Read Part One Here.
At a Marian Conference in the Bay Area, back in the 1980s, while many presenters where acting embarrassed about Catholic teachings on the Virgin Mary, one scholar (I do not remember his name) brilliantly reproposed these doctrines in a way the profoundly changed many of my closest friends. Drawing from Hans Urs von Balthasar’s reflections on Mary and the Bridal mystery of the Church, this thinker helped them glimpse the greatness the Bridegroom who laid down His life for her. At the time, he was hardly known, but the way his thought influenced my friends rekindled my own devotion to Mary. We soon began to prepare ourselves for consecration to Mary through spiritual catechesis and renewed practice of mental prayer.
You can knock thinkers such as Fr. Balthasar all you want, but the reality is, he was the fir st to raise concerns over the problem of loneliness that we see in the Church today. He is often held up as a favorite punching bag for what ills the Church today, but his chapter on Loneliness in Theological Exploration vol. IV was ahead of its time. Father Joseph Fessio SJ was prophetic when he translated and published this work in English. Though ripe with theological opinions he considered himself more of a spiritual director than a theologian, and should be read that way. This specific work, together with many others by this remarkable cultural thinker, has helped priests and intellectuals better discern how to respond to the crisis of the Church in the world. The answer comes down to personal conversion and a return to the practice of mental prayer.
For my part, I admire Fr. Balthasar because he stood firm with Paul VI on Humanae Vitae when very few other theologians in the Church would do so. While other theologians were caught up in the enchantments of the 1960s, he reaffirmed the Chair of Peter in the Church and promoted the wisdom of the saints as the only adequate answer to the problems facing the world today. While some thinkers were playing defense, trying to preserve what they could of the Church’s patrimony, he went on the offense, bringing the treasures the Church to bear on the difficult problems of the time when it was not popular to do. He points to the solid ground of the Church’s mystical tradition, and a whole host of scholars that he has inspired are beginning to recover the wisdom of the saints as a result.
While many may not agree with all of his arguments, his courage and creativity are an example for engaging cultural challenges that the Church must answer. Along these lines, he observes that the great bark of Christendom has sunk in the storm of secularism. Nonetheless, he argues, the Christian faith continues until the end of time. This means, we must find a way to be Christian in post-Christian times. And this means, we must find a way of providing a word of hope when such a word is needed by those who most need one. Such a word will always be a word of prayer before it is a word shared with another.
Spiritual formation in the mystical tradition of the Church has something to say about this. I would add only that the state of the academy minimizes the role it might otherwise play in such an effort. So it is that new institutions need to be formed that approach this task with a methodology the Fathers of the Church identified as mystagogy. This means reproposing the mysteries of the faith that help the faithful encounter Christ in a life changing way, one that leads to prayer, penance, fasting, works of mercy, and most of all, deeper devotion to God and love for the Church. In fact, I worked with Dan Burke to form the Avila Institute for precisely this reason.
For his part, Father Balthasar mused that the Church may well survive by the efforts of a few faithful priests forming “islands of humanity” wherein the faithful are provided refuge from the storm of secular materialism. At a time when there has never been so much hostility to the faith as there is today, he proposed the altar as a rallying point for prayer, family and humanity. But he does not stop here. Instead, he goes on to reflect on how a priest’s loneliness, and the loneliness of the modern believer, must be discovered as a participation in the loneliness of Christ. This can only happen through a return to prayer, prayer from the heart. It is in this loneliness of the Word made flesh that the Holy Spirit makes possible true intimacy with God the Father and in deepens communion of the Church for the salvation of the world. Here again, authentic Christian contemplation as witnessed by hosts of Catholic saints for more than two millennia is what transforms loneliness into participation in the life of the Trinity.
Such a vision suggests a vital need for spiritual formation in the Church today. Indeed, the loneliness of the 1970s is as only a shadow of what we face today. If then a few hours of daily TV created a hostile spiritual vacuum in the souls of young people, what about what cellphones and computers have done to us? The materialism of our technocratic culture is nudging us away from a more meaningful life of love and sacrifice for the glory of God. We have observed that a certain timidity grips the contemporary Church, and we must learn to stand against this by prayer.
There is a cost to not growing in prayer, to failing to pray for our brother priests in their moment of need. The ones who disproportionally bear this cost are always the most materially and spiritually poor, disadvantaged and vulnerable. This includes some of our brother priests, some of our spiritual fathers who find themselves drowning in the flotsam and jetsam of the secularism’s storm. And with each of them, a whole island of humanity, of families and future generations is put at risk. The cost is an absence of love, a misery, an ache so great that it scandalizes the faithful, and the priests most of all. It is time to take up spiritual resistance against the alienating materialism and technocracy that threatens the mission and communion of the Church. O tempora o mores indeed!
We become spiritual resistance to the materialistic nihilism of our times when our prayer unites our loneliness (that is, the whole communion of loneliness suffered in every heart that prayer searches out to offer to God) to the loneliness of Christ, the loneliness he chose out of love when He embraced the Cross. Yet into this crisis of loneliness (this moment of struggle suffered by so many of the faithful even as you read these words), this is exactly where we must go to meet Christ. Mental prayer brings us into this place – because prayer filled with the Holy Spirit searches the deep things of God. Prayer even allows us to offer the loneliness that others suffer so that their loneliness becomes our loneliness too until they do not suffer alone.
Under the shadow of the Cross, His thirst transforms our thirst into an invitation to an even deeper communion than the Church has ever known. For indeed, even after 2000 years, we have only scratched the surface of the inexhaustible riches of Christ. Here in these unfathomable depths is the wisdom of the saints that von Balthasar opened for the Church. Here is the treasure that great spiritual directors such as Fr. Raymond Gawronski and Fr. Giled Dimock helped seminarians and young priests find. Here is where the great battle is won that cultural thinkers such as Dr. Alice von Hildebrand proposed anew. This is the resistance movement of our times, and a whole network of holy friendships (a web of grace!) is being formed in the mirth and sorrow, honor and sacrifice that such a resistance occasions.
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