Spiritual Direction and Stories

First, an update from yesterday. An anonymous reader asked about my claim that we can "grow out of" spiritual direction. In fact, the claim is not mine, but that of Blessed Columba Marmion. I had also qualified what I wrote by saying that this was part of the Benedictine tradition. There are other, more recent spiritualities in which spiritual direction plays a major, ongoing part. However, given the fact that good spiritual directors are rare, I would not want to place on the lay faithful a burden that cannot be carried, namely to suggest that authentic discernment cannot take place except in the context of spiritual direction. In the monastic tradition, particularly today in the Carthusian tradition, the emphasis is on the indwelling Holy Spirit. This is a gift to all the baptized, and not merely the religious. This may sound risky to say in public in an age when people too uncritically accept their own authority, but I also, I hope, reasonably clear in saying that our consciences needs formation. It is not so much a matter of 'trusting your feelings' as it is developing a sense and taste for the things of God, so that we almost naturally choose the Godly course.

On to another comment:

Amator Catholicarum said...

"I would be interested in a discussion of how this tension between
conversion and epistemological continuity manifests itself in many Catholics. It
seems that many of them do not seek for the continuity within the context of the
faith, but rather their own lives. That is to say, the result is that the
conversion becomes an isolated part of their lives, but does not convert the
whole person."

It would perhaps be presumptuous of me to attempt to speak of Catholic experience as a whole in this area. I believe that religion in general today tends toward personal and compartmentalized expression, and so we might naturally simply read only our life story in order to find God's presence. The two major correctives for this problem are the liturgy and Scripture. Catholics who regularly attend Mass and other paraliturgical devotions (attendance at the Divine Office is still pretty rare) tend to pick up a sense of being part of a much larger story, the story of the whole of creation and its redemption through the saving death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Catholics probably lag behind Protestants in terms of filling out this sense of the cosmic story by attention to Scripture. In either path, God will eventually touch every part of our lives, if we are listening.

What I am putting forward here perhaps needs a summary, in order to remind readers entering in mid-conversation what exactly is on the table. I have been claiming that A. MacIntyre's idea of an 'epistemological crisis' (a crisis in understanding the world and one's place in it) can illuminate the Christian understanding of conversion. In fact, Scripture and the liturgy should provoke ongoing 'crises' of understanding, such that faith continually moves us to a deeper change of heart and a deeper sense of God's dominion and love, and a profounder determination to give the whole of our lives to God as a gift. A part of this involves the challenge to understand our own lives as falling in the midst of the cosmic story and thus requiring public confession and witness of some kind (just as, say, living in post 9/11 America requires us to take responsibility for political debates about security, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so forth, whether we feel like it or not). The Church's story should open us up more and more to concern for the whole Church and the whole creation.

In terms of our own lives prior to conversion, we can learn to see them in Biblical/liturgical terms (where we might be inclined toward psychological or sociological terms). Thus, instead of finding that Jesus Christ has allowed me to actualize my full potential in life--this understood as doing the things that I really want to do--we instead are persuaded that we are like the Israelites in the desert, being rescued by God, and yet complaining about what we had to give up. Or we see ourselves like David, blessed and yet pronee to the worst sorts of sins of pride and self-will. We see that God treats us in ways similar to the Biblical persons, with corrections, warnings, and such, but ultimately with knowledge of Him and communion with all that is good in creation.

We can take a cue from St. Augustine, who definitely read his own life in a Biblical sense in order to narrate his conversion, but from there, he went on to reading the Bible. He concludes Confessions with a three-chapter incomplete commentary on Genesis. Many have puzzled over this, but perhaps this is just St. Augustine's way of indicating that our personal narratives, important as they are to each of us, are best understood within the cosmic story.

Psychology of Conversion, 3

Ive changed the title of this series, dropping 'epistemological crisis' for reasons I hope are fairly obvious...

In commenting on the first of these posts, Bob makes a very reasonable criticism of my charge that fundamentalists undergo conversion and then stop being converted. After more thought, I recognize that I had in mind two separate phenomena, and that I could have more carefully worded the charge. I agree with Bob that in what is termed 'fundamentalist Christianity', conversion can be ongoing just as much as it can for Gregory of Nyssa. Before I parse the two phenomena behind my critique of certain forms of conversion, I would like to emphasize one important point of MacIntyre's reading of 'epistemological crises'.

In his essay Epistemological crises and dramatic narrative, MacIntyre takes issue with a series of thinkers: Descartes, Burke, Michael Polanyi and Thomas Kuhn. In his opinion, what they have in common is an approach to truth that neglects the role that coherent narrative plays. To use the most famous example, Descartes, faced with the crisis of philosophy in his day, imagined that he could reduce himself to the radical doubt of all previous traditions (narratives), and start, a priori, with a brand new one. To use a more subtle example, M questions Burke's critique of the French Revolution. Again the question is not whether the Revolution represents a good or an evil, but whether it can be understood coherently as part of ongoing French history. Burke saw a rupture, but according to MacIntyre, thinkers as diverse as Peguy and Belloc (!) "were able retrospectively to see the great revolution as reconstituting a more ancient France, so that Jeanne D'Arc and Danton belong withing the same single, if immensely complex, tradition."

The key word I wish to suggest in this context is 'continuity'. MacIntyre goes so far as to suggest that traditions actually require revolutions 'for their continuance'. The successful resolution of an 'epistemological crisis' requires narrative and dramatic continuity. So, too, I would suggest that a genuine and lasting conversion requires the same for the same reasons. I mentioned this in the first post with a reference to late medieval Nominalism. Can we claim that Descartes' radical doubt is best seen not as a rupture, but in continuity with Nominalism? God willing, I will take up this loaded question at a later date.

Today, I would like to conclude with a response to Bob's correction. What I had in mind there, as I said above, is a mixture of two different phenomena. The first is what I understand to be a derivation of certain tendencies in Calvin, in which acceptance of conversion is seen as a once-for-all proposition that guarantees salvation (no matter what happens in the narrative before or after?). As Bob correctly noted, this in fact does not match with the experience of the genuine experience of Christians, but it can create tension with the received theology. As I understand it, the movie "Unforgiven" plays this out, where the lead character, unable to make a coherent narrative out of his life after his faltering conversion, decides to force the narrative into coherence by committing one more act of (vigilante) murder. This seems to him to be 'more in character'. Therefore, in retrospect, his conversion appears as a mirage and the grace of God unavailable. So this failure of the narrative of conversion is one problem I meant to present.

The second has more to do with the label 'fundamentalist' that I used. In this case, the fundamentals of the faith are understood to be disclosed by the Bible and not in any way by natural philosophy. Again, I submit that this impulse, highly principled though it be, weakens personal narrative in crucial ways. For one thing, it can only provide an explanation for what a person previously believed (if that person subscribed to natural philosophy, e.g. some form of belief in evolution) by positing radical deception. There can be no dialogue between the person's former and current selves, at least it seems to me. What happens in fact is that continuities of unexamined sorts pop up (analogously to Descartes' unintentional echo of Augustine in his famous Cogito ergo sum). I would point to things like Christian rock and multi-media megachurches as instances of unintentional continuity between the world and the saved Church. Be that as it may, my principal concern here is to contend that the rupture envisioned between life before conversion and life after can create real problems.

In concluding and anticipating the next post, we should be clear that Christianity does present us with a radical choice that requires a renunciation of life 'according to the flesh' or 'in the world'. How does our encounter with Jesus Christ risen cause us an 'epistemological crisis', and how is it resolved? I will hopefully try to tackle these questions in subsequent posts.