Spirit and Action

Spirituality and Action

Spirituality and Public Witness

Bibliographic Resources

offered by Don Beisswenger, Professor of Church and Community Emeritus, Vanderbilt Divinity School

[11-7-01]

In Contemplation in a World of Action, Thomas Merton recorded (slightly altered): One who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening one's own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. One will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of one's own obsessions, aggressiveness, ego--centered ambitions, delusions about ends and mean, doctrinaire prejudices and ideas. There is nothing more tragic in the modern world than the misuse of power and action to which persons are driven by their own Faustian misunderstandings and misapprehensions. (pp. 179-180)

The events of September 11^th certainly validated his reflection. We need to think deeply as a people. But the problem faces all of us each day as we engage the world. Where do we go to develop the capacity of love he suggests? Where do we come face to face with our obsessions, prejudices? Certainly we need one another. The Witherspoon community has a responsibility to call us to account. But the call to touch the deeper streams where the holy God engages us remains. The purpose of our life in the spirit, our prayer, is the deepening of the reality Gods love and justice. The purpose of our meditation is to explore new dimensions of justice and love as well as the Jesus story.

I imagine we all find ourselves experiencing what Merton suggests. We do get torn and worn and need interior strengthening. Yet we do not attend to the deeper meaning and realities often, and just carry on. Sabbath rest does not take form.

A spiritual companion and I use two writings which have been refreshing year after year: One is Frederick Buechner's little book of daily readings entitled Listening to Your Life. He has an imaginative way of noticing how God comes to us - in a relationship, the rustle of the wind, a wedding, an embrace, an event. The second book is Henri Nouwens daily readings, Bread For the Journey, which keeps the Jesus story more sharply in focus. There are other helpful readings as well: Parker Palmer's Let Your Life Speak focuses on vocation. Contemplative Prayer is given attention by Thomas Keating, inviting us to rid ourselves of our over active minds as we pray. In Ordinary Time by Roberta Bondi and The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris have been well received. Most all these books are more helpful with the personal and interpersonal dimensions of our life before God than with that dimension of life focused on public and systemic issues.

Here are some writings which may help us discern God in the midst of public life: Dorothee Soelle's The Silent Cry focuses on mysticism and resistence. Practicing Our Faith, edited by Dorothy Bass, gives attention to the practice of Sabbath, which most of us do badly, as well as forgiveness and discernment. Joyce Hollyday relates spiritual formation and social witness in Then Shall your Light Rise. Alton Pollard focuses on the witness of Howard Thurman in Mysticism and Social Change. Our friend Robert McAfee Brown, whom we remember with such appreciation, still helps us with his book Spirituality and Liberation. Sheila Cassidy has written a fine book on caring entitled Sharing the Darkness. Howard Rice has done us a great service with his writing on Reformed Spirituality. The Journal of John Woolman and The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day continue as classics connecting life in the spirit and historical realities.

Presbyterian Marjorie Thompson offers an invitation to the Christian spiritual life in Soul Feast. The Presbyterian Church has an Office of Spiritual Formation in Louisville with various kinds of resources, including listings of retreat centers around the country. Penuel Ridge Contemplative Retreat Center near Nashville, and Kirkridge in eastern Pennsylvania are two places I recommend, as well as several monasteries in Georgia, Minnesota, Kentucky and New York.

What is our hope in all of this? As we pay attention to our life as persons imbedded in relationships and communities, indeed the world, we connect and unite with Gods energies which keep streaming through nature, human nature and public life. We are stretched and strengthened as we find our personality, our relationships, our world, gradually drawn into the "orbit of Gods creative power and finding the re-alignment of all our faculties and energies to the purposes of God." [See footnote.]

Blessings on the journey.

Note: From an article, "Riding the Wild Ox," by Robert Morris, in Weavings, a Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life, July/August 2001)