Ian Linden
Lay Spirituality in a Post-Modern World

"Each tradition will have its own techniques of watchfulness, its own criteria for the purification of desire and for weaning adoration from idolatry". Nicholas Lash in The Beginning and the End of Religion.

The title of this talk obscures more of its content than it highlights. To begin with, traditionally the word "lay" has taken on its meaning only in distinction to "clerical", and this distinction has often been read as "amateur" as against "professional", beginner as against expert. While we often need to define ourselves in opposition to something that we are not, how people are differentiated and express their identity depends on the context and has some, at least implicit, purpose.

 For example, when I was working in the anti-apartheid struggle it was sometimes years before I found out if a colleague in South Africa was, for example, a Baptist, a Muslim, a Catholic or a Communist. The relevant question was "whose side are you on?" - and it was wise to find out early in a relationship. It is the nature of the common task that determines which are the important and unimportant differences between people, and what aspects of our identity are significant. Are Christians engaged on a mission in which the distinction between lay and clerical is important? Is to "seek the Kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and by ordering them according to the plan of God", as the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium, n. 31, describes it, a mission for the laity alone? How can this be if, as Vita Consecrata insists, the option for the poor is "inherent in the very structure of love lived in Christ" and "all of Christ's disciples are therefore held to this option"? (The Consecrated Life and its Mission in the Church and in the World Vita Consecrata, n. 82).

 In addition, the word "spirituality" is a huge inflatable castle of a word. On further inspection, like a lot of words that originate in French with certain rich resonances, in English spiritualité can evoke a sense of plastic emptiness. Popular modern books on spirituality, and their metastasis as sunshine-through-the-leaves posters in religious houses and pastoral centres, do not suggest that we are dealing with faith seeking knowledge, but potted psychology, not so much an opium for the people, more some talcum powder for the sores and abrasions of modern life. If Christian spirituality is defined simply - for example as "Christian wisdom and perspective on faith and life for our world", where are we to find the wisdom, the theology, in much of what passes for spirituality in Catholic bookshops?

 No less inflated a word is the term "post-modern society". My suspicion does not stem from the fact that only a few people would describe their social experience in this fashion. Does it matter if few people immediately and directly register the atomisation and fragmentation of society, the collapse of grand narratives, or the reality of cultural relativism, as being key features of our contemporary world? The world under our feet today is not, of course, the same as the world in our heads. But this has been true throughout history as each generation tries to interpret their human condition.

 The substantive point is to what extent is post-modern society as a description of contemporary global society an accurate philosophical construct, a useful interpretation of who we are as human beings and of the world in which we live? Perhaps it might fit Western Europe in the late 1990's. But our global reality seems a lot more complex, a jostling juxtaposition of the different pre-modern, differentiated forms of modernity and post-modern, a temporal patchwork. Whether or not there is an overall trajectory, and it is in the direction of the post-modern dissolution, remains to be seen.

Discipleship

 To explain why I was initially happy with the title means going back 30 years to when I first read Yves Congar's Lay People in the Church and got accustomed to the idea of there being a "lay spirituality". He begins his chapter on spirituality, "In the World but not of the World", by conceding that strictly speaking there is no "spirituality of the diocesan clergy" or "spirituality of the laity". There is one spirituality, the Christian quest to seek union with God in Christ and so "to tend to holiness" (Y. Congar, Lay People in the Church, Geoffrey Chapman, 1965, 400).

 This use of "lay spirituality" without inverted commas, he insists, is so that "those to whom the word is familiar and clear may know that our purpose is to talk about the things they understand by that word: in what particular conditions do lay people have to sanctify themselves?" (ibid.). We are all used to that question being "familiar and clear", but it is easy to forget how revolutionary it was in its day.

 There is also considerable continuity with tradition in Congar's book. His common-sense, concrete approach rests on a legacy of something more than convenience. It arises out of a tradition of institutional arrangements in the Church expressed by him as "forms of life" which he goes on to describe as "vocations". "Their vocations are diverse, their states and conditions of life are diverse, their actual duties are diverse", he writes (ibid.). This all seems to make up a coherent discourse, with echoes of St Paul's different charisms, and to be uncontentious as a statement about the sociology of how the contemporary Church is structured.

 But, as Vocations Sunday comes round and sermons fall apart trying to make it clear that the primary purpose of the day is to encourage recruitment for the consecrated life and diocesan priesthood, but, shuffle, shuffle, that those of us then confusingly called "the laity" also have a vocation to sanctity, something more weighty is glimpsed as at stake. As Vita Consecrata makes clear we are dealing with something more than a sociology of the contemporary Church; the two different forms of life, the consecrated life and lay life, plus the ordained ministry, are "in accordance with the plan of the Lord Jesus"; they are "paradigmatic" (Vita Consecrata n. 31).

 As Congar describes it, traditionally only two of these vocations are understood as requiring people to live the Christian life "more intensely", and to make a priority of the spiritual journey that all Christians are called to undertake (Lay People, p. 401). And the "objective superiority" of the consecrated life as "a way of showing forth the Church's holiness", in Vita Consecrata, n. 32, objectively becomes conflated with a hierarchical structuring of the Church, as, through the imposition of celibacy, there is created a bogus approximation of clerical life to monastic life. A spirituality in which, in practice, diocesan clergy attempt to behave like ersatz monks, and lay workers try to behave like ersatz diocesan priests, appears today spectacularly at odds with the new demands coming from pastoral action and collaborative ministry. Congar in his day was part of a revolutionary process of freeing the laity from an ecclesiastical prison, but he - and we - despite the clear ecclesiology of Lumen Gentium, still have not fully dismantled the clericalist pre-suppositions into which the prison walls sank their foundations.

 Nonetheless, Congar, Lebret and the French theologians of the 1960's, who so informed the Second Vatican Council's thinking, opened up a new vista for Catholics who wanted to relate faith to life. Karl Rahner called for the Church to give greater support to those who dealt daily with the problems of an increasingly secular Europe and saw clearly the demands that would be made on any lay spirituality (K. Rahner, Theological Investigations Volume Five, Darton, Longmann & Todd, 1966, pp. 152-3).

 The idea that the sacrament of marriage put Christians in a special "state", characterised by each spouse being the primary channel of grace for the other, was an exciting one, even if it placed an enormous responsibility on a single relationship. Married spirituality was a classic elaboration of Congar's vision of lay spirituality, related to a form of life or "state". It was liberating in a Church in which a celibate clergy had more often than not passed on an alien "monastic" spirituality - imposed on them - onto married people, at times inadvertently causing untold suffering. But marriage remained a central experience of Catholic life mainly abandoned by academic theologians as an object of reflection, and prey to the manic contrivances of the canon lawyers.

 The problem with all these "states" with their attendant grace was their static, bounded qualities, which tended under the intense scrutiny of new forms of spiritual formation to turn people in on themselves and their relationships. Spirituality was easily reduced to a form of psychological hygiene with a pantechnikon of methods and techniques drawn from popular psychology. This had the merit of winnowing motivations and prejudices by applying the see-judge-act approach to oneself. But it smacked of a spirituality which understood itself as dealing with what Nicholas Lash calls "the 'inside' of Cartesian man, the opinions, dreams and preferences of the private self" (N. Lash, "The Church in the State We're In" Modern Theology 13, 1997, 123).

 Christians are not in the habit of going around imagining themselves as divinely defined parts of an organic mediaeval christendom, working out their sanctification in terms of their allotted timeless boundaries and forms of life. Such a mediaeval fantasy was at best a neo-Gothic dream, at worst a prelude to a Fascist nightmare. In the heady optimism of the 1960's, many Christians were available for a more open ended journey. Indeed, the French title of Congar's book, Jalons pour une theologie du laicat, suggested new, uncharted territory. The word that first comes to mind to describe journey is not "vocation", with its institutional slotting into a bounded sociological role, but discipleship - where you learn what to do as you go along. Discipleship suggests Congar's surveying of uncharted territory, a sense of risk, not knowing where you will end up, not knowing who you will become. With Bonhoeffer, of course, it suggested a radical break with the past and an incalculable cost (D. Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, SCM Press, 1959). It is telling that when Vita Consecrata talks of the option for the poor it immediately begins to talk about "all of Christ's disciples" (Vita Consecrata n. 82).

 Discipleship is a form of apprenticeship, a learning by doing, or by watching someone-else-doing. So it is not suprising that as the Second Vatican Council unleashed Christians and gave them permission for an uncharted discipleship unstructured by an institutional control of "vocations", an opposition perceived as being between "experience" and "dogma" came to the fore. The "processing" of experience through apprenticeship in the context of the Church's living and unfolding tradition simply was not on offer. The pastoral experience arising out of the creative excitement of the 1960's did not match easily with a dogmatic and hierarchical response to the "world".

 In the metaphor of being sent out into the "world", who was doing the sending? It was easy to reply Christ and the Church but, as pastoral experience diverged from dogmatic assertion and hierarchical discipline, this could begin to appear as an "either-or" question.

 What broadly distinguished pastoral experience from what might be called the dominant perspective on spirituality was that one was by definition incarnate and the other, by historical accident, presented and expressed as disincarnate. While a disincarnate spirituality might not result in an immediate crisis of faith for some in the consecrated life, - for some of course it did - it simply did not work for the vast majority who had gone on a different journey. Many of these therefore completed that journey in an increasingly dis-integrated state with faith, prayer and life falling apart, or with faith and prayer un-nurtured by the Church and slowly withering. Not suprisingly, simply stated, many gave up on the Church.

Liberation Theology

 It was the special contribution of Latin American liberation theology to the life of the Church after the Council to offer a way out of a disincarnate spirituality that, for many people, did not enable them to build an adequate bridge between faith and life, and to offer an alternative to the charismatic and other lay movements. In short, it provided an underpinning for a renewed Christian spirituality by returning to a concrete scriptural christology which had, on the whole, disappeared from "devotional" writing after the Middle Ages (Ignatian spirituality would be an important exception). It did so by first of all showing how religious language was shaped by power interests, and by demythologising pietistic spirituality.

 This enabled theology and spirituality to be linked again in a popular Christianity that opened up discipleship as a focused option, an option for the poor. For some of the Latin American liberation theologians and, in the case of the South African Dominican, Albert Nolan's Jesus before Christianity, it renewed the quest for an historical Jesus accessible to a secular world seeking justice (A. Nolan, Jesus Before Christianity, David Philip, Johannesburg 1976).

 Thus through the impact of the ideas of liberation theology in the 1970's, which grew from the faith of the poor, the basic commitment and orientation of the Christian way of life for at first radical Catholics, then as it entered the bloostream of the wider Church for many more, came to be expressed as "the option for the poor". This, of course, originally meant first and foremost the engagement of the poor in their own personal, socio-economic and political liberation. But it came to mean the religious commitment and evangelical bias of all those who take the side of the poor in their quest for integral human liberation. For, in the eyes of faith it is God's own option. This is why the standpoint of the poor is theologically privileged; in other words the poor are best placed to discover and contemplate God's hidden presence in the world.

 Indeed, the starting point for the thinking of the Peruvian theologian, Gustavo Gutierrez, was precisely the disjunction between the Christian message and an experienced reality, that of the Latin American poor. "How is it possible to tell the poor, who are forced to live in conditions that embody a denial of love, that God loves them?" His implied answer was that this message would be a lie if God's love, and thus the Christian Gospel, were disincarnate, not about changing the world of the poor economically, socially and politically.

 If I might add a personal note at this point, for me liberation theology came just in time. In as much as I ever felt the tug of a "follow me", it came from people like a Breton priest in an Emmaus community of Abbe Pierre, from Christians who risked their lives for justice in Rhodesia and South Africa, and did not come from out of the mysterium tremendens of bells and smells in Westminster Cathedral. My first love for the Church came when I glimpsed in it a school of solidarity with the poor. I have always resented the term "social catholicism" because it never occurred to me that catholicism could be anything other than social.

 Indeed I cannot imagine that I would be standing addressing a forum of this nature had liberation theology not come along in the early 1970's, entered the bloodstream of even European Christian spirituality, and nourished a faltering faith. As the ever evolving answer to Gustavo's question, it was also the beginning of an answer to many stultifying dilemmas caused by the lack of a usable link between theology and spirituality, between Christian tradition, orthodoxy and experience. It gave an incarnate content to faith, a new way of thinking about religious truth, and gave meaning to what had to be done. It promised the integration of faith, prayer and life, of feelings of anger and attempts at social analysis, however little this promise was fulfilled in my own life in practice.

 An incarnate spirituality meant being political because politics was, at its simplest, the way people were in the world with each other. It meant living in a world of real liberation movements, and real political parties, rather than talking about an abstract concept of liberation or the Church and Politics. Above all it meant recognising that the powerless wanted power, and were not going to be satisfied when Christians covered up their lack of political commitment and strategy, their failures and lack of nerve, their fear of going onto uncharted ground, by talking about the powerlessness of the Cross. So it meant taking on a new set of disjunctions and ambiguities, and persevering with a new set of tensions and problems. In short it meant living in the moral mess of the political, being tainted by it and changed by it.

 Liberation theology was insistent that no theology was politically neutral. Theology was, whatever the context, either prophetic and stimulated the righting of wrongs, or it supported the way things stood. For example, either it supported protest against women being only allowed to participate in the Autumn 1994 Synod on the Religious Life as observers, or it supported the divine office of explaining-away such an outrageous travesty of justice in terms of some traditional principle. Either it strengthened the poor or it left them oppressed. This was a painful insight because it meant inevitable conflict.

 Yet liberation theology, perhaps because it inhabited a kind of ecclesiastical desert, had its special temptations. While for the majority of those in the thick of it, power was first and foremost the power of non-violent resistance to evil - and this obviously could and did lead to martyrdom - for those on the European sidelines, it was tempting to want simply to bypass the Cross, to want the poor to win, just once in a while, and not to fret too much about the means. True, after the decolonisation of Zimbabwe, Namibia and majority rule in South Africa, in which I had the privilege of being involved because of my work at CIIR, only the most naïve equated the poor winning simplistically with the political victory of a particular liberation movement.

 So, I would personally plead "guilty but extenuating circumstances" to Nicholas Lash's and John Milbank's charge against liberation theology, that a Nietzschean "orientation to power" infected its politics, and was deeply seductive, even if few Latin American practitioners of liberation theology succumbed to it in practice, and even if - in my head if not in my heart - it was a will to power for someone else (cf. J. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 1990, pp. 3-10; N. Lash "Eagles and Sheep: Christianity and the Public Order Beyond Modernity" in The Beginning and the End of Religion, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 219-236). But I would argue on the basis of lives like that of Archbishop Oscar Romero and countless martyrs around the world that this charge does not stick as a fundamental critique of the practice of liberation theology. It did seek to enact "the peaceable generosity of God".

 My other full and frank confession would be that many in my generation in Western Europe took it for granted that the train of history might occasionally disappear down dark tunnels but would take us ultimately to our destinations. It did not bear thinking about that history might not be going anywhere in particular, but might be a blundering mess of conflictive human behaviour leading into blind alleys and possibly to environmental destruction of the planet. Any sober appraisal of the 20th century would suggest that this possibility did bear thinking about, and must be reflected on today. In this sense we enter our modern Garden of Gethsemane from a different direction to Christians from Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union who have not shared our illusions.

 How then in past and present political contexts does the option for the poor lead Christians into an apprenticeship in solidarity and so into a school for Christian spirituality? Or put another way, how does the option for the poor make of us a Church? My first observation would be that it encourages Christians to get into situations in which poverty, chastity and obedience become practical virtues within a struggle for justice. I would hasten to add "political virtues". Practising these virtues contributes to the common good and builds the Church.

 This was something that could be glimpsed in the midst of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and it was perhaps no accident that Albert Nolan wrote The Service of the Poor and Spiritual Growth in 1984 as Christians were beginning to prepare the Kairos document and the liberation struggle was at its most intense. "Just as there are stages of prayer and stages of growth in love, and just as St Bernard can speak of steps in the development of the virtue of humility, so also in our commitment to the poor", he wrote, "there is an analogous spiritual experience that goes through different steps or stages with its own crises or dark nights and its own discoveries or illuminations". He goes on to describe these stages from compassion to romanticism to genuine solidarity (A. Nolan "The Service of the Poor and Spiritual Growth", CIIR Justice papers, No. 6 1985, 3).

 Liberation theology gave discipleship a compass bearing, moving it into action-reflection, praxis, and opened up a new set of social experiences whose meanings were illuminated by biblical texts. Above all it was an antidote to the kind of self-indulgent, individualistic fantasy of "doing your own thing" that managed to survive the collapse of 1960's optimism. It never is, of course, "your own thing", merely what our time of advanced capitalism wants to sell to us.

Speaking from the Margins

 The answer to Congar's question "in what conditions do lay people have to sanctify themselves" requires a preliminary discernment of history and therefore a book or two. But the point I want to underline is that the question can only be answered by Europeans today by placing themselves within the painful history of the short 20th century which came to an end at the beginning of the 1990's.

 We live in the shadow of the Holocaust and of what really existing socialism really meant. Even the golden years of post-war growth have their downside of greed. Too many people in Western Europe have benefited in the last two decades from a politics that has increased inequality and excluded an "underclass" to vote for anything that threatens to move out from the status quo of "centre" parties. It appears increasingly that the majority of people in democracies reject political parties overtly committed to social justice and redistribution of wealth. They certainly do not want their political aspirations to be expressed and implemented by political parties committed to profound social and economic transformation whether or not these might benefit the poor. The European historical experience of profound transformations has either been too terrible or involved too much disillusionment.

 The radical politics of the peaceable generosity of God has therefore to be played out increasingly in what has unfortunately been called, with very little concern for definition, "civil society", yet without abandoning the restrictive world of party politics. But, though for minorities, growing impoverishment and marginalisation is a fundamental experience, Europeans appear culturally unable to construct a "theology from the margins". In a world where political and economic power are becoming more and more centralised, Europe inhabits an ideological universe which is described as post-modern and "de-centred", and which disclaims grand narratives, offering instead a babel of competing voices most of which may be deemed "marginal". This is part and parcel of a philosophical climate in which relativism flourishes.

 Those who claim to speak only from particular positions and for special interest groups cannot easily take a stance with regard to issues of global injustice, and have scant resources for broad social and political critiques. Addressing this ideological impasse is an integral part of any future European liberation theology. Taking the option for the poor in the European context thus has its own particular challenge, its own demanding discipleship which defines the journey as, at least temporarily, quite uncharted. The sign posts have gone. This has implications for a Christian spirituality in Europe far beyond what even Rahner imagined in the 1960's.

 Keeping going on this journey without dramatising a lack of bearings as a dark night of the soul is challenging. The challenge is that much greater given the disproportionate Church effort going towards seminary training for clergy, compared with the resources ploughed in to ongoing formation and education for the majority of Christians.

 The option for the poor is certainly foolishness to today's "Greeks". So, at least, the temptation to jump from theological analysis into the programmes of particular political parties has gone. There is no obvious fit and an uncritical leap from theology to politics was always a mistake. The discipline of bringing about small, incremental change - if we are lucky - against rather heavy odds is the order of the day. We will increasingly be doing this as civic groups and coalitions using the political space opened up as Governments retreat under the pressures of neo-liberal ideology, whether in the sphere of domestic poverty or international economic justice.

 In the face of what Jon Sobrino calls "the crucified peoples", today Rwanda and Burundi, yesterday El Salvador, Guatemala, Bosnia, this seems a tragically inadequate response. As Tina Beattie, an evangelical convert to Catholicism, writes: "We love Jesus, and we cannot bear to expose ourselves to the stark cruelty of human nature. So we run away. We find some quiet, protected place in which to pray and sing hymns and escape from the rotten world. We think of him, far away on a hillside that we cannot bring ourselves to visit, and we tell ourselves that at least we are not involved. We are not like those in the crowd who demand blood" (T. Beattie, Rediscovering Mary: Insights from the Gospels, Burns and Oates 1995, p. 117). Which is why Mary, who prayed the revolutionary words of the Magnificat and did not run away, and stood at the foot of the Cross, still speaks to us from the margins today. She is the model of the Church speaking truth to power from the margins, even in her silence.

 The spiritual journey from the optimism of the 1960's can sometimes seem like a crash course in humility. We are now in a time of sober hope, chastened by history. As Albert Nolan says: "When one is dedicated to the service of the poor it is even more difficult to accept that it is not they who need me but I who need them" ("The Service of the Poor", p. 7).