Beyond Piety: The Christian Spiritual Life, Justice, and Liberation

Preface

Christian spirituality is not simply about devotional practices or religiosity. Moving beyond piety we find that Christian spirituality is primarily and most emphatically about life in the Holy Spirit. More than piety, Christian life is a vocation, a calling in the world, a life project or share in God’s mission. Hopefully most Christians know this, even though we are not always attentive to it. All too often we relegate Christian spirituality to pious practice, prayerful devotion, evangelization, religious buildings, and spiritual leaders as if the Gospel message of Jesus had nothing to do with our home life, our work, our recreation, and our role in society. This is a common mistake and one we need to outgrow.

At the age of twelve, Jesus thought that to do his Father’s will he had to be in the temple discussing God’s Word with the teachers of the Law. Like the young Jesus, many Christians seem to believe that sharing in God’s mission means prayer, Bible study, and going to church. Luckily for Jesus, Mary and Joseph took him home, where thanks to their efforts and instruction he grew in wisdom and grace (Luke 2:49). Some eighteen years later, besides in synagogues and the temple, Jesus did his Father’s mission and will in the fields, on fishermen’s boats, at dinner parties, and in the market place with ordinary people and even public sinners.

My hope in writing this book is to help my brothers and sisters in Christ grow in wisdom and grace by coming to a better understanding of the Christian spiritual life and how it relates to justice and liberation. Like the young Jesus, you and I need to mature in our view of how to best serve God and share in his mission of creating, saving, and sanctifying the world. God calls us to be Christian where we are every day of the week—in our homes, at work, at school, at play—and not just at church on Sunday.

This book grows out of my course on Christian Spiritual Formation for seminarians and lay ministers at Catholic Theological Union and my course on La vida espiritual Cristiana for the deacon candidates and their wives in the Instituto de Liderazgo Pastoral of the Archdiocese of Chicago. As a result I owe a debt of gratitude to the students who for the last ten years have participated in those two courses. As a professor, I find that I learn a lot from my students when I am teaching a course, because while they have one professor, I have a room full of teachers. Every time I have taught both these classes, I have been edified and educated by the lived examples my students share in class. So my first thank you and muchas gracias goes to them.

More recently my work on the Christian spiritual life has been enhanced by my participation in a group of Catholic and Protestant theology professors and formation directors who gathered in the summer of 2009 to reflect on The Christians’ Callings in the World. I would like to thank these professors and formators from Fuller Theological Seminary, Princeton Theological Seminary, Yale Divinity School, Luther Theological Seminary, and Catholic Theological Union, for their work and insights.

Over the years I have learned a lot about being Christian from my brothers and sisters in the Lord. I thank God for all of them, especially the members of La Tropa de Cristo, a youth evangelization team I founded at Our Lady of Angels Church in San Antonio Texas in the 1980s. Their stories, their faith, and their preaching taught me a lot about moving beyond piety and into concrete action on behalf of the Gospel. I am also particularly grateful to Alexander Gaitan, Carmen Nanko-Fernández, Jaime Bascuñan, Gary Riebe-Estrella, Luigi Miranda, Fernando Harris, Dennis Joseph, JoKay Joseph, Arturo Ocampo, OFM, and David Rodríguez, OFM, for their love and encouragement especially while writing this book. Diosito les conceda paz y todo bien or, as I like to say, pax et bonum amplexumque.

My debt of gratitude would not be complete without giving mil gracias y muchisimo cariño to the people who taught me to live and love in the Lord, la familia Cavazos-González. Deseo agradecer en especial a mis padres Gilberto y Emma y con mis hermanos Sergio, José Luis, Gustavo y sus esposas Norma, Herminia e Yvonne. I also want to thank my sobrinas y sobrinos Larissa, Sergio, Eliana, José Luis, Gilberto, and Emma. Los quiero mucho. Que Diosito me los bendiga.

Fray Gilberto, OFM

Introduction

Describing Christian Spirituality

I love the sound of the wind. It seems to sing amid the rustling leaves as it blows between the branches of a tree. It whooshes between buildings with a sometimes-gentle, sometimes-piercing whistle. It whispers over tranquil meadows and majestic hills. I especially love to hear it moan as it crashes waves of the sea into the sand of the seashore. Jesus claims that as the wind blows, so it is with those born of the Spirit (John 3:8). The Spirit or wind blows where it wills, with no one knowing where it comes from or where it is going; yet you can hear its voice. Those people born of the Spirit become the rustling leaves, strong buildings, crashing waters, tranquil meadows, and majestic hills where the wind of the Spirit becomes a song, a whistle, a whisper, or a moan; where the human spirit proclaims its spirituality.

Spirituality is a fascinating and often misunderstood subject. Thousands upon thousands of books and magazine articles treat the topic of spirituality. Doing a word search on the Internet leads you to 29,000,000 results for the word spirituality (32,800,000 for Christian Spirituality and 60,600,000 for spiritual).¹ A cursory look at these references reveals that people understand spirituality as either something religious or something just the opposite of religious. I’m spiritual, not religious has become an all too common catch phrase. Unfortunately for many people, spirituality deals exclusively with the inner world or interiority as opposed to the real or outer world. For many, it has to do with esoteric or new age cults. And for many Christians, it is nothing more than traditional piety and devotional practices.

Spirituality in general is often thought of as contrary to matters of the body and the world. To be spiritual is considered an escape from the secular or secularized world we live in, especially from all its socio-political and economic woes. Often it is seen as a way of turning to a higher power (God, if you will) in order to leave behind the iron grip of religion to move into a new age of private enlightenment or gnosis. Spirituality as a Christian experience is often seen as ineffective in dealing with the real events of lo cotidiano² (see sidebar).

Lo Cotidiano

Lo cotidiano and cotidianidad are the daily; the quotidian; the commonplace and routine nature of day to day living as well the occasional highlight of something wonderful and the unwelcome reality of sorrow and difficulties that sometimes occur in daily living. These two terms are used by many Latino/a (Latino and Latina) theologians in the United States in reference to where theological reflection and discussion need to take place. Christian spirituality and God-talk take into serious consideration our cotidianidad.

Christian spirituality needs to be liberated from false or limited understandings that seek to place it dualistically in contrast with material reality. It needs to be liberated from those who would keep the Spirit of Jesus in a Bible, a tabernacle, a rosary, or a retreat center. If the Spirit of Christ that dwells in each Christian is to sing, whistle, whisper, or moan effectively in the Church and in the world, it must be allowed to blow away the chains that keep people poor, bound, blind, and imprisoned. Christian spirituality is about traditional piety and devotional practices, but these are worthless if it is not also about justice, peace, and liberation. To live our Gospel calling as disciples of Jesus in the world we need a clearer understanding of Christian spirituality as a liberating spirituality.

In this book, I would like to clarify the Christian concept of spirituality, not by offering yet another definition of the term, but rather by looking at what spirituality is and how it is put into practice in our cotidiano. This is a book about growing in our faith as Christians so that we can truly live our spirituality as a life guided by the Spirit of Jesus. But first I would like to give you a very short history and a description of the term.

Short History of the Term

Spirituality, it has been said, is an ancient yet novel discipline. And even though the term was coined within Christianity, it is a much older and wider phenomenon or human experience than just Christian spirituality. In one way or another, humanity has always sought the vitality and inspiration of spirituality.

Spiritualogians

I coined this word a few years ago to distinguish theologians who specialize in the field of spirituality from theologians of spirituality, who work in the field of spiritual theology.

Spiritualogians are scholars dedicated to the advancement of the academic discipline known as spirituality.

St. Paul encourages the faithful to be spiritual, but you will not find the word spirituality in the Sacred Scriptures. The English word spirituality has only been around since the first half of the twentieth century. No one knows for sure who coined the original Latin word spiritualitas. Scholars of spirituality or spiritualogians³ (see sidebar) believe that the term most likely came from the fifth-century French bishop Faustus who coined it in a letter urging a newly baptized reader to age ut in spiritualitatis or rather to act . . . in spirituality (in a spiritual manner).⁴ From that time on, Christians spoke of acting out or living one’s Holy Spirit-filled life with the Latin word spiritualitas. Originally, spiritualitas was something that all baptized Christians had and were expected to grow in. Eventually, spirituality became the domain of special Christians far removed from ordinary Christian life. In the Late Middle Ages, Scholastic theology came to see spiritualitas as relegated to emotional interiority and special experiences, separated from lo cotidiano, public life, and social praxis.

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Although a French author in the thirteenth century translated the word spiritualituas into French, it was not until the 1500s that spiritualitas was considered something that the laity could understand, when Franciscan Friar Mariano da Firenze translated it into Italian for his work The Spiritual Life. This was soon followed by the Spanish translation into espiritualidad. With these translations spiritualitas began to undergo a slow and gradual democratization process by which spirituality eventually came to be understood as something that is part and parcel of all human beings not just a Christian elite.

Description of Spirituality

In the 1920s spiritualitas was finally translated into the English spirituality and used in a four-volume translation of a work by the French theologian Pierre Pourrat on Christian Spirituality. As more and more books and conferences began to use the word spirituality in their titles, it slowly entered popular language in the latter half of the twentieth century. The widespread use of the word spirituality in a variety of contemporary languages has led many non-Christians to use the word as well. What began as a Christian word has become a word used by many of the world’s religions and religious movements to mean a variety of things depending on their relationship to the material world. Many contemporary spiritualogians are trying to help us understand what spirituality is in Christian terms. Their study has led to the division of talk about spirituality into four categories of understanding: human reality, personal experience, communal traditions, and academic discipline.

Human Reality

We do not become spiritual! We are spiritual.⁶ God breathed ruah (spirit/life/breath) into all of us (Gen 2:7) therefore all humans are spiritual beings (Homo spiritualis). In other words, spirit is very much a part of who we are as humans. This ontological reality is part and parcel of Christian anthropology, because, as image of God (imago Dei), the human being is at once corporeal and spiritual.

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Personal Experience

Experiences of the spirit or of life in the spirit are experiences of life in relationship. It is in the cotidiano, the day in and day out of relationships, that our spirit is lived, and it is in our actions that our spirit is manifested. Ultimately, if humans are spirit, then all human experience is somehow spiritual.

Spirituality is often described as life in the spirit. This description is fine; however it raises the question, Which spirit? Spirituality is an existential reality made up of the personal and communal experience of being moved by the human spirit, angelic or demonic spirits, team spirit, patriotic spirit, the spirit of this age, and/or the Holy Spirit, which is why there are so many spiritualities.

Paul coined the term spiritual to indicate the Christian as a person under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in contrast to the natural human being. However, since Vatican II we have discovered that just as there are Catholic, Protestant, Franciscan, Jesuit, clerical, and lay spiritualities (to name a few) there are also Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu spiritualities (to name a few). At the core of each type of spirituality is experience, both personal and communal.

Experience is also teaching us, Christians, that we have much in common with the spiritualities of many of the world’s religions, especially in the desire for justice, peace, and liberation. Growing dialogue with the leaders of the various religions around the world helps us discover that we have much to learn from each other’s spiritualities as well. Sadly, many Christians are also taking elements from other religions and spiritualities in ways that do not understand or respect the doctrines of those other faiths and using them to create a doctrine that lives merely to serve their individual needs.

Communal Traditions

At this point, for our purposes of explanation and because of my own experience, I will focus on Christian spirituality. At the heart of Christian spirituality is Jesus’s personal experience of