08_Rhythms_of_Liturgical_Prayer

01_Pentecost

2._Division_Diversity_Unity

03_Mary_ICON_of_CHURCH_Model_of_Humility

04_HUMILITY

05_The_Eucharist_Summit_and_Font

06_SPIRITUAL_BALANCE

SPIRITUAL BALANCE: AN ASCETICAL PRACTICE and A WAY of LIFE     Medieval MSS. Illum. NAVIGATION BAR LINK THE classical notion of virtue as a mean or balance  is employed by Thomas Aquinas, but it is frequently overshadowed in Christian spirituality by a model of virtue as warfare or struggle. ESSENTIAL in employing and adapting spiritual practices, as noted by Lassus, are discretion and balance, as well as formation for freedom in God, freedom as “human act,” and freedom in opening the heart.             1) THE RHYTHM of OUR LIVES ALL human experience can be conceived as a kind of alternating rhythm, a life-giving, energizing movement back and forth, between the the two poles of “activity” and “receptivity”: ACTIVITY speaking searching working   RECEPTIVITY listening perceiving being

07_LECTIO_DIVINA

 A CLASSICAL depiction of this practice/charism is the medieval Benedictine historian Bede’s story of the cowherd (and later monk), Caedmon.

08_contemplation

01_Ladder_and_Garden

The Garden of Eden,  Thomas Cole, 1828

4. ALTERNATIING RHYTHMS of SPIRITUAL LIFE and PRAYER

12. ALTERNATING       RHYTHMS of  SPIRITUAL LIFE     NAVIGATION BAR LINK 1) THE RHYTHM of OUR LIVES ALL human experience can be conceived as a kind of alternating rhythm, a life-giving, energizing movement back and forth, between the the two poles of “activity” and “receptivity”: ACTIVITY speaking searching working   RECEPTIVITY listening perceiving being

TEMPLATE

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MANY people believe that the Catholic Church in America today is polarized to an unprecedented degree – that it is dangerously divided as it has never been before.  This is untrue.  It may be helpful to remind ourselves that vigorous debate and even polarization have characterized the Catholic Church in North America almost from the beginning.  Recalling specific examples from our past may help us acquire better clarity and balance with regard to the significance of our own contemporary struggles.

CALIFORNIA Catholic history begins with the missions of Saint Junipero Serra.  The California missions were the subject of controversy in the Catholic community almost from the beginning, with both sides equally convinced that their social values were most in harmony with the Gospel. The Mission Fathers considered themselves to be the protectors and teachers of the Native Americans they evangelized.  They envisioned a multi-generational, gradual process of Christianization that would necessarily but benevolently be restricted to the mission property, where literacy, agriculture, music, crafts, and Christian moral values would be steadily inculcated among Native American neophytes and baptized leaders.   In opposition to this vision, the Mexican government officials, many of them pious Catholics inspired by the Catholic Enlightenment, regarded the work of the Mission Fathers as medieval, paternalistic, and coercive, as little more than infantilizing slave-compounds.  Their successful efforts to replace the Franciscans with non-Franciscan clergy and their unsuccessful plan to distribute mission-property to “Mission Indians” may have been noble in purpose; but the consequences were disastrous, resulting in the complete dismantling of the mission system and the fraudulent appropriation of mission land, primarily by colonists of European descent.

The 1850s and 1860s offer another distressing example of polarization among Catholics: slavery. Even though several popes condemned the slave trade as early as the fifteenth century, slavery continued. In 1839, Gregory XVI explicitly condemned the slave trade, but not the ownership of slaves. Bishop Patrick Kenrick of Philadelphia explained in 1841 that slavery was a natural institution, acceptable as long as slave owners treated their slave humanely and attended to their conversion to the Catholic faith.  On the eve of the Civil War, not a single American Catholic bishop publicly opposed slavery, but by 1863 Bishop John Baptist Purcell of Cincinnati became an outspoken critic of slavery itself. Using biblical texts to support their positions, Catholics, bishops included, and other Christians deeply divided over slavery. It was only at Vatican II (1962-1965) that the Catholic Church definitively and unequivocally condemned the institution of human slavery.

IN the late 19^th century, controversies also flared up within the Catholic community concerning the public (“common”) school movement which began in the United States in the 1840s.  In reality, it was more Protestant than public, requiring all students to use the St. James Bible. Catholics, fearing the loss of the faith of their children, began establishing their own schools. The bishops at the Third Baltimore Council in 1884 decreed that all Catholic parishes were required to establish grade schools. Protestants attacked these schools as separatist. Catholic bishops divided publicly over whether Catholic schools were necessary, suggesting instead that Catholics could attend public schools and add a religion class after the school day ended.  The controversy has continued down to the present, and today at most 50% of parishes sponsor Catholic grade schools.

IN the 1980s, the Catholic bishops established a committee to draw up pastoral letters on war and the economy. They led public hearings on successive drafts. Articles and books claiming that the drafts were pacifist and socialist were widely covered in the press. The Catholic media began to divide on these issues as well. The Catholic University of America struggled over what to do with a tenured priest-professor who led a movement to reject the 1968 teaching on birth control. Concerning the pastoral on war, the pope intervened and required the American bishops to talk with the German and French bishops before publishing anything final. In a major document on Catholic higher education published in 1990, the Vatican addressed the bitter controversies over the Catholic identity of Catholic colleges and universities and the academic freedom of their theologians.

THIS brief selection of historical conflicts and controversies in the Catholic Church in America is simply a reminder that Catholics have always been polarized to varying degrees over social, political and moral matters. Our current public divisions among bishops, priests and laity over such issues as the most recent presidential election and restrictive public health measures in the wake of Covid differ from those of the past, however, in at least one important respect. Our divisions have been made more public and embarrassing by the easy availability via the internet of angry bombast, as well as the tragic spectacle of prelates and other putative representatives of the Magisterium openly sniping at one another, rather than appealing to reason and tradition. Though sharp divisions existed in the past, Catholics in general considered it bad form to display them in public. To disagree was not necessarily to condemn, and certainly not to condemn in public.  Today, subtle or even vitriolic caricature of one’s opponents has become not only acceptable, but a kind of popular entertainment - often a financially rewarding one for both secular and Catholic media outlets.

    THE current challenge is not so much to decide whether we are worse now than we once were, but to work out how we should deal with what we have always been.  The creative rough-and-tumble of traditional Catholic debate has been poisoned in our own time by strident, impolite, unapologetic proclamation of opinion as if it were fact, together with open contempt for authority masquerading as wisdom.  Catholic Church leaders have recommended that we counteract the negative drive towards polemic and caricature with positive encouragement of accompaniment, listening, and “synodality”.

luke@valyermo.com

The following is excerpted from: “Humility,” by June Price Tangney, The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology ed. C. R. Snyder Shane & J.Lopez (Oxford Univ. Pr. 2002) pp. 411-419.

 […] Although humility is often equated in people’s minds with low self-regard and tends to activate images of a stooped-shouldered, self-deprecating, weak-willed soul only too willing to yield to the wishes of others, in reality humility is the antithesis of this caricature. To be humble is not to have a low opinion of oneself, it is to have an accurate opinion of oneself. It is the ability to keep one’s talents and accomplishments in perspective (Richards, 1992), to have a sense of self-acceptance, an understanding of one’s imperfections, and to be free from arrogance and low self-esteem (Clark, 1992) (p. 33).

Templeton (1997) presents a similar conceptualization of humility:

Humility is not self-deprecation. To believe that you have no worth, or were created somehow flawed or incompetent, can be foolish. Humility represents wisdom. It is knowing you were created with special talents and abilities to share with the world; but it can also be an understanding that you are one of many souls created by God, and each has an important role to play in life. Humility is knowing you are smart, but not all-knowing. It is accepting that you have personal power, but are not omnipotent. ... Inherent in humility resides an open and receptive mind. .. . it leaves us more open to learn from others and refrains from seeing issues and people only in blacks and whites. The opposite of humility is arrogance—the belief that we are wiser or better than others. Arrogance promotes separation rather than community. It looms like a brick wall between us and those from whom we could learn. (pp. 162–163)

For many, there is a religious dimension to humility—the recognition that “God infinitely exceeds anything anyone has ever said of Him, and that He is infinitely beyond human comprehension and understanding” (Templeton, 1997, p. 30; see also Schimmel, 1997). Here, too, the emphasis is not on human sinfulness, unworthiness, and inadequacy but rather on the notion of a higher, greater power and the implication that, although we may have considerable wisdom and knowledge, there always are limits to our perspective. Humility carries with it an open-mindedness, a willingness to admit mistakes and seek advice, and a desire to learn (Hwang, 1982; Templeton, 1997).

Also inherent in the state of humility is a relative lack of self-focus or self-preoccupation. Templeton (1997) refers to a process of becoming “unselved,” which goes hand in hand with the recognition of one’s place in the world. A person who has gained a sense of humility is no longer phenomenologically at the center of his or her world. The focus is on the larger community, of which he or she is one part. From this perspective, the excessively self-deprecating person can be seen, in some important respects, as lacking humility. Consider the person who repeatedly protests, “Oh, I’m not really very good in art. I never did very well in art class at school. Oh, this little painting that I did really is nothing. I just whipped it together last night. It (my painting) is really nothing.” Such apparently humble protests betray a marked self-focus. The person remains at the center of attention, with the self as the focus of consideration and evaluation.

In relinquishing the very human tendency toward an egocentric focus, persons with humility become ever more open to recognizing the abilities, potential, worth, and importance of others. One important consequence of becoming “unselved” is that we no longer have the need to enhance and defend an all-important self at the expense of our evaluation of others (Halling, Kunz, & Rowe, 1994). Our attention shifts outward, and our eyes are opened to the beauty and potential in those around us. As Means, Wilson, Sturm, Biron, and Bach (1990) observed, humility “is an increase in the valuation of others and not a decrease in the valuation of oneself” (p. 214). Myers (1979) effectively captured these latter two elements of humility, stating:

The true end of humility is not self-contempt .. . . To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, humility does not consist in handsome people trying to believe they are ugly, and clever people trying to believe they are fools. . . . True humility is more like self-forgetfulness. .. . It leaves people free to esteem their special talents and, with the same honesty, to esteem their neighbor’s. Both the neighbor’s talents and one’s own are recognized as gifts and, like one’s height, are not fit subjects for either inordinate pride or self-deprecation. (p. 38)

In the theological, philosophical, and psychological literatures, therefore, humility is portrayed as a rich, multifaceted construct, in sharp contrast to dictionary definitions that emphasize a sense of unworthiness and low self-regard. Specifically, the key elements of humility seem to include:

·  an accurate assessment of one’s abilities and achievements (not low self-esteem, self-deprecation)

·  an ability to acknowledge one’s mistakes, imperfections, gaps in knowledge, and limitations (often vis-a`-vis a “higher power”)

·  openness to new ideas, contradictory information, and advice

·  keeping one’s abilities and accomplishments— one’s place in the world—in perspective (e.g., seeing oneself as just one person in the larger scheme of things)

·  a relatively low self-focus, a “forgetting of the self,” while recognizing that one is but part of the larger universe

·  an appreciation of the value of all things, as well as the many different ways that people and things can contribute to our world

Outside of the therapist’s office, parents, teachers, heroes, and community leaders all play a role in modeling (or not modeling) a sense of humility for the subsequent generation. […]

References

Clark, A. T. (1992). Humility. In D. H. Ludlow (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Mormonism (pp. 663– 664). New York: Macmillan.

Halling, S., Kunz, G., & Rowe, J. O. (1994). The contributions of dialogal psychology to phenomenological research. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 34, 109–131.

Hwang, C. (1982). Studies in Chinese personality: A critical review. Bulletin of Educational Psychology, 15, 227–242.

Means, J. R., Wilson, G. L., Sturm, C., Biron, J. E., & Bach, P. J. (1990). Theory and practice: Humility as a psychotherapeutic formulation. Counseling Psychology Quarterly, 3, 211– 215.

Myers, D. G. (1979). The inflated self: Human illusions and the biblical call to hope. New York: Seabury.

Templeton, J. M. (1997). Worldwide laws of life. Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press.

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