Spirituality -- Books: Spirituality steeped in incarnation

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CHRIST OF THE CELTS: THE HEALING OF CREATION
By J. Philip Newell
Published by Jossey-Bass, $19.95

English poet William Blake remembered as a boy “seeing a tree filled with angels of light,” writes author J. Philip Newell in Christ of the Celts. “He rushed home with excitement to share his vision with his father. And his father responded that if he ever told a lie like that again, he would get a good thrashing.

“There are ways of perceiving that have been beaten out of us,” Newell continues. “Our inner ears have been silenced, either because of modern materialisms that have stripped matter of its ancient music or because of religious dualisms that have separated the spiritual from the material. In both cases, the essential elements of the universe have become empty notes, devoid of sacred sound.”

In Christ of the Celts, Newell visits the insights of teachers and mystics who represent ideas found within the Celtic tradition, such as Teilhard de Chardin, Julian of Norwich and ninth-century Irish scholar John Scotus Eriugena. The Celtic people became Christians independently of the spread of the Roman Empire, and the themes in Celtic spirituality have tended to be more poetic than doctrinal. Newell uses Celtic prayers and artwork to show how the Celtic worldview linked Christ intimately with creation, a holistic spirituality that he says can go far toward the healing of the world’s divisions. “To listen to scripture without creation is to lose the cosmic vastness of the song,” Newell writes. “To listen to creation without scripture is to lose the personal intimacy of the voice.”

Newell is a father of four, a poet, a minister in the Church of Scotland and presently a theologian at the American Spirituality Center of Casa del Sol in New Mexico. In an honest, uncomplicated style, he writes movingly of encountering God’s presence in creation and in the people he loves -- in conversations with Native Americans in the New Mexico desert; in watching pilgrims pray in the ruins of a nunnery on the Scottish island of Iona; and in watching his infant son stretch his arms toward twinkling, light-filled leaves on a tree above him.

AWE-FILLED WONDER: THE INTERFACE OF SCIENCE AND SPIRITUALITY
By Barbara Fiand
Published by Paulist Press, $9.95

This chapbook is the text of the 2008 Madeleva Lecture in Spirituality sponsored annually by St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Ind. Named in honor of the nun who began the school’s graduate program in theology, the Madeleva Lecture has been going since 1985; its speakers, always women, have included Joan Chittister, Lisa Sowle Cahill and Kathleen Norris.

-- Dreamstime.comThe Awe-Filled Wonder lecture was given by Sister of Notre Dame de Namur Barbara Fiand, who teaches at Loyola University in Chicago and lectures and holds retreats widely “on such issues as holistic spirituality, prayer, the influence of quantum discoveries on spirituality, and the transformation of consciousness.” Religion and science, Fiand says, are at their best when they approach Mystery with humility. Fiand is not a scientist herself, but she is interested in the insights that scientific research can offer us “in our quest for ultimate meaning and for a better world.” To this end she summarizes certain discoveries of quantum physics and explains that we are in a “post-Newtonian” world, where we see the universe not as a static void but as a humming hive of energy, constantly creating and expanding, all interconnected.

Such a conception of the universe, says Fiand, changes the way we have traditionally been taught to imagine God. God is not external to us, but “God operates in us and ever flows through us, energizes us, and can never be separated from us.” No longer, she says, can we think of God in anthropomorphic categories -- not as Father, not as Mother, not as anything but pure energy.

Fiand admits, “The silent void of mystical union somehow seems foreign and cold when one wants to pray for divine support and protection,” and quotes a friend who asked her upon hearing these reflections: “Where is the personal God that loves us and answers our prayers?” Fiand gives us hope in the person of Jesus: He is our contact point with the personal God, and the exemplar who can show us that we are all being led toward transformation.

-- Erin Ryan, NCR staff

COMMON SENSE SPIRITUALITY: THE ESSENTIAL WISDOM OF DAVID STEINDL-RAST
Edited by and with introductions by Angela Iadavaia
Published by Crossroad Publishing Company, $16.95

This book is a selection from the writings of Catholic spirituality author Br. David Steindl-Rast. The selections center on three themes. First, according to Steindl-Rast, our peak or mystical experiences are the essential part of our spirituality, and that spirituality is really a kind of common sense.

Second, the sacred religious traditions that are expressions of our spirituality are flawed but nevertheless potential lifelines to faith, hope and love.

Third, our response to our spiritual experiences is key, our willingness to let them define who we are and to shape our lives, meaningfully and with gratefulness.

Religion begins with our individual religious experiences. Organized religion is an inevitable follow-up, Steindl-Rast tells us. That’s because we do with our mystical experiences what we do with every experience. “We analyze them. We form opinions. We try to celebrate and hold onto what is best about them. All organized religions can be traced back to mystical beginnings.”

Steindl-Rast’s ruminations are particularly helpful for those who struggle with the famous dichotomy between being “spiritual” and being “religious.” Steindl-Rast tells us, for example, about sacramentality, “the secret that here on earth, all communicate to all, in a myriad different ways, the life of the Holy One in the midst of us.”

“Our spiritual communities are merely pointers toward that one great family of God, more or less successful models and partial realizations of it. Their celebrations of life are somehow sacraments, because life itself is sacramental.”

He sees the discovery of mysticism as everyone’s inalienable right, and reminds us that such a discovery brings with it puzzling tensions. Whether it’s experienced out in nature, listening to Bach’s B-Minor Mass or watching a newborn baby’s face, these mystical experiences bring to us a sense of the discrepancy between undeniable religious experiences and the “forms” that necessarily pass as religious, the shapes that organized religion takes in our lives.

Every religion begins with mysticism and ends up in politics, says Steindl-Rast, who serves as founder/adviser to the worldwide Network for Grateful Living though the interactive Web site www.gratefulness.org.

“If we could understand the inner workings of this process, maybe we could deal with the tension between mystical religion and religious establishment in a new way. Maybe we could transform the polarization into a mutually vitalizing polarity. Understanding it would certainly make us more compassionate with those caught up on both sides of the struggle.”

In her delightful introduction to the book, fellow Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister writes: “God is bigger than an adult Disneyland designed to reward rule keepers, and the earth is a speck in the universe too small to explain something as great as the end and purpose of creation.”

Living here necessarily requires the common sense Steindl-Rast has spent his life writing about.

AN ALTAR IN THE WORLD: A GEOGRAPHY OF FAITH
By Barbara Brown Taylor
Published by HarperCollins, $24.95

In her new book, Barbara Brown Taylor tells of being invited by a fellow priest to speak at his church in Alabama. “What do you want me to talk about?” she asked him. “Come tell us what is saving your life right now,” he answered.

What’s saving her life presently, she writes, is “the conviction that there is no spiritual treasure to be found apart from the bodily experience of human life on earth. ... What is saving my life now is becoming more fully human, trusting that there is no way to God apart from real life in the real world.”

She holds up our most ordinary experiences -- eating, singing, bathing, giving birth -- and claims that religion could never have survived without such practices. “Even now, purposeful return to these practices has power to save religions that have just about run out of breath.”

A former Episcopal priest who was named one of the 12 most effective preachers in the English-speaking world in 1996 by Baylor University, Brown Taylor teaches religion and philosophy at Piedmont College in Georgia. She is author of Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith and When God Is Silent.

Her chapter titles reveal the human experiences about which she ponders: “The Practice of Getting Lost,” “... of Encountering Others,” “... of Feeling Pain,” “... of Walking on the Earth.”

Particularly exquisite is her reflection on the practice of “Wearing Skin.”

Being human means being covered in flesh, underneath which are countless nerve cells responsive to pain and pleasure. To spend a night in pain, for example, “is to discover depths of reality that are roped off while everything else is going fine. Why me? Why now? Why this?”

-- Univ. of California at Berkeley/NASA/Jeffrey Newman: A Hubble Telescope view of spiral galaxy NGC 4603, 108 million light years awayThese questions are just as relevant to ask when we are in pleasure too, she says.

“Who deserves the way a warm bath feels on a cold night after a hard day’s work? Who has earned the smell of a loved one, embracing you on your first night back home? To hold a sleeping child in your arms can teach you more about the meaning of life than any 10 books on the subject. To lie in the yard at night looking up at the stars can grant you entrance into divine mysteries that elude you inside the house.”

This is the daily practice of incarnation, she writes, “of being in the body with full confidence that God speaks the language of flesh.” This teaching method is as old as the Gospels. “Why else did Jesus spend his last night on earth teaching his disciples to wash feet and share supper?”

Barbara Brown Taylor’s spiritual reflections are original, bringing fresh air to her topics because her spirituality is steeped in everyday life while illuminated by the ancient Christian spiritual tradition.

-- Rich Heffern, NCR staff

National Catholic Reporter December 12, 2008