I took this photo of Howard Rice leading a retreat
for the Lazarus Project and West Hollywood Presbyterian Church
at Mt. Calvary Retreat House in Santa Barbara in the 1980's.
At
the risk of copyright infringement, I cannot resist quoting an entire passage from
Howard Rice’s book, Reformed
Spirituality: An Introduction for Believers. It summarizes everything to be
said for the spiritual life in Christian terms, and I am quick to add that
Howard practiced what he preached:
God is love, and the experience of God’s love is
one that meets our basic need for love so that we can be free to love others.
Without receiving love, we cannot love others, no matter how hard we try. That
is why spiritual experience is so linked with self-giving love for others. The
heart of the experience of God is an inner knowing that “I am loved, loved
beyond comprehension, beyond my earning or deserving.”
This deep knowing of the soul is the shattering of
the otherwise inexhaustible need for love, which drives us to keep ourselves in
the very center of the universe and to evaluate everything on the basis of how
much it meets our needs. The person who knows love is able to love; the person
who has been in the presence of the Divine Lover is filled to the brim with a
sense of satisfaction of that need and can let go and share love. That is why
truly great mystics are always such powerful figures and are often
revolutionary.
They have a vision of how things might be that is
not blurred by fear of what might happen to them. They are powerful because
their vision has broken down their need for being loved. They have been
liberated from their own inner needs, and they are empowered to go out and
challenge the powers of evil in the world. They know, from their own
experience, that the power of evil within them has been broken by the power of
God’s love [p 166].
Rice
goes on to explain the two-fold range of such love. One is to care for those
closest to us, neighbor and family. The other is to care more “long-range,” to
be involved in transforming structures so that those structures may care for
others, what John Calvin would call “the most remote person” and what Jesus
called “the least of these.” The first is personal. The second is political.
You
can see how this echoes the early monastic movement, the Desert Mothers and
Fathers who went out into the wilderness of the Middle East in the third and
fourth centuries to pray. They pursued their spiritual disciplines not simply
to save themselves from being corrupted by collaboration with the empire, but
to be able to reach out to save others from the “shipwreck” they saw as
civilization.
What
Christians from the Reformed tradition often overlook is that the history of
Christian spiritual practices from the centuries since Jesus is our history
too, as the split between Catholic and Protestant only just occurred in the 16th
century, long after the spiritual contributions of such figures as Arsenius, Benedict,
Catherine of Siena, Claire, Francis, Hildegard, Ignatius, Julian of Norwich, and
Syncletica, to name a few in alphabetical rather than chronological order. And
the split between Eastern and Western Christianity occurred in the 11th
century. So we share with Catholic and Orthodox traditions more combined
history than separate histories.
Howard
Rice’s book reminded me of this when he surprised me with the notion that John
Calvin actually used the Benedictine spiritual practice of lectio divina, contemplating a sacred text meditatively.
In
an appendix to Monk Habits for Everyday
People, Dennis Okholm explains Protestant resistance to monasticism:
+
It implied a two-tiered or class system of Christian community that was
believed schismatic.
+
Monastic vows seemed to contradict justification by faith alone.
+
“Idleness,” a mistaken belief that monks were not doing their part as Christian
ministers.
Howard
Rice notes a central distinction of Reformed spirituality: a desire for union
with Christ as the way to union with God. He notes that what we call
spirituality Reformers called piety, a word that today carries self-righteous
connotations.
Rice
writes of Reformed congregations, “The familiar vow once used when people united with the church was the
promise to make diligent use of the means of grace,” the use of spiritual
practices to be receptive to, not to earn, God’s grace.
And
the endgame was still the same. In the words of Richard Baxter, “to prevent a
shyness between God and thy soul…”
I am pleased to announce
that my friend Connie Tuttle has had her delightful book published, A Gracious Heresy: The Queer Calling of an Unlikely Prophet. I
wrote about it in a post five years ago, Nativity Stories. My blurb describes it as “containing
extraordinary stories extraordinarily well told.”
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Copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser.
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