Spiritualities in the church certainly are gifts from the Holy Spirit.  That is why they are also called charisms.

 

We know that in the two thousand years since the time of Jesus, many spiritualities have lowered in all of the Churches, one after the other (and at times simultaneously), inasmuch as these Churches have been faithful to the Word of God. The spiritualities are beautiful, rich and profound, and so today, the Church, the Bride of Christ is adorned with the most precious pearls, with the rarest diamonds. In this way, as we say, if Jesus is the incarnate Word, the Church - in the fullness of all the spiritual experiences of history - is a gospel unfolded in time and space.

 

First and foremost, what is a spirituality? It is a way of living the Gospel, a Christian lifestyle. Although the Christian life is one, it is experienced in different ways, giving rise to different spiritualities. This diversity of expression is due to a whole series of factors which can be reduced to two, namely, a dynamic to do with the nature of the Gospel and the Church as well as the phenomenon of history and culture.

 

The first set of reasons for the multiplicity of spiritualities has to do with the understanding which is never complete of the Gospel. The Spirit of Truth introduces the Church gradually into the whole Truth - as the Vatican Council puts it - with an understanding which progresses 'through the contemplation and study of believers ...and the intimate sense of spiritual realities which they experience" (DV,8).

 

Spiritualities thus appear as the progressive experience of the Christian mystery. This progress is an ever greater, more liberated and more conscious participation in the life of Christ in the Church and a gradual assimilation of Gospel values. The Spirit introduces us into the "deeper understanding of spiritual things" which enables us to grasp the Christian mystery from a particular perspective. Through the initiative of the Spirit, men and women emerge who give rise to charismatic movements and who offer new spiritualities to the Church. The Spirit opens their minds so that they understand the Scriptures(Lk 24:25). The Spirit makes them interpreters and exegetes of Christ's teaching.

 

The second set of reasons for the multiplicity of spiritualities has to do with the cultural and social context in which they appear. The Word of God is "efficacious" and works in the lives of individuals and peoples. Because of that, spiritualities which are born from the Word of God and are at its service, are not abstract fruitless, but interpret human needs, penetrate the social fabric by responding to what is lacking and throwing light on the cultural conquests of the time. The spiritual charisms appear as interventions of the Spirit with a view to guiding history. The Spirit who examines and knows the secrets of God (ICor 2:11), examines and knows the secrets of the human heart and the needs of the times. The Spirit knows the cries and groaning of every generation and so brings to light, in a new way, those Gospel dimensions which respond most to the needs of the times. In this way, the Spirit helps the situation and problems of the Church and the world, even if the Gospel values of which the spiritualities are bearers, are themselves perennial. In every historical moment of crisis, difficulty and transformation, the Spirit, with his creativity, re-proposes the fruitful vitality of the Gospel and so Christ continues, in a way which is always new, to be the light which enlightens every human being who comes into the world.

 

The very word 'spirituality' indicates the source of these ways of living the Gospel: the Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit who illuminates the words of the Gospel: the Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit who illuminates the words of the Gospel one by one, throughout the Church's history, helps us to understand them more deeply all the time, and teaches us how to live them. Every spirituality is like an expansion of a word of the gospel by the Holy Spirit.

 

The Pentecost: Event

 

The Church made manifest at Pentecost, became visible in the first community at Jerusalem. We can say that the spirituality of the first Christians is not so much a spirituality as the spirituality. On the day of Pentecost, at Jerusalem, the Holy Spirit descended in his fullness,  leading the first Christians directly into the deepest dimension of the gospel: the new commandment, unity. He taught them the lifestyle the Word wished to bring on earth, the lifestyle, so to speak, of the Trinity, that is Love, Unity, Communion.

 

Even though there were difficulties and tensions from the beginning, the life of the community was immediately characterized by unity. We all remember what the Acts of the Apostles say — the believers met together to pray, were united in hearing the experience the apostles shared with Jesus, were of one heart and one mind and put their goods in common. The Holy Spirit fused them into unity. That life of the first community in Luke's description, is like an ideal sketch, a model of what the life of the Church should always be — it's the Christian life in its most charismatic moment, at Pentecost.

 

In the Church at Pentecost, there are contained, as if incandescently, all the words of the gospel. We can compare it to the theory of the Big Bang, which holds that all the energy present at the origin of the universe was set free, giving rise to the galaxies, stars, planets: at the beginning, all that energy was completely condensed in one point. So, the fullness of the life of Pentecost had then to be expanded throughout the ages, and, in contact with history, to give rise to many spiritualities.

 

This is where the Holy Spirit is at work, unfolding each of the words of the gospel throughout the whole life of the Church. It's the Holy Sprit who, you could say, 'opens out" the initial unity, and gradually sets free all the richness contained in it. It is a journey both of suffering and enthusiasm. The Church is gradually led towards the fullness of life and of the fullness of the initial charismatic density. The final consummation will be even more beautiful than the beginning. The words of the gospel will all return towards the initial unity from which they have been set free, but after they have been translated into life and having carried out the works of God. So, we can understand how all the charisms, all the spiritualities, are bom of the unique source of the Spirit, of Pentecost, and are all destined to return to unity.

 

Now, let us first look at the mission of the apostles. They were given to bring his message “to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8) and to make all his disciples.  And they did this after Pentecost with great courage.  “The area assigned to them is the world.  Without local boundaries, they work for the creation of the one body of Christ, the one people of God, the one Church of Christ.  It’s not that the apostles were bishops of specific local Churches; they were rather “apostles”, and as such, were directed towards the whole world and the whole Church that was to be constructed therein.  The universal Church precedes local churches, which arise as her concrete realisations” (Ratzinger)

 

Understandably, communities, churches were born from this missionary activity of the apostles. This development necessitated persons, with responsibility, to guide the emerging communities and Churches. There had to be someone to guarantee the unity of faith in these small and separate churches with the whole Church. Somebody had to be responsible for shaping the internal life of the local churches, such that they may grow numerically and bring the gift of the Gospel to their fellow citizens who were not yet believers. This local ministry gradually acquired a stable form. At the end of the second half of the 2nd century, this local ministry took on a clear profile in the triad of bishop, presbyter, and deacon. At this stage of development there was this realization that the bishops were successors of the apostles and that the apostolic mandate rested upon their shoulders. In short, we see that at the outset, there was a community that goes back to the intentions of Jesus whose structural form developed until it got stabilized around the 3rd Century. This community understood itself as the sacramental continuation of Christ’s ministry today.

 

In the 3rd Century, for many reasons, the ministerial services of the apostles gradually disappeared and the Episcopal Ministry assumed them. The danger in this development was that this apostolic ministry could wither to a point of merely carrying  out services on the level of the local Church, thereby, losing sight of the universality of Christ’s mandate. Besides, the restlessness that urges one to bring the gift of Christ to others was slowly extinguished in the stagnation of a Church that was highly organized and that accommodated to the values of the world. It was also around this time that the Church started to come out from the catacombs. From a persecuted and an underground Church, it became the official Church of the Roman Empire. The radicalism that characterized the Christian life of the time of the catacombs started to wane and the Church started to accommodate and adapt herself to the needs of a worldly life.

 

The Quest for God in Solitude: the Anachorites

 

 

It is in this context that through the Holy Spirit, God inspired men and women who put themselves at the disposal of the Church to manifest in her the multiform wisdom of God (Eph. 3-10).

 

One of the first words the Spirit reveals to his Church is the commandment, 'Love God with all your heart, with your whole soul, with all your strength.' So, a few years after the experience of the first Christians, we see the birth of a particular way of living the gospel, a spirituality.

 

Some Christians feel moved by the Spirit to withdraw into solitude, into the desert — these are the hermits (anachorein means: to draw apart, to distance oneself from). We can understand the appearance of the desert spirituality if we remember that the evangelical radicalness that marks the beginnings of the Christian life had become gradually watered down.

 

When the fervor of the early Christians (which had forged the community of Jerusalem into one heart and one soul) had begun to wane and the persecutions had ended. At this point many Christians decided to save their faith by withdrawing to the desert. It was the age of the hermits. This saved many Christian principles and resulted in many hermits becoming saints, but often the importance of one's neighbor was undervalued. He or she was even looked upon as an obstacle in the way to God.

 

The first to choose this way of life was St. Anthony, abbot, who lived in Egypt during the 3rd century. One Sunday in church, when he was 18-20 years old, he heard the Acts of the Apostles being read, where it spoke of the first Christians selling all they had and bringing it to the Apostles. He was deeply impressed by this. The following Sunday, the passage in the gospel where Jesus says, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have, give it to the poor, then come follow me." Anthony felt these words were just for him, so he sold all he had, gave it to the poor, entrusted his sister, who would have been left on her own, to Christian women, and gave himself completely to God.

 

He went to live on his own, outside the village, and spent some years in prayer. Then he moved further away into the Egyptian desert, to be ever more alone with God. Others, attracted by his reputation for holiness, imitated him. The desert, or other lonely places, 'flowered' as was said at that time through the living presence of men and then women. Many of them reached holiness in a profound union with God.

 

The hermits went to God in solitude. Unlike the first Christians, theirs is a spirituality that greatly underlines the 'individual aspect, even if it was always an 'ecclesial' one, because the monk is, by definition, the one who "separated from all, is united to all", as Evagrius Ponticus said. Thanks to their ecclesial openness, the love the brothers. For example, they often help the poor with the fruit of their work. They pray for the whole Church, give hospitality to travelers' advise those who come to them in order to grow in the spiritual life.

 

However, their lifestyle is not centered on love and service of the neighbor. It is based especially on prayer, on solitude with God, Their life of union with God radiates outwards, but their center of gravity is within, motivated by the love of God, by desire to live only for Him. They are inspired by the example of Elias, of John the Baptist, but especially by Jesus, who withdrew into the desert for forty days, and who often, at night, went to pray alone on the mountain.

 

 

Apa Arsenius said: "Flee from human beings, and you will be saved".5 "I can't be with God and with people at the same time"  He loved the disciples who gathered around him, drawn by his sanctity. In that same "saying of his, he also confessed: 'God knows how much I love you.' Yet, he wasn't able to reconcile love of God and love of the brothers. It seemed that to be with God he had to leave the brothers.

 

And still, many centuries later, in the famous book, The Imitation of Christ, it is written: "The greatest saints avoided when they could the company of others, and preferred to serve God in solitude. One holy man says: 'Each time I have been in the company of people, I have come away less of a man myself... The one who distances himself from friends and acquaintances draws close to God and his angels".6

 

Of course, an individual spirituality is never individual. Because of the reality of the Mystical Body of Christ, what takes place in one person always has a certain influence on others. This is true also because these Christians offered and are still offering prayers and penance to God for the sake of others.

 

 

 

 

Monasticism

 

It was quickly found that the way of holiness was easier when people helped each other. The monasteries developed, where the monks came together to journey more quickly towards God. This was the experience of Pacomius and Basil in the East, and of Augustine and Benedict in the West, and became the experience of much of monasticism in the first thousand years of Christianity. The monks were persons who, united by fraternal love, helped each other to enter into close, personal relationship with God, and who were then ready to share their experience with others.

 

St. Basil's way was especially significant. He lived in Asia Minor in the 4th century, was attracted by the desert Fathers' reputation for holiness, and went on pilgrimage to where they were most famous, Egypt, Syria, Palestine. But, thanks also to the deep relationship of communion with his own longtime friends, who would become saints with him, he quickly understood the importance of helping one another. When his disciples asked him of it was better to live alone or together, he explained to them the superiority of the-common life. He understood how the human person, as God had willed, was capable of relationship, and so had the capacity to live the commandment of love. This natural social capacity of human beings is already a sign of the vocation to unity. He then explained to his disciples that by coming together it was easier to live the gospel.

 

"The commandments are easily kept in greater number by many united together, while this doesn't occur for whoever is on their own, because while he keeps one, by that very feet, he is impeded from keeping the other one[s]. In community life, the charism proper to each one becomes common to all who live with him. The solitary one doesn't know his defects, nor is he aware of the progress he has made in works, because he does not have the possibility of fulfilling the commandment. How can he show humility if there is no one before whom he can be more humble? How can he show feelings of mercy, if he is cut off from communion with others? And how can he exercise patience, if there is no one opposing his will? According to the gospel, we are supposed to put ourselves in the last place, but if I am alone, who can I put myself after? We are supposed to wash each others' feet, but if I am alone, whose feet can I wash?'

 

If the desert Fathers focused on the first commandment, it could be said that the Holy Spirit caused the monks to discover the second, 'love your neighbor as yourself.' With Basil, and especially with Augustine, the new commandment of mutual love also was emphasized. Augustine wrote at the beginning of his Rule for the little community that lived with him near Carthage:  "The essential reason that you are united together is so that you might live in the house in the same spirit and that you have one soul and one heart aiming towards God."

 

Still, in the monastic life, we come together to help each other progress on the way of holiness, but that way remains for the most part an individual way. The new commandment, of which the monks are well aware, is not translated into a "lifestyle", it does not give shape to the entire project of the spiritual journey.

 

What we can see, in monasticism, as in the life of the hermits, are instruments of sanctification which indicate clearly that monasticism too is a spirituality that can be called "individual."

 

Instruments of an 'Individual spirituality'

 

We find these instruments of an 'individual spirituality in all the other spiritualities that come to life, one after the other, in the Church, beginning with what are called the mendicant orders,

 

Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, Augustinians. We find them in St. Francis’ and St. Dominic’s way of holiness, even if their lifestyle is modeled on the words of the gospel urging the gift of self, especially in preaching the Good News.

 

The Holy Spirit made them discover the task Jesus entrusted to His disciples, when he sent them out to announce the gospel in pairs, asking them not to take anything with them on the way, and to live in poverty. The Friars of Francis and Dominic went, like the disciples, to the four corners of the earth to proclaim the Kingdom of God. They give witness to that fraternity that breaks all barriers, all the feudal and aristocratic hierarchies so powerful in the society of that time.

 

The itinerant lifestyle started up by the Mendicants was more suitable for the changed situation. If, in Benedict's time, stability was necessary as a brake on the peoples" too great mobility, now there was need for a new flexibility that enabled contact with the people. The friars' going about from place to place to witness to the gospel was an invitation to the new cities not to get closed in on themselves in a selfish defense of their own particular locality, but to open themselves out to universal brotherhood.

 

Francis and Dominic lived and taught their friars a true poverty, penetrated by evangelical motivations opposed to the greed for money at their time. The highest poverty of spirit became their lifestyle.

 

The quest for poverty became ever more interiorized and brought Francis, in the last years of his life, also towards a physical solitude, that of Averna, in which the Spirit configured him to Christ, poor and crucified. He wrote as his last will to St. Claire, "I, Francis, a little brother, wish to follow the life and poverty of our most high Lord Jesus Christ and of his most holy Mother, and to persevere in that to the end."

 

The quest for God in the Rhineland mystics

 

The typical instruments of the individual spirituality are also to be found in the great spiritualities that flourished in the Low Countries (Dutchland, Netherlands) and in Germany between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. These spiritualities are represented by famous names — Meister Eckhart, John Tauler, Henry Suso, Jan van Ruysbroeck. There is the spirituality called the Rhineland spirituality, because it flourished in the Rhine valley, and there is also what is called the devotio moderna, tied up with the Flemish school. There is a similar spiritual movement in England, whose doctrine is summarized in a famous work, The Cloud of Unknowing.

 

Even though in various ways, all these great spiritualities seek God in the "depth of the soul' as Meister Eckhart called it. Because in this deepest part of our being, the generation of the Son and the movement of Trinitarian love occurs. So these mystics felt called to enter into themselves to find beyond themselves the most profound unity with God and to share in his life. Ruysbroeck writes: "Our life is always essential and tends towards the origin of our being as a creature, where we live from God and through God, and God is in us and we in Him...This life is hidden in God and in the substance of our soul."

 

To attain this union with God we have to fully renounce ourselves, empty ourselves of everything, so that the 'depth of the soul' be fully open to God. Tauler asks: 'Do you want God to be able to enter? Then, created things, and all that is in your possession should make room for Him.' We become ever more aware of the value of our nothingness. Again, Tauler:

"When God decided to create things, Nothing existed (...) So He created everything from Nothing. If God is to operate [in us] in his own specific way, the one thing he asks is that this Nothing alone should be present."

 

The quest for God in Christian Humanism

 

This is why this mystical current requires detachment from all creatures.

 

We're now in the years between thirteen and sixteen hundred. At the same time as we enter the modern epoch from the middle ages, there corresponds to the diversification of cultures a diversification of spiritualities. There is a Spanish spirituality (Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross), an Italian spirituality (Anthony Mary Zaccaria, Gaetano of Thiene, Phillip Neri...), a French spirituality (Francis de Sales, Lallement, Berulle, Olier..). We could note how the so called golden ages of Italy, Spain and France (from an economic, artistic, cultural, perspective), coincide with the happiest expressions of spirituality and of mysticism. There's also the development of a Russian spirituality, that will achieve full self-awareness in the nineteenth century.

 

[And alongside the Catholic spiritualities, the Protestant Reform, speeding up the development of national identities, gives rise to a Protestant and Anglican lifestyle. These spiritualities are affected by the new cultural climate of Humanism and the Renaissance. If in the medieval period the dominant note was the presence of God, with Humanism what is focused on is that God has entrusted the world to humans, who find themselves at the center of the cosmos.]

 

Spirituality now pays attention to the person, to his psychological interiority. The various movements of the soul are analyzed with a previously unknown depth, and the laws for the discernment of spirits are worked out. Spiritual psychology and spiritual direction are developed. It is enough here to recall St. Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises, St. Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle, St. John of the Cross's Ascent of Mount Carmel.

 

It's a matter of a spirituality centered on the lived experience of the indwelling of the Trinity in the soul of the Christian. St. Teresa would say that the Trinity lives in the deepest dwelling of the interior castle, and one enters into intimate relationship with that especially through prayer, experienced, in Teresa's words, as '^La friendly relationship, taken up and desired many times over, actuated by oneself alone with the one we know loves us." It's a demanding journey, calling for the complete emptying of self, the nada, as St. John of the Cross, calls it, the nothingness, the passing by means of the darkest nights, to arrive at full union with Christ and transformation in Him. (purgative, illuminative, unitive)

 

The spiritualities of service

 

In the centuries following the Council of Trent, new spiritualities arise which are fruit of a concrete attention to the daily needs of the people, especially of the poor, and of the least.

The saints feel called to respond to the great social needs: of sick to be cured, young people to be taught, poor to be helped...The Spirit led them to dedicate themselves to the service of humanity in all its miseries. This is the time of Sts. Camillus de Lellis, John of God, Vincent de Paul, John Baptist de la Salle, John Bosco. The Spirit reveals the words of the gospel that revolve around the Final Judgment: "I was sick and you visited me, hungry and you gave me to eat...Every time you did it to the least of my brothers, you did it to me."

 

These are spiritualities of service, of concrete love, which will have a new increase in the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century, with the amazing flourishing of the religious congregations, through which the Church can appear really 'equipped for every good work"(LG 12). To relieve the most varied poverty is, St. Vincent de Paul interpreting all the saints of charity says, 'to enter into his (Jesus's) sentiments, to do what he did and to carry out what he commanded...And He himself wanted to be born poor, to have the poor in his company, to serve the poor, to put himself in the place of the poor, up to the point of saying that what we do for the poor he will consider done to his divine person.'

 

The 20th Century's Anxiety for Communion

 

Now we have arrived at last century nearest us. A characteristic of the spiritualities of our time is the appreciation of the positive aspects of the world, and the going beyond being too Church-centred. It is in the world that God's plan has to be realized, and the Christians are at the service of that plan: social commitment is an essential part of Christian spirituality. At the same time we know that at the end of the 18th century there were strong needs expressed for communion and unity. Many political, cultural, economic, religious factors speak of the need for communion. And of the tension towards a united world.

 

It is enough to think of the various socialisms, and the birth of institutions like the League of Nations and then the United Nations, World Council of Churches, etc. Science and technology have increased cultural exchange and brought the various peoples near to one another. In the field of the Church there is a greater than ever awareness of the need for ecumenical dialogue between the Churches, and between all religions. Within the Catholic Church there's the deepening understanding of the Church finding its high points in the encyclical on the Mystical Body (Mystici Corporis), and especially in Vatican II, which has given rise to a new desire for communion at all levels.

 

Christifideles Laici, n. 19 said that “the ecclesiology of communion is the central and fundamental idea in the documents of the church.  Although there is no single documents of the Second Vatican Council which speaks about unity, all the sixteen documents speak about unity. John Paul II said in a discourse to the international conference on the implementation of the Second Vatican Council said: “Communio is the foundation on which the church’s reality is based. It is a koinonia that has its source in the very mystery of the Truine God and etends to all the baptized.” (JP II “Vatican II was the Spirit’s gift to the church,” in L’Osservatore Romano (English Edition), # 10, March 8, 2004, p. 4)

 

It is as if a request for unity, for communion, almost a cry, arose from humanity and from the Churches today.

(to be continued. .)

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