The Annunciation

A New Evangelization and Apologetic for Mainline Protestants and Progressive Catholics in Postmodern North America

Larry Hart

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781532605482
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

The Annunciation is an in-depth look at how the Christian message can be communicated in a way that is comprehensible to the postmodern world and yet remain within the classical faith.

Part I

A New Evangelization

Having had a spiritual awakening . . . we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

—Step Twelve

Chapter One

The Practitioner

When the Christian has discovered not only the truth that gives life purpose, but absorbed it into personality by Rule over some years; evangelism becomes a developed instinct rather than an occasional duty. It is natural to wish to share our joy with others, to introduce them to the love of God, and we are all most rightly elated when we can prove of use in this way. But I would say that it is quite useless to think about lay-evangelists until this necessary grounding in Rule has led to a reasonable maturity of faith.1

—Martin Thornton

To proclaim fruitfully the Word of the Gospel one is first asked to have a profound experience of God.2

—Benedict XVI

Among the greatest of philosophers, theologians, and Christian saints was the medieval Dominican, Thomas Aquinas. One of the core mottos of the Dominican Order of Preachers, Contemplare et contemplata aliis tradere, usually translated as, “To contemplate and to share with others the fruits of that contemplation,” was taken from Saint Thomas’s Summa Theologiae. More than once, Thomas left academic positions to preach—left to share the fruits of his contemplation.

The Craft of Contemplation

For Aquinas, contemplation meant the contemplation of truth—Divine Truth. It meant the Truth, the Divine Reality, encountered in contemplation that is then shared through preaching and teaching, and through the whole ministry of evangelization. Saint Thomas particularly understood contemplation as reflection on Scripture. So, the Dominican Constitutions insist: “Continuous study nourishes contemplation, encourages fulfillment of the counsels with shining fidelity, constitutes a form of asceticism by its own perseverance and difficulty, and, is an essential element of our whole life, as it is an excellent religious observance.” Aquinas, it is said, did much of his scholarly writing on his knees so that his study would indeed be prayer.

In the Middle Ages there was not just one but multiple methods of meditation and prayer practiced by monks and nuns in convents and monasteries and by lay people—most dramatically and powerfully by the Franciscans and the Dominican Order to which Thomas Aquinas belonged. The term “contemplation” has changed considerably since the Middle Ages. The word “contemplation” itself is the Latin translation of the Greek “theoria,” which means “to see”—it is therefore “that at which someone looks.” Among the Greek philosophers it referred to mental perception or insight into the reality of something. When the pagan priests concentrated with fixed attention on something like an inscribed circle in which the will of a god was expected to be made manifest, that was contemplation. Richard Woods, OP, the well known writer on Dominican spirituality, makes three points in regard to Dominican contemplation:

First, the original place of contemplation in Dominican life was simpler and much less esoteric than later formulations imply. But it was foundational.

Second, although contemplative experiences can be gratuitous, preparation and training, including study, are required to develop and maintain a contemplative spirit. But that is easier than one might think.

Third, despite the serious obstacles to contemplation presented by contemporary culture, ordinary life situations, including active ministry, far from being a barrier to contemplation are, in fact, the necessary condition for and normal occasion of contemplation.3

Dominic de Guzman, the founder of this order of contemplative friars in the early thirteenth century, practiced the methods of meditation or contemplative prayer that were typical of a thirteenth century monk:

Bowing by profoundly inclining his head before the altar he would slowly chant: “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.”

Outstretched on the ground he would recite Luke 18:13 (A prayer used by the Desert Fathers and Mothers), “O God, be merciful to me a sinner.”

Deep in prayer, he appeared to be meditating upon the words of God, and he seemed to repeat them to himself in a sweet voice.

He appeared then to be listening carefully as if to hear something spoken from the altar. If one had seen his great devotion as he stood erect and prayed, they would certainly have thought that they were observing a prophet, first speaking with an angel or with God himself, then listening, then silently thinking of those things which had been revealed to him.

After the canonical hours he quickly withdrew to some solitary place, to his cell or elsewhere, and recollected himself in the presence of God. He would sit quietly, and after the sign of the cross, begin to read from a book opened before him.

One of the Order’s early friars observed: “The holy custom of our father (Dominic) seems, as it were, to resemble the prophetic mountain of the Lord in as much as he quickly passed upwards from reading to prayer, from prayer to meditation, and from meditation to contemplation.”

Saint Dominic himself, then, seems, to have engaged in a number of meditative practices—chanting, music, gazing at the crucifix, reciting Scripture sentences, and lectio divina, which carried him into a deeper consciousness of God, into a contemplative state, into wisdom, and sustained him in his apostolic ministry.4

Sharing the Mystery of Contemplation

But contemplation was not, for Saint Dominic, Saint Thomas, or Meister Eckhart, perhaps the Order’s ultimate mystic, an end in itself. Contemplation may be regarded, as Richard Woods explains it, as “an unflinching and loving look at reality as divine,” or in Meister Eckhart’s language a generation after Thomas, “Seeing God in all things and all things in God.’” In the Dominican understanding of Christian spirituality it is also the Truth, the Reality, the Light, the Love, the Wisdom, the Mystery, encountered in contemplation and handed on to others. It reminds one of the ox-herding pictures of Zen.5

The famous ox-herding pictures of Zen depict someone in search of the ox—the sacred animal of the East. Successive drawings show the person lost in illusion until finally the footprints of the ox are discovered and eventually the ox itself, which is then tamed and ridden home. Originally, this picture story of enlightenment reached its climax in the eighth drawing when, after the ox itself had disappeared, the person also disappeared so that nothing remained. This was represented by the drawing of a circle—a symbol of nothingness, of nondiscriminating consciousness. But then in twelfth-century China other pictures were added showing the seeker, now old and enlightened, returning to the market place to save all “sentient beings.” Contemplare et contemplata aliis tradere.

Now here is something about the founding of the Dominican Order that may be pertinent to our own time. In the spring of 1203, Dominic joined Prior Diego de Acebo on an embassy to Denmark for the monarchy of Spain, to arrange the marriage between the son of King Alfonso VII and a niece of King Valdemar II of Demark. At that time the south of France was the stronghold of the Cathar, or Albigensian, heresy. After they encountered the Albigensians at Toulouse, Dominic saw the need for a response capable of winning members of the Albigensian movement back to mainstream Christian thought. Prior Diego recognized immediately that while the representatives of the Holy Church acted and moved with pomp and extravagance offensive to the poor people of the region, the Cathars lived a simpler and more sacrificial life. Prior Diego therefore suggested that the papal legates begin to live a reformed apostolic life. The legates agreed to change if they could find a strong leader. The prior took up the challenge, and he and Dominic dedicated themselves to the conversion of the Albigensians. What Dominic came to see out of this whole experience was the organic connection between spirituality and evangelization.

Superficiality — the Curse of Our Age

A number of people, like Diana Butler Bass, are convinced that the number of people who somewhat paradoxically identify themselves as both spiritual and religious when responding to surveys, as well as the strong indication that, at least in North America, the word “religion” is negatively associated with institutional religion, may indicate many people in the North American culture are not so much closed to the Christian experience of the Divine Mystery we call God as they are turned off by the utter banality of most churches. The reality is that those who are hungry for the transcendent cannot be evangelized by someone who is oblivious to such longings and experiences in his or her own life. If the tree is barren there is no fruit to give away. “What does not live in you cannot live around you.” Does this mean that sharp entrepreneurial priests and pastors can’t build whopping big churches? Obviously that is not the case, but while not everyone can become a successful shopkeeper, we can all become transformed and transforming contemplatives.

I have no idea how many times I have now quoted the first three lines of Richard Foster’s book The Celebration of Discipline since first reading them over thirty years ago: “Superficiality is the curse of our age. The doctrine of instant satisfaction is primarily a spiritual problem. The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deeper people.”6 Borrowing Foster’s perspective we could say, “Superficial evangelism is a curse of the postmodern church. Reliance on programs rather than practice is a spiritual problem. The desperate need is not for a greater number ...