Our calamitous century and the fire of prayer

I'm a few pages into a book that looks very promising.  My friend, historian, Steve Varvis, suggested it.  And it's highly regarded. Barbara Tuchman's a Pulitzer prize winner, and in her book, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, she hands us a tale that does what historians do best--she helps us live better today in light of the past.  Superbly and beautifully written, the book follows the life of a single 14th century knight, Enguerrand Coucy VII: ("the most experienced and skillful of all the knights of France") and through him shows us what the 14th century was made of.

Tuchman initially wrote to learn "the effects on society of the most lethal disaster of recorded history--that is to say, of the Black Death of 1348-50, which killed an estimated one third of the population living between India and Iceland."  But researching the period she found that more than this single and lethal disaster, the 14th century was itself a disaster--it "suffered so many strange and great perils and adversities that its disorders cannot be traced to any one cause; they were the hoofprints of more than the four horsemen of St. John's vision, which had now become seven--plague, war, taxes, brigandage, bad government, insurrections, and schism in the Church."

Here's a paragraph that really arouses my interest:

"Although my initial question has escaped an answer, the interest of the period itself--a violent, tormented, bewildered, suffering and disintegrating age, a time, as many thought, of Satan triumphant--was compelling and, as it seemed to me, consoling in a period of similar disarray.  If our last decade or two of collapsing assumptions has been a period of unusual discomfort, it is reassuring to know that the human species has lived through worse before."

She wrote those words in the mid-1970s.

The book ought to enjoy a resurgence of interest today.  Especially among us who are assaulted by the fear tactics of political and religious ideologues telling us the sky's falling on top of us.  The Swiss historian, de Sismondi called the 14th century "a bad time for humanity."

The 21st century could very well be as calamitous as the 14th.  But humanity survived that "bad time" well enough to have forgotten it entirely.  What's more, suffering produces spiritual fire.  In England alone, the 14th century produced some of the greatest spiritual teachers our history knows--Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, and the anonymous monk who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing.

If that was true then, it's likely the Holy Spirit's up to the same mischief today.  In fact, I'll bet on it.

Avoiding the Pitfalls of Mass-Market Spirituality

In a recent New York Times editorial, Ross Douthat says:

"By making mysticism more democratic, we’ve also made it more bourgeois, more comfortable, and more dilettantish. It’s become something we pursue as a complement to an upwardly mobile existence, rather than a radical alternative to the ladder of success. Going to yoga classes isn’t the same thing as becoming a yogi; spending a week in a retreat center doesn’t make me Thomas Merton or Thérèse of Lisieux. Our kind of mysticism is more likely to be a pleasant hobby than a transformative vocation.

"What’s more, it’s possible that our horizons have become too broad, and that real spiritual breakthroughs require a kind of narrowing — the decision to pick a path and stick with it, rather than hopscotching around in search of a synthesis that “works for me.”

Douthat addresses two of the chief themes of this blog and website:

1. There's a real need to make spiritual practice accessible to ordinary people

2. These practices are best resourced from deep within a tradition

But he also issues a warning:

• Spiritual awakening and transformation takes work; in out-dated language---"discipline," even "renunciation"---or language more current, "muscle," "perseverance," or "guts."

Without such work, whatever spiritual awakening we think we're pursuing just might turn out to be little more than a fad.

Prayer: a few choice words

We've entered a turbulent century, but it's not the first time in history people have faced such difficulty. The 14th century (see this excellent book on the subject) was every bit as challenging and yet it produced some of the most enduring spiritual teaching in history. In this brief video I explore the gifts of the 14th century English Christians who excelled at interior prayer--in particular, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing.

A few choice words are mighty expressions of genuine prayer. Learn to utter simple words and awaken a profound experience of prayer in the midst of your active life.

Spiritual but not religious?

There's a conversation beginning over on the Speaking of Faith (SOP) site about the relationship between spirituality and religion.  Since I've often reflected on the spiritual awakening taking place today and how religious institutions often stand in the way, I thought you might be interested in following along or commenting in order to help the SOP folk prepare for an upcoming interview with Anne Lamott. Annie says: "Sober people say that religion is for people who are afraid to go to hell, and spirituality is for people who’ve been there. And I think faith, for me, is a word that speaks much more to a belief and an interest in matters that are spiritual rather than the institution and creeds that you associate with religion.”

And SOP says: We’ve been thinking about Anne Lamott a lot lately as we continue to build a dialogue about what it means to be spiritual but not necessarily religious. (We’re looking to make a full-fledged production out of your responses, so add your reflections here — and please share this link with others.)

Beyond the cluttered heart

In the awakened spiritual life, the key is not merely to get rid of the heart's clutter, but to live unattached to it, without identification with all that causes you to love it and want to hold onto it.   You want to get to the place where you no longer feel compelled to have it around, period. This freedom is the fruit of interior prayer, watchfulness, awareness.

Continual, habitual returning to that deep union with Christ within means that you become increasingly non-attached and disidentified with the thought-clutter that once littered your inner life, though you probably could not see it at the time.