PROVOKE THE HOLY SPIRIT AT THE RISK OF GETTING WHAT YOU ASKED FOR.

I should have known better, but I did it anyway. My latest Lectio Divina was one hour ago, sitting in the dentist’s chair, waiting for her to come in to start drilling. As always, I begin with Philippians 2:5 (“Have in you the mind of Christ Jesus”).

Sitting there, my thoughts drifted back to last Sunday, when our group of Zoom Lay Cistercians was meeting in formation class (Lay Cistercians must meet once per month face to face, unless you are a broken-down, cranky one, like me). What prompted my Lectio was a statement made by one of the couples, who was talking about the institutional Church and how it was lacking relevance because of the hick-ups with clergy pedophilia and the evident sinfulness of the institutional Church (as they perceive it). And they would be correct. That is the institutional Church, founded on St. Peter, who denied Christ three times and was betrayed by Judas for thirty pieces of silver. What an act of faith in humanity, knowing our predilection to self-indulgence and proneness to seek what is easy rather than the cross and what is right according to God.

The Apostles did not even know how it all fits together and how to go about telling the world of this good news until the Holy Spirit came down upon them in tongues of fire and allowed them to die to their Jewish heritage with Christ so that they could not worry about anything but putting the kingdom of heaven first so that all things followed naturally as they should. Foolishly, they asked the Holy Spirit to help them because they did not know what to do, where to go, and what structures they should put in place to ensure the sustainability of the good news down the road. The institutional Church can not help but be sinful and prone to errors in judgment and practice of those at the top, and, I might add, each of us, too.

MY CATHOLIC FAITH

My own journey to find out where and how I fit into the Church caused me so much anxiety that I took the complete instructions for a year to become Anglican because of my perceived notion that the Church is corrupt. It is corrupt, was corrupt, and always will be corrupt as long as there is original sin. What I realized was that I was dividing up the Catholic Church into all those in the institutional Church of my perception, with only me being against it. Granted, other single-issue Catholics exist.

All this led me to ask the Holy Spirit for enlightenment and focus as I sat in that dentist’s chair, awaiting my fate. As usual, the Holy Spirit told me THE TRUTH, as in “I am THE WAY, THE TRUTH, and THE LIFE. I recount to you what transpired in that dental chair and how it just confirmed that MY LAY CISTERCIAN WAY is key to being about to live in an institution that has sinful members but is HOLY, as in ONE, HOLY, CATHOLIC, and APOSTOLIC. That the Catholic Church survived this long without disintegration, like all other human institutions, is no accident. Christ himself said that the gates of Hell would not prevail against the Church built on the sinful Peter but Holy in purpose. Christ did not say that our collective human journey or the path taken by Church leaders would be easy or even correct. Like the saying of Christ, “Peace be with you.” Not the peace that the world gives, but this peace is not the absence of sinfulness or hardship in each person’s walk, but the presence of love as you find your walk full of obstacles. Just because your individual walk with Christ is rocky, and because you might or might not believe all that the Catholic Church teaches (according to your perception), does not mean you are on the wrong path. Remember, you and I carry the cross. It can be a cross of balsam wood (just a minimum of what it means to be Catholic), or it can be heavy oak, and you need help along the way.

In my own case, it all came down to this: I am a Catholic in the same way I am a Lay Cistercian (…or is it the other way around?). I am a Lay Cistercian like everyone else. I am not you, you are not me, God is not us, and we most certainly are not God. My awareness of God may not be the same as yours, and my living out a Lay Cistercian spirituality may not be like yours.

As a Lay Cistercian, I am in constant conversion mode (conversio morae) each day, beginning anew. I am constantly moving from the complexity of being human to the ever-consciousness of what that means, unfolding for me each day. Teilhard de Chardin’s map of how it all fits together is a piece of this puzzle that allows me to, quite literally, change the paradigm from “how I fit into the Catholic Church and make all its rules, to that of the realization that I am a sinful person in need of daily (maybe hourly) redemption through, with, and in Christ.” My Catholicism is not the center of my life. The Church is not God, but I am part of the mystical body of Christ, trying to realize the purpose of life while I live.

I make up My Cistercian Way like I create what it means to be Catholic. I don’t believe everything is equal, but I trust in the Holy Spirit to gradually reveal how it all fits together. I stay away from the politics of the people in the Church to focus on one thing: ” Have in me the mind of Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5).

My Cistercian Way is a creation of mine, as in taking dishes from The Abbot’s Table (RB 56). My Lay Cistercian practices are unique to me regarding my life experiences, and so are yours. I use the Eucharist, Liturgy of the Hours, Rosary, Reading Sacred Scripture, Reading from Cistercian authors, hospitality to others, and the Sacrament of Reconciliation to keep new wine in new skins.

Only two years ago, for example, I saw who I was in the sight of the Truth of the Holy Spirit, which scared the Hell out of me. I am increasingly a penitent Lay Cistercian, asking constantly for forgiveness and mercy for my foolishness of the past. My Catholicism is based, at this moment in my life, on those things, I bring into my worldview to help me discover the meaning of what it means to be fully human, what it means to love profoundly, and what is that Truth that comes from the Holy Spirit that I need to say “Jesus is Lord.” In my Catholic view of what life is all about, I do not fit into all of it and believe all of it in the same way. I say the Creed at Eucharist, understanding that it is at the core of who I am, yet realizing, as St. Thomas Aquinas taught us, “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.”

I believe in organized religion (as opposed to the unorganized kind) but with this exception. It is like a smorgasbord luncheon where I choose what to eat from those dishes before me. Those dishes before me depend on my humility, obedience to God’s will, and just sitting in the upper room of my inner self and waiting to sync the heartbeat of Christ with my own. I choose what it means for me to be a Lay Cistercian from the practices and charisms of Cistercian spirituality. My Catholicism is not conformity to rules but using all those marvelous helps that Christ gave to his disciples to hand down to us to “…have in me the mind of Christ Jesus.”

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