Spirituality – A Dis-ease

The Holy Longing
Roland Rolheiser

“…there is within us a fundamental dis-ease, an unquenchable fire that renders us incapable, in this life, of ever coming to full peace. This desire lies at the center of our lives, in the marrow of our bones, and in the deep recesses of our soul. We are not easeful human beings who occasionally get restless… The reverse is true. We are driven persons, forever obsessed, congenitally dis-eased, living lives…of quiet desperation, only occasionally experiencing peace…”
There are other names for this dis-ease: a restlessness, a longing, a disquiet, a hunger, a loneliness, a gnawing nostalgia, a wildness that cannot be tamed… Desire is the straw that stirs the drink!
Spirituality is ultimately what we do with that desire. Spirituality is what we do with our unrest.
Spirituality is not something on the fringes, an option for those with a particular bent. Everyone has to have a spirituality, and everyone does have one, either a life-giving one or a destructive one. All of us are fired into life with a certain kind of madness that comes from the gods and we have to do something with it.
Spirituality is about being integrated or falling apart, about being within community or being lonely, about being in harmony with Mother Earth or being alienated from her. We act in ways that leave us either healthy or unhealthy, loving or bitter. What shapes our actions is our spirituality. And what shapes our actions is what shapes our desire. Spirituality concerns what we do with our desire.
Spirituality takes root in the eros inside us and is all about how we shape and discipline this eros. This is the starting point of John of the Cross, and, for him, spirituality is how we handle that eros.
Few would consider Mother Teresa an erotic woman, but she is so, but not in the narrow Freudian sense. She was a dynamo of energy. She was a human bulldozer, but she was a disciplined woman, dedicated to God and the poor.
A saint is one who can channel powerful eros in a creative, life-giving way. A saint is someone who can will the one thing (Kierkegaard). Mother Teresa did just that in her focus on God and the poor. She had a powerful energy, her powerful eros poured out for the poor. This was the signature of her spirituality.
Janis Joplin too had a lot of energy. She was a woman of fiery eros. But she could not will the one thing. Her energy went out in all directions, creating an excess and a tiredness that led to an early death. Her activities, a total giving over to creativity, performance, drugs, sex, drink, coupled with neglect of normal rest, were her spirituality:

i'm buried alive, oh yeah, in the blues,
I'm buried alive, somebody help me, in the blues.
I beg for mercy, I pray for rain,
I can't be the one to accept all this blame,
Something here trying to pollute my brain,
I'm buried alive, oh yeah, in the blues.
The end result was not integration but dissipation. She, at a point, simply lost the things that normally glue a human person together, and she broke apart under too much pressure.
Looking at Joplin’s life and our own lives, and looking at the definition of a saint as being someone who can will the one thing, we can make a reflection: most of us are like Mother Teresa in willing God and the poor, but the problem is we will everything else as well. “We want to be a saint but we also want to feel every sensation experienced by sinners; we want to be innocent and poor but we want to taste all life too; we want a simple lifestyle but we want the comforts of the rich…”
Thus we struggle with commitment. It is not that we do not want certain things; it is just that we know that if we choose them we close off so many other things. It is not easy to be Mother Teresa. The danger is that we end up more like Janis Joplin, good-hearted, highly energized, driven to try to drink in all of life, but in danger of falling apart and dying from lack of rest.
There is another side. In Princess Diana there are two elements: the erotic and the spiritual. The erotic is obvious: the most photographed woman spending millions on clothes, who had affairs of various kinds, but she had a great energy which made her exceptional.
The spiritual in her was obvious too. Even before she met Mother Teresa she had a will to serve the poor. But spirituality is about how we channel our eros. In her case it was a painful case of struggle for choice and commitment. Hers was a mixed road.
She chose some things that made her integrated in body and soul, and others which tore at her body and soul. Such is spirituality. It is about integration and disintegration, about making the choices Princess Diana had to make and living with what that does to us.
Spirituality, then, is about what we do with the fire inside of us, about how we channel our eros. And how we do channel it – the disciplines and habits we choose to live by – will either lead to a greater integration or disintegration in the way we are related to God, others, and to the cosmic world.
The opposite of being spiritual is having no energy, is to have lost all zest for living – becoming a couch potato, watching football and sitcoms, or soap operas … taking beer intravenously! The task of the spiritual is to glue us together so that we do not fall apart and die. Thus the opposite of a spiritual person is one who has lost one’s own identity, a person who does not know who he or she is anymore. A healthy soul keeps us energized and glued together.

The Non-negotiables of Christian Spirituality

These are essential for a healthy spiritual life:
1. private prayer and private morality
2. social justice
3. mellowness of heart and spirit
4. community as a constitutive element of true worship



What does a fractured Christianity look like? Scenarios
1. Private prayer and private morality but no justice: this happens to many who go to church regularly, pray and have a good private morality but who do not care for social justice. This is a one-sided faith.
2. Social justice but lacking in private prayer and private morality. Does God care about our private prayer, our private grudges and our private morals? God cares because we care and these things make a big difference to God, because they make a big difference for us.
3. Private prayer, private morality and social justice but lacking mellowness of heart and soul. A Sister spoke of her experience of conversion: “There was something cold inside of me. I had become like the older brother of the prodigal son, doing all the right things, but having no celebration in my heart.”
4. Private prayer, private morality, social justice, mellowness of heart but lacking public worship. To be involved in a church community challenges us in living out our beliefs.

The Four Essential Pillars

1.Private prayer and personal moral integrity in things, even in the smallest private affairs, are things that Jesus makes non-negotiable in the spiritual life. To have a personal relationship with God is to keep the commandments. “If anyone loves me, he will keep my commandments.” In the Gospels, fidelity in this is the only real criterion to tell real prayer from illusion.
The spiritual life is not just about ‘Jesus and I’. However, there are equal dangers in not having enough ‘Jesus and I’ within our spiritual lives. The danger is not having the proper interiority and the personal moral fidelity to back up our faith preaching is that we end up turning Christianity into a philosophy, an ideology, a moral code… missing what it essentially is, a relationship with a person.
We will make progress in the spiritual life only if we, daily, do an extended period of private prayer, and only if we practice a scrupulous vigilance in regard to all the moral areas within our private lives. That is the first nonnegotiable within the spiritual life.
2. The call to be involved in creating justice for the poor is consistent throughout all the Gospels. One in every ten lines deals directly with the physically poor and the call from God for us to respond to them. In Luke and James the call is more insistent. We will get to heaven or hell on the basis of giving or not giving food, water, clothing, shelter, and justice to the poor. How we treat the poor is how we treat God. Reaching our preferentially to the poor is an essential component of the spiritual life.
God cannot be related to without continually digesting the uneasiness and pain that are experienced by looking, squarely and honestly, at how the weakest members in our society are faring and how our own lifestyle is contributing to it.

3. Sanctity has to do with gratitude. To be a saint is to be fueled by gratitude. But sanctity is as much about having a mellow heart as it is about believing and doing the right things, as much about prayer energy as about truth. Our task as Christians is to transform the world through love and justice, but we will only succeed if our actions come from a grateful heart. In the Gospels the call to have a mellow, grateful heart is significant.
“Following our wrong God home we may miss our star.” The wrong God is that of both the contemporary right and left, the God who is wired, bitter, anxious, workaholic, neurotic, and unhappy as we are. But that is not the God who lies at the end of the spiritual quest, but the God who, Julian of Norwich tells us, sits in heaven, smiling, completely relaxed, looking like a marvelous sympathy… The deepest revenge on demons that haunt us is to be happy.

4. Jesus teaches us clearly that God calls us, not just as individuals but as community, and that how we relate to each other is just as important religiously as how we relate to God. In fact, how we relate to each other is part of how we relate to God. To really love God is to love one’s neighbor. So, for the Christian, concrete involvement within a historical community of faith is essential for the spiritual life.
Many today want God but don’t want church. By doing so they bracket one of the primary demands inherent within the quest for God. Without church we have more private fantasy than real faith. Real conversion demands that its recipient be involved in both the muck and the grace of actual church life (Lonergan). Spirituality is ultimately communitarian, because spirituality is about the common search for the face of God – which is in a community.
Spirituality is partly a question of balance. Attention to the essential pillars can give that balance. Yet we must walk the earth like gods and goddesses. We want, with our Creator, to continue to create, and with our Redeemer, to continue to redeem. We want to help God bring the planet to completion, to a consummation of all that hope inspires in us. A key part of the spiritual life is to fulfill a vocation, by being part of God’s ongoing incarnation.
Incarnation as Basis of Christian Spirituality
One of the best expressions of incarnational spirituality and its implications comes from Teresa of Avila’s “Christ has no body now but yours…” For us Christians, Christ is the center of everything: our meaning, our hope, our self-understanding, our church lives, our theologies, our spiritualities. He is the guide of our discipleship.
Spirituality is about carefully disciplining the fiery energies that flow through us. Hence a good spirituality requires a certain discipleship – a disciple is one under a master. Jesus is the master for us. What Jesus wants of us is that we undergo his presence so as to enter into a community of life and celebration with him. Jesus is a a presence to be seized and acted upon.
Undergoing Jesus must be the center of any Christian spirituality. Within Christian spirituality we must speak about Jesus, the person and the energy that undergirds everything else. He is the vine, the pulse, the heart while everything else is merely a branch.
The Incarnation was not a thirty-year experiment, a short-cut incursion of God into human history. In this version,God came to earth physically and after 33 years went back home. However, the Incarnation is still going on and it is just as real and as radically physical as when Jesus of Nazareth, in the flesh, walked the roads of Palestine.

Why incarnation? Because we need someone with us who has some skin. A God who is everywhere is just as easily nowhere. We believe in what we can see, touch, hear, smell and taste. And God, having created our nature, respects how it operates. The Jesus who walked the streets of Palestine could be seen, heard, touched. In the Incarnation God became physical because we are creatures of the senses who need a God with some skin. Christ takes on flesh so that every home becomes a church, every child becomes a Christ-child, and all food and drink become a sacrament. God’s many faces are now everywhere, in flesh, tempered and turned down so that our human eyes can see him. God in his many-faced face, has become accessible, and visible, as the nearest water faucet. That is the why of the incarnation.
Why the rawness of this event? Scripture uses the expression ‘body of Christ’ to mean three things: Jesus the historical person; the Eucharist; and the body of believers. To say the word ‘Christ’ is to refer, at one and the same time, to Jesus, the Eucharist, and the community of faith. We are the Body of Christ. We do not represent Christ – we are Christ. The Word became flesh and continues to dwell among us in the body of believers and in the Eucharist.
If it is true that we are the body of Christ then God’s presence in the world today depends very much upon us. We have to keep God present in the world in the same way as Jesus did. We have to become God’s physical hands, feet, mouthpiece, and heart in this world. The community mediates Christ to the world.
The Christian God is in-carnus, has concrete flesh on this earth. Its implications color every aspect of how we relate to God and to each other: how we pray, how we look for healing and reconciliation, how we seek guidance, how we understand community, religious experience and mission.

For understanding how we pray:
As Christians we pray to God ‘through Christ,’ and in trying to answer that prayer, God respects the incarnation. God’s power is partially dependent on human action. We charge ourselves as the Body of Christ with some responsibility for answering the prayer.
“Kneel down and I will bless you. God seems far away. He cannot touch you right now. I know that, but I am going to put my hands on your head and touch you – to let you know that you are not alone, not unlovable, not in the darkness. God is here and God does love you. When I touch you God will touch you.”(The Serpent’s Egg)

For understanding how we should seek reconciliation and healing:
In terms of incarnation, healing/wholeness come by touching the Body of Christ, and we are called upon to dispense God’s healing and wholeness by touching others. We have our sins forgiven by being in community with each other, at table with each other. We will never go to hell as long as we are touching the community… gathered in prayer. We can forgive each other’s sins by the power of Christ within us. God has given each of us the power to keep each other out of hell.

For understanding guidance:
As Christians guidance comes not only from God above but from the community below. When we look for God’s guidance these voices on earth – family, neighbors, church, friends – must complement the voice from heaven.


For understanding community:
Christian spirituality is never something you do alone. Community is the essence of Christianity and spirituality. God calls us to walk in discipleship in a group. You cannot deal with the all-loving, all-forgiving God if you cannot deal with the less-than- loving, less-than-forgiving community on earth.

For understanding religious experience:
The Christian perspective on religious experience is that God who is love and family, who was born in a barn, is a God who is found, first of all, in our homes, in our families, at our tables, in sunrises, in our joys, and in our arguments. To be involved in the normal flow of life, giving and receiving, is to have the life of God flow through us.
Christian spirituality is not so much about admiring God, or even trying to imitate God, as it is about undergoing God and participating, through the taking part in the ordinary give and take of relationships, in the flow of God’s life. The God who became flesh in order to be experienced by the ordinary senses, still has flesh and is primarily to be experienced through the ordinary senses.
For understanding mission:
Our task is to radiate compassion and love of God, as manifest in Jesus, in our faces and in our actions. Our mission as persons of faith is precisely to form our own faces in a correct way. Jesus taught us that the Kingdom works like yeast. We are asked to let the things he taught transform us, from the outside, like yeast transforms dough, and as summer transforms a tree.

For understanding the communion of saints:
We give concrete expression in our lives to those virtues and qualities of our loved ones which they best incarnated in their lives. We will meet the ones we can no longer touch when we put ourselves in where their souls once flourished. Our loved ones live where they have always lived and it is there that we will find them.
As we struggle to channel our eros, to find the spiritual disciplines that can bring us life, we need to bring our egos and our scars, our hopes and our fears, and our joys and hesitancies to Jesus to see what he makes of them. And the fire energy that so burns inside us will come to maturity, creativity, and calm when we shape our live and our bodies in the way that Jesus shaped his… when we help him carry the incarnation forward.