be transported into a new life at an advanced stage to the present one.

It's curious though how we human beings manage to screw all that up by introducing ideology and politics into everything. There are only four dimensions to being: the physical, the intellectual, the emotional and the spiritual. We cannot access the fourth dimension other than through the first three tangible dimensions. But rather than enabling us to access the spiritual it seems to me that they can also block the spiritual. And the saddest thing of all is that institutionalised or cultural religion can be the greatest aid to this blocking of any agency on God's earth. It seems to me the greatest blockage comes through, or from, our emotional needs. We all want a sense of personal security and certitude (i.e. answers to everything).

The institutional Church rose to the position of influence it did, I suspect, principally because it was able to offer "the great unwashed" and "the seething, uneducated masses" a sense of certitude and seeming "answers to everything". The problem the institution faces today is that "the seething, uneducated masses" have largely disappeared and through science, modern scholarship and the ways of abstract reasoning that are now encouraged from the earliest stages of our education "the great unwashed" are no longer prepared to be treated as kindergarten tots when science, and just "lived life" itself tells us there are actually "no answers to some things" - life is full of incertitude and we had better get used ot it so that we can live (and die) with it. This thinking literally scares the living daylights out of a certain remnant cohort in the population, including some with impressive educational qualifications, and like some "kindly nanny" Mother Church seems to have put all her energy into molly-coddling that sector and literally couldn't give a fig for the needs of the rest of the population.

Across the Western world 85% of them have now quietly walked out without leaving any protest notes and washed their hands of the whole institutionalised religious outlook. They've not abandoned God though. They are searching, like lost sheep, for someone - anyone - who might articulate their needs and provide some coherent response that can point them in the direction of where answers might be found to this deep quest we all have for the dual forms of happiness I described in the first paragraph.

Two paradoxes...

It seems to me there are two enormous paradoxes in this whole religious business that consumes so much of our lives. The first is that we can't actually pursue the spiritual through the spiritual. Let me explain that: the spiritual is intangible. The only way we can pursue the spiritual - the "ultimate" dimension of our being - is through the three tangible dimensions. But it is a form of idolatry to elevate any of those dimensions to the point where we are seduced or we worship them. Don't we see it all the time - individuals who "adore" their physical looks, others who are in love with ideas and what their mind can do, and possibly the largest cohort of all, those who are seduced emotionally? Spiritual maturity, I suspect, comes with the sort of thing we were talking about with Merton in his last days, but, at the more practical level it comes from some kind of developing "balance" in the three tangible dimensions of our being. We grow to enjoy "the physical me"; we grow to enjoy "the intellectual me"; and we grow to enjoy, and be at peace with, "the emotional me". It is through that process that we develop the sense of serenity and equilibrium that opens us into the spiritual. It's a lifetime's work learning how to do that though.

That last sentence leads to the second paradox...

However many millions of words James Fowler has written in his lifetime we are indebted to him for two brilliant insights that I think are easy to grasp. The first is the general concept of perceiving spirituality as some staged process that parallels the stages we go through in physical, intellectual and emotional maturation. His second insight is the paradoxical one: we can't move to each stage of spiritual maturity without traversing the thinking and emotional states inherent to the earlier stages. Just as we intuitively seem to know that a child has to go through the mythic phase of believing in goblins, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy if they are to emerge as emotionally balanced adults, so also we can't get to a Merton-like stage 6 or 7 level of spiritual maturity without having traversed the deserts and delights of seeing our faith as some hoop-jumping endeavour and perhaps even going through a "speaking in tongues" phase and all the other crazy things people do in the name of religion or spirituality.

This second insight of Fowler's presents challenges to us both individually and in our role as members of the human family or the institutional Church. At the personal level how do we learn to "filter" the information we are receiving and not get distracted by the communications that are not relevant for our needs at the stage we are at? I find myself still getting very upset at the hoop-jumpers - and the ways in which the institution only seems to care about them. I can see other people at a more advanced stage than me though and they seem to eventually move through this stage of being emotionally upset by that. It does seem that somehow we do eventually learn to filter effectively.

In the responsibilities we carry as member of the human community or the Church community though, how do we tailor our communications to this increasingly diverse and heterogenous population the Church, or the community, now has to talk to? In the past the Church was largely dealing with a very homogenous population - the vast majority were poor and uneducated. That's not long ago in the span of human history. When I went to university in the mid-1960s I was still one of the 10% elite in this country. Today 70% of young people have access to a tertiary education in this country and something like 90% to what is termed post-compulsory education. Institutionally and communally we need urgently to develop styles of communication that bridge the enormous span in society now - or we need to teach the art of "filtering" from the very earliest stages of educational and spiritual development.

Away from all this intellectual rambling though the challenge that doesn't go away is the one of bringing balance, equilibrium, happiness and ultimately that "peace which surpasses all human understanding" into our lives. The Thomas Merton's of this world are the trailblazers who point to the ways in which we do that.

Blessings, Tom

Tom Scott is the pen name of the editor of Catholica, Brian Coyne.

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