Wilkie Au, S.J. 

CHAPTER ONE

"If I have faith in all its fullness, to move mountains, but without love, then I am nothing at all."

(1 COR 13: 2-3)

LIKE A MAP, a spirituality is useless if it is not based on the existential terrain those following it must traverse. But, even more critical is the realization of travelers that a map is indeed necessary. And this realization results only when they are in touch with their enmeshment, their need for a way out of a perplexing entanglement which blocks progress. Martin Buber, the Jewish theologian, tells a story that brings this truth home nicely. (1)

Buber describes the encounter between a jailed rabbi and the chief jailer. The majestic and quiet face of the rabbi, deep in meditation, touched the jailer deeply. A thoughtful person himself, the jailer began talking with his prisoner and questioning him on various points of scripture. Finally, the guard asked the rabbi,

"How are we to understand that God the all-knowing said to Adam: 'where art thou?' "

"Do you believe," answered the rav, "that the scriptures are eternal and that every era, every generation and every [one] is included in them?"

"I believe this," said the other.

"Well," said the zaddik (2) "in every era, God calls to every [one]: 'Where are you in your world?' So many years and days of those allotted to you have passed, and how far have you gotten in your world?" God says something like this: "You have lived forty-six years. How far along are you?"

When the chief of the gendarmes heard his age mentioned, he pulled himself together, laid his hand on the rav's shoulder, and cried: "Bravo!" But his heart trembled.

Buber goes on to explain that God does not ask the question expecting to learn something new. Rather, God uses the question to confront Adam with the state of his life. God asks the same question of us today to jolt us into examining our lives and taking responsibility for our way of living. This decisive heart-searching is, according to Buber, the beginning of a spiritual way for human beings. So long as we do not face the still, small Voice asking us, "Where art thou," we will forever remain way-less. Adam faced the Voice, perceived his enmeshment, and discovered a way out. The question, "Where art thou?" is like the "red X" on the map of our lives. As on a map of a shopping mall, the "red X" marks the exact location of where we are standing. When we ascertain that point, we can then proceed.

When Christians today face the question, "Where art thou," they find their lives more complicated than ever. Often they fed buffeted by the pressures of life and torn by the competing values that lay unrelenting claims on their limited energy and resources. Inner voices flood their minds with quandaries and concerns:

-''I'd like to develop my prayer life, but I feel so guilty when I take time away from the family."

-''I'd like to volunteer to help out at the downtown shelter for the homeless, but I hardly see the wife and kids as it is, with work being so hectic these days."

-"How do I stay faithful to my duties to my children and husband and still get some time and space for myself? Is it being selfish to tell them that I just have to get away for a couple of hours and that they'll have to fend for themselves for awhile?"

Perplexed by such inner pressures and questions, Christians often experience frustration, guilt, and confusion. They feel the need to clarify their situations and make good choices about how to spend their time and energy.

This demanding existence challenges lay Christians living in a world of "future shock," where the rapidity of change and the crush of choices besiege them daily. But the same situation is increasingly true for professed religious. For them, the increased pace and complexity of their lives were ushered in by Vatican Il. By reversing the centuries long adversary stance of the church in relationship to the world, the council challenged active religious (as opposed to contemplatives) to end their cloistered separation and to place themselves at the heart of the world, where the church felt called to be in solidarity and service to humankind. This relocation placed religious smack in the middle of the world, sharing the same fast and frenzied fate of their fellow Christians. Given this relatively new reality, a spirituality that can, like a map, help orient and guide them in this new terrain of post-Vatican II Christian existence is needed. These days many professed religious find themselves struggling with their own variety of the same quandaries perplexing their lay brothers and sisters:

-"How do I keep from getting over-extended and being burned out, when there's so much to do and such a shortage of help? Let me tell you, the vocation crisis has got me worried!"

-"These days I find myself so exhausted that I don't feel like doing anything when I get home from work. I'm too tired to pray or to get involved in community. But, then, when I skip prayer and withdraw from community I feel lonely and out of sync! What should I do?"

-"I feel the need to stay in touch with good friends, but work at the parish takes up all the time I have."

These inner voices of concern reveal the challenge entailed in living gospel values in the midst of busy lives. Fulfilling the diverse requirements of Christian living in a balanced fashion so that no one aspect is overemphasized to the detriment of others is not an easy task. "A place for everything and everything in its place" suggests a way of achieving harmony. To attain this harmony, an ongoing process of self-monitoring is required. And for this, we need an overall perspective, a way of looking on our lives that provides a sense of the big picture. Only such a framework will enable us to assess whether we are paying adequate attention to the full range of gospel values. A holistic spirituality attempts to tackle the tough task of finding an outlook that will integrate our lives sufficiently to give us a sense of increasing wholeness and guide us in our pursuit of holiness.

Striving for holiness, like taking up exercise, can be hazardous to one's health. If misguided, the pursuit of sanctity can produce immaturity and stunted growth. Wanting to harbor themselves until the storms of life pass by, some people use religion as a safe haven to escape the struggles of adult life which produce growth. While fearful images of God as a stern judge sap zest and spontaneity out of the lives of some Christians, the authoritarian rule of some church leaders perpetuates the childish dependence of others.

Professionals such as priests, ministers, and vowed religious are not exempt from the dangers that come with taking religion too seriously. The caricatures of a "Father Frighteningly Frigid" and a "Sister Severely Stern" illustrate the repressiveness that religious life can produce, even in post-Vatican II times. These caricatures point to only two of a variety of immature religious who form a group of "grumpy children of God" in today's church. We have all met insecure pastors angry at trained volunteers seeking greater involvement in the parish as well as religious whose sexual anxieties make them ineffectual in many pastoral situations. Some people might argue that emotional health should not be absolutized as a Christian value. But all must concede that priests and ministers with emotional hang-ups often severely impede the spread of God's kingdom, damage lives through the abuse of authority, and undermine collaboration in ministry.

The perils of a religious path also endanger lay Christians. Men and women who take religion seriously can lapse into forms of pious fanaticism and simple-minded fundamentalism that render life burdensome and dull. Those who interpret the Bible literally, for example, often use scripture as a club to beat others into conforming to their inflexible views, and the righteousness of true believers often allows them to condemn others with an ease that would make Jesus blush. A holistic spirituality attempts to safeguard Christians from these myopic extremes.

The holistic approach to the spiritual life suggested in this book will enable both religious and lay people to forge a more vital link between their faith and their daily lives. In this way, they can heal the dichotomy between the human and the holy, the secular and the sacred-a division that has forced so many to be schizophrenic in living out their religious beliefs. In short, this holistic spirituality will help to develop Christians, both religious and lay, who are integrated personalities. Aptly described by Jesuit historian, Hugo Rahner, a mature Christian person is "one who has overcome the pernicious schizophrenia between soul and body, brain and heart, and thus become fully integrated. . . ." (3)

Like Rahner, I believe that a healthy spirituality cannot be built on the ruins of the human person. A healthy spiritual life respects human wholeness and does not pit it in opposition to holiness and religious commitment. Only such a holistic approach can successfully inculcate the habits of the heart that have made the religious path a genuine way to holiness and growth of the total person.

WHAT IS A HOLISTIC APPROACH?

The term "holistic" has in recent years been applied to such diverse fields as medicine, therapy, education, catechesis, and spirituality. In all these applications, the common meaning reflects a concern for wholeness, a desire for integration, and an attempt to understand the connections among the various aspects that constitute a given reality. To capture some of the more significant nuances of the term, let us consider its usage today in a variety of contexts.

Holistic medicine, for example, represents the desire to keep the total person at the center of medical attention, and not to reduce health care to the impersonal treatment of diseased organs or dysfunctional parts. This concern is in reaction to the growing specialization in medical care, and in fear of increased depersonalization due to technological advances. Holistic medicine stresses the organic unity of body and mind, as well as the responsibility and control that individuals have for taking care of their health through proper diet and exercise. Counteracting a certain complacency among some people who feel they are too busy to get the proper amount of nourishment and rest needed for vibrant health, it emphasizes the importance of preventing illness through the cultivation of a well-balanced and harmonious life.

Psychologists al so speak of a holistic approach to human development. They stress the importance of acknowledging and developing all the complex aspects that make up the human personality. These include one's body and physical needs, emotions and affective needs, and spirit and religious needs. Psychological health also draws upon the Jungian notion that maturity requires the integration of polar aspects of the psyche and in the Eastern notion of balancing the yin and yang forces in one's life.

This integration requires a lifetime of effort and reaches a dramatic moment in what has popularly been termed the mid-life crisis. According to Jung, the challenge presented by the afternoon of one's life is to cultivate those aspects of the personality that remain latent and underdeveloped due to their neglect during the morning of one's existence. Thus, the mid-life project requires looking at and owning one's shadow (aspects of the self that had to be repressed for personal reasons in the course of one's history) and growing androgynously through the progressive assimilation of the feminine (anima) and masculine (animus) principles in the development of one's personality. A holistic approach thus challenges people to go beyond gender stereotypes of what it means to be a male or female and to develop more richly as total personalities.

Human beings, like puzzles, are made up of many parts. Their self-concept allows them to experience themselves as a single entity rather than as a loose collection of unrelated parts. However, unlike a static, prefabricated puzzle with limited parts, the human person is a multifaceted being whose many dimensions are only discovered over the course of a lifetime. When new pieces of the self emerge at different points in life's journey, they demand to be recognized and given their rightful place. Finding a place for these pieces often requires that the present design or self-concept be disassembled so that a more complex pattern capable of incorporating these newly discovered parts can be developed. This dissolution is scary, because it can shatter people's sense of who they are, thus precipitating an identity crisis and creating momentary disequilibrium. Mature growth requires living with this temporary confusion and allowing a more inclusive self-concept to emerge. Threatened by this breakdown of meaning, rigid personalities cling tenaciously to their restricted sense of self and deny these new pieces a legitimate place. In contrast, a holistic approach to development requires that we continually enlarge the images by which we understand ourselves and our world.

Educators have also found the term useful. Holistic education attempts to foster emotional as well as intellectual growth. "Instead of having emotions clash or conflict with intellectual activity," states a leader in the field, "we try to have both work in a harmonious relationship for the ultimate welfare and productivity of the learner." (4) Education is too narrowly viewed when it is reduced to the development of the mind and when it leaves out the cultivation of wonder, irony, and daring to think otherwise, which are essential ingredients for lively engagement in the world. (5) Thus, holistic educators exhort teachers to "take pains not to lose sight of the fact that there is more to 'mind' than knowledge, and more to 'person' than mind." (6) A holistic approach attempts "to pour back some juice into dehydrated educational practices" by blending affectivity and cognition and engaging the senses and the imagination. (7) In a book concerned with "the remaking of American education," the author underscores the vital need for reintegrating thinking, feeling, and sensing in education. "What tomorrow needs," he believes, "is not masses of intellectuals, but masses of educated [persons] - educated to feel and act as well as to think." (8)

In the sphere of formation of faith, contemporary catechesis calls for a holistic approach that goes beyond the classroom model. Holistic catechists argue that only an experiential and participational approach involving the whole person can achieve what The National Catechetical Directory describes as the aim of all catechesis: to make a person's faith become living, conscious, and active through the light of instruction.

To attain this objective, effective catechesis cannot merely address the learner's mind, but must "continue the process of developing the individual's full potential: the affective and behavioral as well as the intellectual and the spiritual." (9) Arguing for an integrated approach, one proponent states: "Witness the saints and heroes of our tradition. They were not canonized because of their astuteness or knowledge but because of the evident goodness of their lives. Is this not our goal for religious education? To achieve this goal, a multifaceted, holistic approach is call ed for." (l0)

What, then, does "holistic" connote when used to describe a spirituality and spiritual formation? It should include all the connotations and nuances of the term described above. Like holistic medicine, a holistic spirituality must respect the psychosomatic or body-spirit unity of the person. Like holistic human development, holistic spiritual growth must include the ongoing struggle for integration and wholeness. It must also respect the developmental nature of that lifelong process. Like holistic education, holistic religious formation must go beyond mere theoretical training to engage the whole person in a process of personal transformation. It must al so value personal experience as an important teacher and validate trial-and-error learning. And as with holistic catechesis, the aim of an integrated spiritual development is to make a person's faith become a dynamic element affecting every dimension of one's daily life, not merely an intellectual assent to abstract truths.

A holistic spirituality is a religious outlook as well as a way of structuring one's life in order to embody religious values. As a religious orientation, it asks the question, "How is God leading and loving us in all aspects of our lives?" It is holistic insofar as it acknowledges that all aspects of a person's life must be subjected to the transforming influence of the Spirit. In the past, certain spiritualities restricted the scope of the spiritual life to one's relationship to God and the condition of one's soul. In contrast, a holistic spirituality attempts to embrace the totality of a person's existence, including one's relationship with others, with one's work, and with the material world. Defining the spiritual life as coextensive with life itself, it finds every human concern relevant. God's spirit dwells and acts in all aspects of our lives and not merely in such explicitly religious activities as prayer and worship.

Understanding spirituality holistically involves linking it with every aspect of human development-psychological and spiritual, interpersonal and political. "Holism (or wholism) is an aspiration to deal with one's life adequately, giving each significant factor its due.'''' Issues revolving around work and leisure, prayer and politics, sex and relationships all clamor for our attention. As a life structure, holistic spirituality is concerned with the question, "Given our limited time, energy, and resources, how can we integrate our Christian lives in a way that provides a sense of growing wholeness and peace?"

A HOLISTIC VIEW OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE

To view the spiritual life holistically is to assert the truth of two central beliefs: (A) the pursuit of holiness is in no way inimical to healthy human growth; and (B) those who strive to be religious are not exempt from the human condition. They must, like everyone else, work out their growth into wholeness in the context of human struggle. What a Jesuit document states about the vow of chastity applies to the whole of religious life. Chastity "does not diminish our personality nor hamper human contacts and dialogue, but rather expands affectively, unites people as sisters and brothers, and brings them to a fuller charity." (12) Thus, those aspiring to be religious persons, whether as professed or as lay people, must continue to invest in their ongoing human growth. Unless they stay open to expanding as people able to give and to receive love, their quest for religious growth will ironically thwart, rather than stimulate, their cooperation with God in bringing about the universal society of love envisioned by Jesus.

COLLABORATING WITH THE CREATOR

Those who take Christian faith seriously should not denigrate human growth as something merely secular, something unrelated to religious maturity. Because the glory of God, as St. Irenaeus reminds us, is the person fully alive, our vocation as human beings entails a commitment to continuous human growth. Human life is a gift from the creator, who couples the gift of life with a call-a call to us to be co-creators, freely fashioning our lives into something beautiful for God. In this process of ongoing human development, the Lord of creation and the human beings fashioned by God's hand collaborate. Consequently, for people who seek to respond to God, a commitment to growth is more a requirement than a choice. To deny the inner impulse toward continuous growth is tantamount to not responding to God, because "as destiny, as summons, as love, God is present" in our process of becoming. (13) In short, a holistic spirituality sees ongoing human growth as essential to religious maturation. A spiritual life not built on solid human development born of struggle is liable to be superficial and escapist.

GRACE BUILDS ON NATURE

Growth in spiritual maturity depends heavily on integral human development. This truth has long been captured in the Scholastic adage that "grace builds on nature." Leo P. Rock, a former Jesuit novice director, applies this truth to religious formation in a pithy way: "Grace does not substitute for nature, but fulfills it. Healthy, sane personality development is the most fertile so il in which grace can take root and grow. Growth in religious life can best happen in the situation which best fosters personal human growth. " (14)

A modern paraphrase of "Grace builds on nature" could be "God meets us where we're at." Sanctity, if it is to be genuine, must be bound up with authentic human life-and thus with the uniqueness, the limited capabilities and potentialities, the emotional maturity of the individual. (15) We may know of some genuinely holy men and women who seem far from psychologically healthy; nevertheless, maturity in spiritual development ordinarily implies maturity at more basic natural and psychological levels. (16) Since God's grace runs along channels of the Lord's own making, generally the Spirit of God respects the natural laws of human development as it interacts with human beings in their struggle towards holiness and wholeness. Thus, any spiritual path that attempts to skirt the natural laws of human development runs the risk of inauthenticity. As a wise old Benedictine abbot in charge of training recruits of varying ages once put it: "You create a monster if you try to put a thirty-year old head on a nineteen-year old body."

On the other hand, nature itself is graced. Because God's grace can be discovered at work within the structure of human development, growth is simultaneously natural development and a surprisingly graceful event. The good news for those struggling to grow spiritually is that God is intimately involved in the process. Far from being indifferent to the struggles of human growth, the transcendent creator of life is mysteriously near to support and sustain that process. Members of Alcoholics Anonymous put it this way: "God always comes to meetings!" God is ever present in us and our world "as the matrix and orientation of [our] coming to be, yet never identified with history nor exhausted by it.'' (17) Thus, human development is at once both secular and sacred. It involves both nature and grace because the conversions that lead us to greater self-knowledge and re-situate us in regard to our human environment "are not simply psychological but salvational. " (18) God is redemptively present in the humanization process.

HOLISTIC GROWTH AND EFFECTIVE MINISTRY

In discussing the relationship between affectivity and sexuality in the life of Jesuits, psychiatrist James J. Gill points out an important reason why a holistic view of spirituality and religious formation must be taken seriously today. There has been a dramatic shift in the nature of effective ministry, he maintains. That shift requires a drastic revision of how lay people and seminarians are trained for apostolic service in the church. In the past, the prominent mode of ministry required that ministers communicate their knowledge (what they knew). Today, effective ministry requires them to share themselves (who they are).

Gill states that people trained for ministry two or three decades ago experienced a formation geared to providing them with knowledge which they could impart and skills by which they could express the truths they were learning about God, people, and the world. They were given to believe that their "spiritual life" was a private matter between themselves and God, and perhaps shared with a spiritual director or superior.

The shift in ministerial emphasis from giving what one knows to sharing who one is requires that ministers today go beyond being impersonal dispensers of "the truth" or distant suppliers of "the answers" to share the problems people face. Today's ministers, whether religious or lay, "are exhorted to 'communicate' with them personally and individually, by listening to their needs, sharing their struggles, allowing them to come to know our deepest attitudes, values, faith experiences, struggles and weakness, and, in brief, giving them a chance to recognize us as 'wounded healers.' " (19) Because of this shift in understanding ministry, those who wish to serve others in ministry hear "a new emphasis on the continuous pursuit of growth, the improvement of our ability to relate to others in Christian friendship, and a deepening of our understanding of ourselves as well as the people we serve. " (20) All of these concerns find a place in the model of holistic spirituality that follows.

A LOVING FRAMEWORK

A compelling quality of Jesus' message was its absolute simplicity. When confronting the question set forth by a lawyer hoping to disconcert him, Jesus summarized "the whole Law, and the Prophets also" by recalling the twofold commandment of love: "You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself" (Lk 10:25-28; Mt 22:3440; Mk 12:28-34). Cutting through the morass of pharisaic requirements, Jesus went right to the heart of the matter: love is the sine qua non of religious life. Neither fulfilling the letter of the law, nor fasting and tithing, but simply loving God with our whole being and others as we love ourselves is the bottom line requirement "to inherit eternal life." This truth, so starkly stated, must have been a refreshing moment of clarity for those perplexed by the intricacies of the Mosaic law. With equal force, it can restore perspective to our complicated lives today.

Simplifications can clarify, but they can also distort. The history of thought contains many examples of how complex realities can suffer from over-simplification or distortive reductionism. For example, without denying the powerful force of libidinal energy, one need not buy into a Freudian reductionism that would make sex the sole motivator of all human activities. Similarly, while economic motives in many ways make the world go round, there is sufficient evidence that people are motivated by more than money to resist a theory of economic determinism.

Fortunately, when Jesus reduced "the whole Law, and also the Prophets" to his twofold commandment of love, he was able to clarify without distorting truth and tradition. Because gospel love is multifaceted, it can encompass the complex dimensions of human life and at the same time provide a simple focus. Viewing spirituality from the point of view of gospel love thus allows us to construct an overview for monitoring the quality of our lives and making the difficult choices that competing claims force upon us.

From the twofold commandment of love, we can derive five distinct loves in scripture: love of God, neighborly love (diakonia), communal love (koinonia), particular love (philia), and self-love. (21) These five loves are distinct, but in reality interact and affect each other. For example, self-love makes it possible for one to love others, whether in friendship, ministry, or community. Yet, being loved by others also enables one to love oneself. Similarly, loving one's own life as a precious gift forms the foundation for grateful worship and love of God, the giver of that gift. Conversely, self-hatred provides no motive for loving God the creator. These interrelationships illustrate how a constant dialectical interaction exists among these five loves. These gospel loves express themselves through prayer, ministry, community, friendship, and self esteem. Based on these gospel values, Donald Goergen has described Christian spirituality in a manner that is holistic in its concern for wholeness and balance. Believing it to be a useful basis for our discussion, I have built on his basic scheme to create a similar one for a holistic spirituality (see Figure A). My conceptualization is purely a loose framework for sharing some personal thoughts. There will be no attempt to treat it as a formal model by describing precisely each component and the dynamics of its interacting parts. Furthermore, the elucidation of each of the gospel loves represents my personal reflections and understanding, and may or may not coincide with Goergen's own presentation of these same elements in his scheme.

My holistic framework contains the same ten elements suggested by Goergen: the five gospel loves listed above, along with their complementary opposites which must be included for a complete understanding of each love. According to Goergen, "we run the risk of misunderstanding each of the loves unless we raise the. question of how that love might be completed and what its complement iS." (22) Thus, only in terms of its complement can each gospel love be appreciated in its wholeness. Consequently, self-esteem must be balanced by self-denial; ministry by leisure; friendship by generativity; prayer by humor; and community by solitude.

Goergen's description of Christian spirituality is useful to a holistic approach in two ways. First, it is comprehensive in including all the loves that we must embody as Christians trying to love as Jesus did. It provides the basis of a realistic spirituality, because it reflects the actual issues and tensions that Christians grapple with in their daily lives. It is a useful guide because it maps out the terrain on which we must struggle to find a way towards Christian wholeness. Second, its complementary approach encourages us to give each love its proper due and at the same ti me challenges us to strike the right balance as we try to

SELF-ESTEEM – SELF-DENIAL

MINISTRY-LEISURE

FRIENDSHIP-GENERATIVITY

PRAYER-HUMOR

COMMUNITY-SOLITUDE

(Figure A)

Complementary Gospel Values

incorporate these loves into our nitty-gritty lives. Modeled on Goergen's basic scheme, the representation pictured in Figure A is a way of imaging a holistic Christian spirituality. Utilizing this framework, let us now explore some of the issues involved in living out these biblical loves in an integrated way.