Reclaiming Our Original Identity (Community and Ministry)

Communion, Community and Ministry

By: Luz Marina Díaz

In this concluding article on reclaiming our original identity, I explore Nouwen’s themes of community and ministry as pathways to recognizing our belovedness to God.

Community
Religious orders carefully select members who are psychologically and spiritually mature. Though they do not always succeed, it is easy to assume that most people entering a religious community can build healthy relationships with others. These individuals’ psychological and spiritual maturity has an impact on how they live with others in community. In addition, they are apt to have an interior, intimate and personal relationship with God. This allows community members to learn and grow from problems and conflicts when they happen in the community. Parishes, by contrast, do not select their members. So, it is obvious that we should expect different stages of psychological and spiritual development among people within this kind of faith community. Moreover, a parish is formed by people of all ages, so spiritual and psychological growth will not go at the same pace for all.

For members entering a community to be conscious of their original identity they must develop the discipline of cultivating that identity and living it individually, so they can also live it with others communally. Nouwen says that often people who are not in communion with God and feel alone, in need of affection and love, enter a community seeking to quench this emotional need. Then there may be clashes between these people since they are together in the community but trapped in loneliness. They are frustrated with not fulfilling their needs owing to not living in a relationship with God.[a]

Stages of Spiritual Development
I believe God invites each person to cultivate a loving relationship with Godself. Still, each person must respond to this invitation, and the ability to do so depends on his or her stage of spiritual development. For instance, the inability to live their original identity is  characteristic of people in the stage that developmental theorists call ‘conventional’ . Janet Ruffing^’s summarises its features:

• an external locus of authority;
• an embeddedness in a group whose norms are determinative either as inflexible rules or as affective loyalty to relationships within the group;
• experience of God that is tied to external authority and best expressed by external sources;
• an inability to reflect on and articulate interior experience and to adjust their behavior in response to the insight gained through the reflection.[b]
• Some people are in the conventional stage because they are relatively young, and others because they have not had the opportunity of progressing to the post-conventional stages. Ruffing describes the characteristics of these:
• a developing interior locus for authority;
• an appreciation of different ideas, thoughts, experiences;
• experience of God that is interior, intimate, and personal;
• an ability to reflect on interior movement and make changes based on that reflection; an ability to tolerate ambiguity;
• an ability to think paradoxically and symbolically.[c]

Faith communities help members enter the post-conventional spiritual stages by offering retreats to teach and practice contemplative and spiritual exercises and enable spiritual conversations to share prayer experiences. Many churches have a group of spiritual directors who can assist community members in achieving spiritual growth. Thus faith communities offer opportunities for their members to embrace and live their original identities.

How can spiritual practices help a person shift from a conventional to a post-conventional spiritual stage? The writer and mystic Cynthia Bourgeault can help to answer these questions using the classic text The Cloud of Unknowing. First, she explains that the anonymous author identifies two spiritual stages—active and contemplative—each of which has two degrees—high and low.

This yields up a fourfold schematic: lower-active, higher-active, lower-contemplative, higher-contemplative. And then, as if to confound schematization altogether, he collapses the two middle rungs into a single overlapping ground, so that in place of four separate strata we have a chain-link fence![d]

Thus, Bougeault says, a person may not be fully active unless that person is also partly contemplative.

According to the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, a person in the ‘lower-active’ stage lives the gospel and is a responsible citizen: ‘The lower part of the active life consists of good and honest bodily works of charity and mercy’. These acts are fundamental to ethics and morality; they are the basis of a sound spiritual education. The lower-active stage explained by The Cloud of Unknowing’s author corresponds to the conventional stage described by Janet Ruffing. However,
The higher part of the active life and the lower part of the contemplative life lie in good spiritual meditations and diligent looking into [literally, ‘beholding’] a man’s own wretchedness with sorrow and contrition, [looking] into the Passion of Christ and his servants with pity and compassion, and into the wonderful gifts, kindnesses, and works of God in all of his creatures both bodily and spiritual with gratitude and praise.[e]

This way of praying matches the practice of a person in a post-conventional spiritual stage. So, what is different? A person in the lower-active or conventional spiritual stage does pray, but superficially, reciting prescribed prayers without self-reflection. What is happening in the higher-active and lower-contemplative? Bourgeault answers: self-reflection! Self-reflective practices help us shift from conventional to post-conventional spiritual stages.^. Bourgeault gives the example of someone who does charitable works, attends church on Sunday, goes to confession, follows the commandments and lives in the world without much thought. In the second half of life, this person realises that life, as it used to be, ‘has become unmanageable’. Then, this person starts asking questions: ‘all of a sudden, you step across the border into “who am I?” “What the hell am I doing, anyway?” And sometimes that movement into actually occupying your life with reflection will happen when life upsets you.’[f]

Francis of Assisi’s and St Ignatius Loyola’s conversion stories are examples of this. The young Francis of Assisi’s life was turned around by his capture and imprisonment following the battle with rival city Perugia in 1202. A changed man, he returned to Assisi without concern for the worldly pleasures of his past and with a deep desire to pray alone. In 1521, Saint Ignatius of Loyola was struck by a cannonball in Pamplona, which changed his life.

Conversion experiences are not limited to saints. It can happen to anyone, even if not in such a dramatic way. It is when we wake up inside. It is when we begin to become self-reflective and ask the questions, who am I? What am I doing? Why am I doing it? The Christian tradition offers excellent spiritual practices that cultivate awakening introspection. These include lectio divina, which invites us to move back and forth between a scriptural story and our own. What does this story say to me? That is a profoundly liberating question. Likewise, the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola, with their rules for discernment and imaginative prayer, are pathways to self-reflection and transformation: ‘what have I done for Christ? What am I doing for Christ?’ (Exx 53)

Moral Identity and Healing the Present
It is vital to be a part of a community to hear the words of God—you are my beloved children—and we should respond to them collectively. Maria Harris and Gabriel Moran write: ‘Spirituality is both personal and communal …. the rootedness of our spirituality derives from being creatures bonded with the rest of creation—persons in community.’[g]

Harris and Moran classify contemplative and spiritual practices within the Christian tradition in terms of the personal and communal. They recognise three significant categories:
One set of practices emphasizes individual interiority; a second emphasizes group ritual; a third emphasizes the integration of these. Among the individual disciplines are prayer. contemplation, and fasting: among the group disciplines are worship, service, and prophetic protest; among the integrating ones are embodiment, memory, and justice.[h]

Among the practices emphasizing integration, Harris and Moran include healing the present by reflecting on stories from the past, such as biblical stories, and dangerous stories, such as the Holocaust.[i]

Nowadays, for example, healing memories is part of some US faith communities’ efforts to respond to the generational harm and injustice that Black people have suffered through racism. Kelly Brown Douglas explains.

In faith communities, reparations must begin with anamnestic truth-telling. Anamnesis means ‘memorial sacrifice’. Its origins are in Jesus’ words, ‘Do this in memory of me’ (Luke 22:19). This is not a passive process but one in which Christians enter into the sacrifice. It is about being accountable to the past in the very present … anamnestic truth-telling confronts the ways in which the past remains alive in the present, thus paving the way to right the present by exonerating it from contemporary vestiges of the past.[j]

In my parish we have organized a series of spiritual conversations on race, racism and racial justice, and presentations on scripture-based racial justice. According to Brown, fostering moral identity and acting as if the future is now are the other two steps of reparations. She states.

Ecclesiastical institutions and faith communities must lead the way towards claiming a moral identity by naming and freeing themselves from their own institutional realities of white privilege …. Faith communities must also witness to God’s just future …. Faith communities do not have the option, as Martin Luther King Jr once said, to remain ‘silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows’.[k]

Ministry
Contemplative and spiritual practices connect human interiority with social, political and environmental commitment. They have an apostolic dimension that brings together self, God and community.

You and I are called, not just to communion and community but then to go out and minister and to trust that those you minister will lead you closer and closer and closer to the heart of love—the heart of God.[l]

Communicating with God through contemplative and spiritual practices is a vital part of the liberating process of cooperating with grace. Furthermore, as the author of The Cloud of Unknowing says, one cannot be fully active if one is not partially contemplative, that is, if one does not engage in spiritual practices that cultivate an intimate relationship with God in Christ.

We are God’s beloved children. This is our original and true identity that must be reclaimed, acknowledged and cultivated by contemplative and spiritual practices that trigger self-reflection. These practices are sources of communion, community and ministry. They help us grow spiritually and adopt a contemplative and religious life characterized by a high quality of our relationships with nature, time, and people. Contemplative and spiritual practices allow us to find God in everything and Christ in others. They awaken in us the desire to cooperate with God in building God’s reign—a world of justice and peace.