Discipleship, Secularity, and the Modern Self

Dancing to Silent Music

Judith A. Merkle

• Editorial: T&T Clark
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780567693433
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Teología y religión
• Categoría: Teología

Judith A. Merkle examines the situation of Christian spirituality today, in a secular age, through the images of dance, silence, and music. Drawing on the work of Charles Taylor as well as core aspects of the tradition of Christian theology on discipleship, Merkle asks how these new conditions affect the practice of Christianity as modern discipleship. The author calls God the music maker. She argues that response to the reality of God can be captured through the image of dance. Merkle reminds us that people in secular society connect to God in diverse ways, not in the least through the call of creation and the call of conscience. She explores discipleship as a lens through which we can understand how a community of faith, service, prayer, worship, and sacramentality can be viewed and integrated in daily life. She emphasizes how the interconnection between prayer, Eucharist, and a believing community is inseparable from the dance of discipleship as it can be lived in secular society. The image of dancing to silent music is a powerful symbol of Christian religious experience in modern times.

Part One

Foundations

1

Silent Music and the Dance

A New Moment in Christian Spirituality

Throughout the centuries human beings have wondered, is it possible to connect to God? How does one do it? Who knows the way? Philosophers throughout the ages have sought to define a life worth living, a life that responds to human potentials and leads to fulfillment. However, their goals were not always religious as we know today, but they did reflect the meaning-seeking nature of human life. Before the Axial Age, 900–200 BCE, the beginning of Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel; and philosophical rationalism in Greece, societies show some belief in a High God or Sky God, since he was thought to be in the heavens. This god, however, was rather inaccessible, and faded from ordinary consciousness. People experienced the sacred in a more generalized way in the world around them. Some held that gods, people, animals, plants, insects, and rocks all shared the same divine life. Even the gods had to preserve this order, and had to cooperate with people in the preservation of the divine energies of the cosmos. If these were not renewed, the world could fall into a primal void.¹ The vision of the ancient gods was a mix between human and mythological characteristics that only approximated the image of a dialogue partner and a divine-human relationship which later became a characteristic of the Judaic tradition, and the monotheism upon which Christianity rested.

A form which exists beyond sensible experience, which accounts for order in the world, approaches the God who the Judeo-Christian believers encountered through revelation. Exod. 3:1-6 recounts Moses meeting God in the burning bush. This offers a picture of an encounter with God which goes beyond a mere principle of order. Coming upon a bush which was blazing but not consumed, Moses states, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up. When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, ‘Moses, Moses!’ And he said, ‘Here I am’” (Exod. 3:3-5). God revealed Godself to Moses: “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God” (Exod. 3:6). The core dynamic of the God-human encounter is recounted here. God offers a sign, Moses turns to pay attention, God reveals Godself.

The mix between meaning-seeking inquiry and religious experience continued in the early centuries of Western civilization. In Augustine’s account of fourth-century life in The City of God, he notes the variety of philosophies, schools of thought, and visions of right living in Roman society. In his account, there were currently 288 varieties!² Augustine reviews the categorization of these different ways of thinking, first by their content and then by whether the philosophy requires that the philosopher actually practices the beliefs espoused or simply professes them. These systems of thought addressed the issue of life in the earthly city, but did not arrive at the heavenly one.

Early Christians were known, not as adherers to a new system of thought, but as those who belonged to “the way.” They recognized that response to Jesus Christ was a reply to the more fundamental question of whether earthly life and heavenly life could mix. Belief and discipleship affirmed more than a philosophical system; it acknowledged that the realities of heaven and earth could touch. The scriptures did incorporate visions of the quality of life which flows from belief, and in some instances borrowed the ideals of those who followed the Greek and Roman philosophies. But the primary focus of the gospels is the Good News that a connection between God and human beings is possible. Early Christians did not die in martyrdom for an idea, an unmoved mover, or even a system of virtue and vice. They died because of a relationship with Jesus Christ.

What Is the Way?

Writers of both Testaments and those who followed in the Christian tradition offered images of what made up “the way” of the Christian life. The symbolic nature of linking the boundaries of this-worldly and other-worldly realms could not be captured in maps, linear language, blueprints, or recipes. Response to the question, how do we on earth connect to God had to appeal to the imagination and the heart. It had to suggest rather than describe; lure and invite instead of command. Both the Hebrew scripture and the New Testament offer such images.

Genesis 28:10-17 puts forward the metaphor of a ladder. The biblical patriarch Jacob dreams during his flight from his brother Esau of a ladder which connects earth and heaven. Jewish scholars, in later periods, unpacked the image of a ladder to remind the community of what it means to live in relationship in these two worlds. They pointed out the “ups” and “downs” of the Jewish people in their life with Yahweh and drew attention to the presence of angels who represent continual divine assistance to the sincere. They compared the ladder to the Temple, which connects the Jewish people and Yahweh as well as their prayers and sacrifices, offered in the Temple, which express their attention to God in their lives. The symbol of the ladder carried the belief of the Jewish community that their symbolic actions on earth have a heavenly connection.

In the New Testament, the gospel of Jn 1:51, retrieves the image of the ladder, as a symbol of Jesus as the true connection between God and people. Many people of the early church would have been familiar with Jacob’s ladder and found in the image a confirmation of their new faith in Jesus Christ. In subsequent centuries, the church fathers returned to this theme to speak of the church. In the first centuries, Christian identity struggled to take root in a new and hostile culture, while the stability and integrity of the church was challenged by persecution from without and controversy from within. Irenaeus in the second century describes the Christian church as the “ladder of ascent to God.”³

The use of images to describe the human encounter with God reflects the density of what is involved in awakening to and engaging in the divine-huma n relationship. Tradition affirms that meeting the divine is not a once and for all event, rather a pursuit which happens over a lifetime. To capture a fuller sense of the divine-human encounter, the metaphor of journey is used both in the Bible and literature to symbolize the ongoing character of the relationship. The book of Exodus depicts the Israelites setting out on a journey in the desert, away from their slavery in Egypt to a new relationship with Yahweh in the promise land. The book of Deuteronomy gives directions as to how to live in relationship with God, as God’s people. After years in exile in Babylon, the books of Ezra and Nehemiah recount how God helped to restore the people of Israel after their sins, mistakes, and misfortunes.

Later Christianity

In the unfolding of Western Christianity, abundant images have been offered to help people understand the “way” to God in their lives. These have become classics of the Christian spiritual tradition. St. Bonaventure in the thirteenth century, writing The Soul’s Journey into God, retrieves the image of the six-winged Seraph seen by St. Francis on the slopes of Mount Alverna.⁴ This central religious experience in the Franciscan tradition, an encounter of the earthly and the other-worldly in the life of St. Francis, was a vision that imprinted on him the living seal of the Stigmata. Bonaventure followed Francis in his conviction that creation itself is a major bridge between earth and heaven, and a deep source of spiritual development. The splendor of created things awakens us to acknowledge God. Bonaventure, a man of his century, viewed the sciences, particularly metaphysics, mathematics, and physics, as a means of deepening awareness of spiritual realities and ultimately leading human beings to God.

The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola, written in 1522–24, grew out of Ignatius’s own personal experience as a person who sought to grow in union with God and to know God’s will in his life.⁵ He kept a journal as he gained spiritual insight and deepened in his spiritual experience. He left these behind as a guide for others, along with directions as how to enter into these same spiritual experiences. Many have followed “the way” of St. Ignatius as a guide for their spiritual journey. Teresa of Avila, in her Interior Castle, offers a narrative of the soul passing through various castles or states of personal transformation, in its journey to God.⁶ Found also in the sixteenth century is St. John of the Cross who wrote the Ascent of Mount Carmel.⁷ This text offers another description of the path of the ascetical life in pursuit of mystical union with Christ. John as a Carmelite monk already responded to the question can we meet God on earth, by entering the Carmelite order to pursue this journey. What John contributes is information concerning stages in the journey, and what happens along the way. John attends to his own experience of the “Dark Night of the Soul” when the individual undergoes earthly and spiritual privations in search of union with God. Christians for centuries have turned to John for confirmation of their question, “which way is ahead” when doubts and obstacles enter into their spiritual life.

The Reformation and Counter-Reformation cultivated the realm of “devotion” to survive spiritually. In England, the threefold controversy, Catholic against Anglican against Puritan, produced in English publications evidence that the public had taken the fruits of the Counter-Reformation to its heart through inward devotion. Practices of meditation, especially among the educated, developed on the continent, were practiced to promote the very connection to God believers sought. Meditation in the sixteenth and seventeenth century was recognized as a method, or way, of applying the understanding to see and to know, as well as to “taste” something of the divine. The goal was to draw one’s heart and affection to the good inclinations and purposes and to stir up love of God, neighbor, and virtue. Evidence of this spiritual movement is found in the religious poetry in England in the seventeenth century.⁸

Francis de Sales in his Treatise on the Love of God (1616) and Introduction to a Devout Life (1614) appeals to both the ordinary person and the person who is more advanced in the spiritual life. Socially, this included the poorest peasants to court ladies. Both writings are to offer a “way” to deepen or advance in their “holy affections and resolutions,” not by leaving the world, but by facing the temptations and hardships which enter into each life.⁹ Francis de Sales offers practical methods to deal with these life situations.

Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) by John Bunyan, regarded as the first novel, and one of the most significant works of religious English literature, takes up a similar theme but for new times and circumstances. Presented as a dream sequence spoken by an all-seeing narrator, the allegory’s protagonist, Christian, an everyman character, embarks on a journey from “this world,” his hometown the “City of Destruction” to that which is to come, heaven, or the “Celestial City” atop Mount Zion. The characters, places, and events of Christian’s pilgrimages depict the dangers, temptations, and obstacles as well as the supports and advocates that are involved in a soul’s journey to heaven. What these images of a journey convey is there is no “heavenly” zone in the earthly city where the believer can move unencumbered from within and without. The connection to God is never without struggle, doubts, turns, and surprises.

These and many other spiritual classics have offered images of the “way” of the Christian living, or discipleship, throughout the history of the church.¹⁰ Meditation was considered a practice of the lower levels of the spiritual life, and not properly speaking a mystical activity. It was pictured as part of the duties of every person in daily life and was available to everyone through the working of ordinary grace. However, modern living raises new questions regarding the spiritual journey, its possibility, and practice. Thus these classical images take a new turn.

Modern-Day Mysticism

Theologian Karl Rahner claims that modern-day mysticism is not the mysticism reserved for the saints and those with privileged spiritual experience, as it was once considered in the past. Rather it is a genuine experience of God arising from the heart of existence, and open to all people of faith. Rahner claims that it is not only in “time apart” that one comes to meet God but in the very processes of knowing and loving in ordinary life.

An individual’s relationship with God is lived out in ordinary life in modern times, rather than cloaked in an “other-worldly” fashion, withdrawn from day-to-day living. The idea of some pure encounter of God and the individual soul requiring the blocking out of the responsibilities of living today is questioned. This is not a dismissal of a contemplative approach to life, or the need for silence and prayer. Rather it is a retrieval of the focus of Judeo-Christian tradition which places our encounter with God as engaged with the neighbor—as incarnational. The Christian life is not just “in one’s head” it is an embedded presence in the concrete world, as was the life of Jesus Christ.

For Rahner, ordinar...