On the Road to Emmaus: The Catholic Dialogue with America and Modernity

3. Lay Spirituality ad Majorem Dei Gloriam

72 3 Lay Spirituality ad majorem Dei gloriam Contemporary Christianity, as an expression of the contemporary world, bears some resemblance to a great carnival midway. From all sides barkers urge their goods. “Have you tried Marriage Encounter?” “Come to the Latin Mass this Sunday.” “I didn’t know what Christianity was about until I joined the Charismatics !” “Have you been to the First Church of Agape in the Park?” Whereas in the pre-Vatican II Church people often had relatively stable patterns of spiritual practice, people now often move in and out of new “spiritual experiences” with great rapidity, making of their lives a series of passages.1 Although one would, perhaps, have to be demented with charity to call all these movements and expressions “spiritualities,” the existence of a variety of spiritualities in the Church is no new thing. In spite of the profound arguments by Louis Bouyer that finally all Catholic spirituality is one, even within Catholic Christianity , as Bouyer so articulately showed, there have always been schools of thought and practice.2 Some of these have found their origin in a particular theological notion or understanding, while others have been a response to the peculiar problems and needs of a particular 1. To use analogously the term of Gail Sheehy, Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (New York: Bantam, 1976). 2. Louis Bouyer, Introduction to Spirituality, trans. Mary Perkins Ryan (New York: Desclee, 1961), 1. Lay Spirituality 73 time and place, or of a condition or state of Christian life. It is in relation to the latter that the idea of a lay spirituality formed historically . In the present chapter I would like to consider briefly how and why a distinctive lay spirituality emerged, to present a reading of our own times, which would argue for the particular relevance of one of the historic forms of lay spirituality, and then, with the other barkers, to press this argument on my reader. A half century ago John Courtney Murray wrote of two basic tendencies within Christianity, which he labeled “eschatological humanism” and “incarnational humanism.”3 Ancient and medieval Christianity tended to express the former, focusing on God in such a manner as to express a certain contempt for the world. From the eleventh century, “incarnational humanism,” which seeks sanctification through the natural goods of this world, came more and more to carry the day. If we keep in mind that both tendencies have always been present in Christianity, Murray’s perspective is useful for understanding the emergence of lay spirituality. There was a pronounced tendency in the Fathers to identify Christian perfection with celibacy and the giving up of private property, and to look upon the married state as an inferior, although legitimate, form of Christian life. Especially from the fourth century, the enthusiasm of many Christian writers was channeled into the praise of the ascetic and monastic lives, with a consequent depreciation and, in some degree, lack of interest in the lives of those left “in the world.” Although many of the Fathers could and did outline the goods proper to marriage, when they urged the laity to spiritual progress the pattern of this progress was almost always implicitly ascetical and monastic in character. While some could speak of the family as a “domestic church,” and of the love between husband and wife as a “communion in the same spiritual ideal,” there hardly developed what might be called a theology of the family or of the lay state.4 3. John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1960), chap. 8. The same general perspective is provided by Gerd Tellenbach, Church, State and Christian Society at the Time of the Investiture Contest, trans. R. F. Bennett (Oxford: Blackwell, 1959). 4. The whole ancient tradition is surveyed by Louis Bouyer, A History of Christian 74 Catholic Incarnational Humanism It seems obvious to me that some form of ascetic discipline will always be necessary as a ground for progress in the spiritual life. Yet in the ancient context the pattern of discipline provided for the laity was extremely awkward, centering as it did on a “flight to the desert ” away from urban civilization. Although particularly the Cappadocian fathers had some understanding of the necessity to create certain institutional and cultural supports for those who lived an active life within an urbanized culture, only the most rudimentary responses...