Contemplating the poor.

Christ is in the poor. Even when we recognize that the poor are not in the least Christ-like He is there in their suffering. If God stands in profound solidarity with the poor as the scriptures affirm shouldn’t we as well?

“Solidarity is the social meaning of humility,” writes Dean Brackley. He applies the ancient rules of St. Ignatius to social justice today. “Just as humility leads individuals to all other virtues, humility as solidarity is the foundation of a just society.”

Henri Nouwen wrote of Christ’s “way of downward mobility.” To follow Him we must reject the council of yuppie culture to climb the ladder of success. The witness of Christ and the challenge offered by Nouwen and Brackley lead us to ask questions. “How much should we have? Better to reframe the question,” writes Brackley, “Do we feel at home among the poor? Do they feel comfortable in our homes? Or do our furnishings and possessions make them feel like unimportant people?” (100)

The solution to our global social crisis is not that the poor become rich, which is neither feasible nor desirable, but that the rich join with the poor. The only solution is communities of equals, resisting pyramids of inequity (see Luke 22:25-26). While some economic differences are legitimate, discrimination and misery are not. In communities of equals, personal talents, instead of advancing some at others’ expense, are stewarded for the benefit of all. Authority is a service for the common good (101).

In my graduate work I have been studying spiritual direction. The director meets with people desiring spiritual direction in an attitude of contemplation. He contemplates God and at the same time the directee, and the directee’s relationship with God. One book, The Practice of Spiritual Direction concludes with an observation of where direction and social action meet.

We need to know how God is experienced by the very poor and destitute. A few directors have begun to work with the destitute. The work is still in its very early stages, but where the director’s contemplative attitude is well developed, it seems promising (196).

I dream of one day studying as a cultural anthropologist the ways faith is formed and transmitted from one generation to the next across culture. I imagine joining with the poor working in the world’s coffee plantations and doing the work of contemplation with them, while also finding ways to get them living wages for their crops.

What is God dreaming for the poor? What is he dreaming for you and I to do with Him about poverty?

Ignatian Pentecost

Consolation has captured my imagination lately. Dean Brackley in The Call to Discernment writes about how the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises can be used for discernment. I have been experimenting with using consolation and desolation to discern the voice of God leading me.

Simply put, when we are following after God, “It is characteristic of the Holy Spirit to move us to ‘true joy and spiritual delight, taking away all sadness and turmoil induced by the enemy.’ It is characteristic of the enemy to ‘work against this kind of joy and spiritual consolation, introducing false reasons, subtleties, and persistent fallacies’” (135). I have been trying to be more aware of those feelings of joy that are disproportionate with their cause, and follow that consolation as the way God is leading me. Likewise I have paying attention to the feelings of desolation that are disproportionate to cause, trying to track down where that feeling began and address that incursion of the enemy as a departure from what God would lead me. This has been exciting, as I have learned to hear the voice of the Spirit in the sensations of my soul. There are of course dangers in false consolations; I can’t trust my feelings, only my God. So I need much practice in these experiments to learn to tell the difference.

Brackley made an immediate connection to my Pentecostal heritage when he mentioned that the Greek word for this consolation is paraklesis: the very stuff of the Paraklete (one of our favorite names for the Holy Spirit). “The comforter has come!” and it is even by his comfort that we learn to hear his will.

9/11 reflection

These are times of global social crisis in which many people feel insecure and alone. Our reflections lead to the conclusion that we find security in community. if we seek first the Reign of God and its justice, ours security needs will be met (cf. Matt. 6:23). Both security and community arise from faith and from the praxis of solidarity that replaces unjust relations and institutions with just ones. To be genuine and avoid condescension, solidarity must be humility-in-practice. Like the gospel, Ignatius assigns humility a central role in our lives. For only in its soil can love take root, grow and bear fruit. To be authentic, however, humility must be solidarity.

-Dean Brackley, The Call to Discernment

Taking over the world

I had a dream last night where I was conspiring with some others to take over the world. The discussion started with creating an advertisement for a product every one would want to buy, but the product didn't really exist. Rather their intense desire that could not be fulfilled would render their will ours. Then we thought of creating a wave generator on Antarctica that would hijack the waves of every broadcast radio and TV implanting a subliminal message. When we controlled the world we could finally create a just distribution of wealth. We just had to conspire to supplant the sinful nature of humanity.

The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius begin with a focus on sin in the world. Can we choose to meditate on the injustice and sin that controls this world? Can we look with unblinking eye at our own sin and the systems that we participate in? Can we do this with out hopeless despair and condemnation, but rather find in it the grace of God to live and supplant the system of this world?

Brackely suggests that the role of spiritual formation espoused by the exercises are to bring us into the Reign of God (The Call to Discernment 26). As Dallas Willard notes, this is a Divine Conspiracy to bring the world into the kingdom of God.

All of the great roles of the director as listener, mediator, doctor and the rest my friends and mentors in this class all come down to one thing, making the Kingdom and the King real in the lives and practice of the directees. It is the selfless subversion of the greatest order.

Perhaps being a spiritual director is like being Che Guevara to some one, inspiring them to the revolution, or that could just be the ad for the proletariat green viva barista t-shirt talking!