Spiritual Practice
Cat-e-che-sis. It’s a Greek word meaning “to echo down” or “to resound.”
David Bowe is credited with saying, “Religion is for those who fear hell. Spirituality is for people who have been there.” Fear, hell, presence, experience. These 4 words sum up the dichotomy often found between religion and spirituality, and what fuels each. Sadly, when I talk to people who have left religious practice they cite the somatic presence of fear and the intellectual emphasis on hell as strong elixirs in their religious experience. When I began my own spiritual descent of unlearning, I felt like fear was the strongest power in my life. And it was, until new experiences started teaching me something different.
Carl Jung said that our image of God creates us. And if catechetical practice has echoed down fear and hell, we have become a short sighted people, much like the Israelites wondering in the desert, who embraced idolatry as a means to provide safety, prosperity, redemption, and a way for themselves. Religion based on fear seeks a spiritual bypass, and as the Israelites found out, the only way is through.
What is being echoed down in catechesis as spiritual practice? I pose the following question as a guide: How are your beliefs translated into experiences? A friend of mine calls God, the “God of her Experience.” Wow. Imagine if we transmuted catechesis in this way. In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, intellectual knowledge is a means to an end. Looking at many catechetical ideologies, one would think it was the path to spiritual practice. It’s not. The path is a person. The path is relationship, involving experience after experience of this person. Knowledge can be a tool or an aid, like a walking stick. Just don’t let it become a crutch. Knowledge never saved anyone. It’s how we put that knowledge into practice, over and over again, that paves the way. Like the Good Book says, “Faith without works is dead.”
What if catechesis moved us through spiritual knowledge to spiritual experience? This same friend also says God is spelled “R-I-S-K.” And what is risk if not stepping into the great cloud of unknowing? Unknowing is unbearable without presence. Maybe its here that we begin to find the face of God, clouded in what fear was truly intended for: surrender, nay, blessed defeat, before a power greater than our greatest fears. Welcoming this experience and presence is clouded in an often misunderstood word: humility.
I find the deepest form of spiritual practice (and you can look to the lives of the saints for proof) in this simple statement: I don’t know. Hopefully followed by: Jesus (or whatever your word is for a power greater than……), I trust in you.
