Next-Wave Ezine > church & culture

Review: Finding Our Way Again by Brian McLaren, pt. 2
By Len Hjalmarson

[Cont. from part 1]

Photosis - the Via Illuminativa

In this chapter we return to the Abbess and the abbey. This time we are welcomed into a garden and asked to notice the health and vitality of the plants we see there. Light is necessary for life and growth. Once having cleansed the windows of the soul, light streams in, bringing sight and life. The purpose of sight is more than seeing, however, it is to see everything in the light of God. We are reminded that the apostle John makes a stunning statement in his short letter when wraps up the message of the Gospel in this phrase: "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all."

Naturally, there are specific practices that help us become filled with light like study and contemplation and gathering with other believers. But this isn't a one-way journey; rather, it is filled with contrasts and like the life of the garden it has both rhythms and seasons. The garden knows rest at night, but death in the dark winter. Yet out of death comes new life in the spring, and greater wisdom. The function of the felt absence of God is to increase desire, as in the spiritual reflections of St. John of the Cross.

O shorten the long days of burning thirst -

No other love allays them.

Let my eyes see your face,

Treasure to daze them.

Except for love, it's labor lost to raise them.

("Spiritual Canticle" Translated J. F. Nims. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. 5)

The final page of this chapter is spent reflecting on the daily office and its place in illumination. Dating back to the Jewish practice of gathering at fixed hours for prayer, the office has five daily stations for prayer. As such, it is a rhythm that integrates work and prayer with the intention of hallowing the day and keeping the mind attentive to God. Brian moves us next to theosis - the Via Unitiva -- as we come to the end of this journey.

Theosis - Via Unitiva

We are back at the abbey on a cool autumn evening. The abbess invites us to sit near the crackling fire. She reminds us of the ways our renovation project have been a parable of the threefold way, then she walks over to the fire and stirs it with a cold, iron rod. The logs crackle and send up a flurry of sparks.

"When a couple builds or buys their first home, the hearth is the heart of it," she remarks. The hearth, center of the old kitchens, was the place of hospitality. Food was cooked there, warmth shared. The family gathered around the warm fire. And it took work to maintain it. But we've moved a long way from this understanding or experience. James Houston somewhere comments that we moved from hearth to couch in our therapy centered world, and our hearts are both lonely and cold as a result.

Some years back one of my favorite recording artists wrote a beautiful song that tells the experience of tending the inner fire of the Spirit. <a href=”http://nextreformation.com/wp-admin/general/steve_bell.htm>Steve Bell sings,

Judge for yourself how great is the one

who lives in God, whose God is love.

Like iron when left in embers bright,

Everything is fire, everything is light.

Oh love– most beautiful you are,

Oh flame of joy within my heart.

Burning ember, I remember love’s first light in me

I was cold then, like a stone when

I saw your flickering.

Oh what beauty as you drew near me,

I could scarcely speak.

Somehow I knew I would be new

in your glowing…

Stoking fires, tending the hearth, is all about spirituality. In the coldest part of our winters I tend a fire daily in the woodstove downstairs. The warmth spreads gradually upwards through the house, until by about 11 AM the upper wood floor is warm to the touch, and acts like a slow heat sink, spreading the warmth evenly upstairs.

I have to add wood or stir the fire every hour or so. Every time I approach the fire I feel the warmth. On a cool day, it’s a very sensual experience, but also mystical.. every piece of wood is transformed, becoming one with the fire. The flames and the coals radiate heat and light. “The whole soul becomes Christ’s, just as the iron in the burning coal becomes fire as if it were burning - everything is fire, everything is light!”

Stoking the physical fire takes effort. I split some wood in the morning, and sometimes have to revisit the pile around dinner time. Stoking the inner fire takes similar focus and intention. If I don’t spend several times in focused attention on God during the week, I am like a neglected fire.. giving off little light and little warmth, not likely to be a resting place for Spirit, not likely to awake to God, and not likely to add warmth to others.

This journey into Christ, and deeper into identification with him, is a growing union in love. Love is all about union. We move toward what we love, and the deeper we move, the purer our love. While our modern paradigms of knowledge involved distance and detachment, premodern paradigms involved experience. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote, "Credo ut experiar," I believe in order to experience. He affirmed that "God is not known if God is not loved."

Our scientific and technocratic world nearly lost this knowledge. We barely know how to affirm the value of experience, working with the philosophic divide of object and subject. But lovers and poets hold this knowledge. And those who grow in Christ have "tasted" and "seen" that the Lord is good. Sixty years ago AW Tozer wrote, "We are only now emerging from a long ice age during which an undue emphasis was laid upon objective truth at the expense of subjective experience." In "To the River" John Mellencamp sings,

And the river runs wide

And the river runs deep

And I spit in the eye

Of safe company

When I dive right down

To the undertow

Well, the deeper I drown

Lord, the higher I'll go.

This brings us to the closing chapters of Finding Our Way Again. In chapter 19 Brian writes on the need to "faith our practices." He asks, "Instead of intensifying our spiritual life by trying to do something "more," can we take what we're already doing and make it count?" He affirms a sacramental view of life, and asks whether our ordinary, daily lives can actually be hallowed for God.

Could reading the morning paper become a way that we affirm our care for God's world, our desire to be part of what God is doing internationally, nationally, locally?

Could running on the treadmill be a ritual of prayer in which each intake of breath reminds me of my need for God's grace, and each exhalation allows me to release all the things that keep me from fully experiencing that grace?

Could the morning commute awaken me to the journey I am traveling in faith...starts and stops, detours, occasional break downs, wrecks, and the occasional smooth trip?

Could every goodbye remind me this world is not my possession, and it will not endure? And at the same time could every goodbye become a "hello," an invitation for God to fill the empty spaces?

While we want to remain open to discovering or renewing faith practices, there is power to be found in "faithing" the practices we already have. A Celtic prayer calls us to the kind of faith we need: "As I stir the embers of my daily fire, I ask you, living God, to stir the embers of my heart into a flame of love for you, for my family, for my neighbor, for my enemy."

Amen, May it be so.

Now you have a good sense of the content and feel of Finding Our Way Again. I wish that you will take Brian's introduction to the practices, along with these reflections, and be enriched in your own journey of discovery. Find partners and comrades who are committed to discovering more of Jesus and His mission in loving and redeeming the world. The book is another gift to a Church in transition, attempting to wean itself from the approval of the world as it reorients itself to Christ and His kingdom. I close with an ancient prayer:

VENI, Sancte Spiritus, reple tuorum corda fidelium, et tui amoris in eis ignem accende.

COME, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of Thy faithful and kindle in them the fire of Thy love.

V. Emitte Spiritum tuum et creabuntur

R. Et renovabis faciem terrae.

V. Send forth Thy Spirit and they shall be created

R. And Thou shalt renew the face of the earth. Amen.

Oremus:

DEUS, qui corda fidelium Sancti Spiritus illustratione docuisti: da nobis in eodem Spiritu recta sapere, et de eius semper consolatione gaudere. Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.

Let us pray:

O GOD, Who taught the hearts of the faithful by the light of the Holy Spirit, grant that, by the gift of the same Spirit, we may be always truly wise, and ever rejoice in His consolation. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.