VUW Chaplaincies / Issues / Discovering Holy Places

A paper delivered at VUW eco-seminar, 8 May 2004

DISCOVERING HOLY PLACES

This paper, for me, is much more than an academic exercise. It represents the drawing together of two major threads of my life journey. The first came to full awareness when I was a chaplain at the university of Canterbury though its roots go back far into my childhood to days hiking over the rolling back-country and coastal hills between Karori and Makara where I grew up. Though bare and wind-swept they contained hidden copses of pine and secondary growth, dark and mysterious to the youthful imagination. At Canterbury over weekends and during term recesses, I discovered the thrust and uplift of the Fiordland ranges and the braided river valleys and dense bush of the mountainous divide between Canterbury and Westland in hikes through Arthur’s Pass with student friends.

Eventually this fascination with New Zealand landscape was to end up in a doctoral thesis centred on environmental ethics and the theology of nature. At the same time I had been touched by the power of Ignatian spirituality, tasted during a thirty day retreat then later from accompanying a number of retreatants through the Ignatian Exercises. From that time a personal project has been to try to shape a structure and process by which men and women of faith can follow a road to a conversion that integrates personal commitment to Jesus Christ as Lord of their cosmos allied to a deep respect and wonder for this creation in which he has been and continues to be embodied.

The paper takes the shape of four steps as follows:

• The need for ecological conversion
• Our common moments of transcendence
• The importance of place in spiritual life
• Some practical conclusions.

A. Ecological Conversion
Many theologians have noted the role of conversion in personal belief. None, however, has traced the process at such depth as the Canadian Jesuit, Bernard Lonergan (died, 1984). I draw upon his work because I am convinced that issues of pollution and conservation are not just political or economic realities – they are also issues of sin and grace. Since Lynn White’s seminal claim of an anti-nature bias in Christian faith and spirituality, much attention on the text of Gen 1-3 has focused on its cultural and anthropological context. Part of this new awareness is that ‘the image of God’ in Gen 1.26-27 is very much to do with a physical likeness between the divine ruler and his human artefact, but also that the author solidly locates the human creature within the created world of the animals. Adam and Eve come from earth, they need a mate and the very fruitfulness that flows from this union is part of the blessing that God imparts to all his creation. What follows is that to degrade the world is to degrade God’s image; in lessening the world’s fruitfulness humans lessen themselves. Exploitation of the environment entails a demeaning of the beauty of the world, God’s image. Concretely this often involves greed, injustice, and wastage of resources, that is, sin. What this paper sets out to do is to suggest a way in which this biblically based insight might be communicated to those who share a sense of the world’s sacredness but not from a Christian perspective.

It is here that we find Lonergan’s vision of the human imperative for conversion of great use. Like Augustine, he sees sin as a negation of something that is due in humankind. But whereas Augustine saw all sin fundamentally as pride, Lonergan sees it as habitual neglect, a failure to respond to the invitation to a deeper integrity and transcendence that God ceaselessly extends to his loved children. Such failure is evident in human structures as neglect, abuse, violence, domination, genocide (perhaps also biocide?); yet underlying this is an incapacity for sustained development as a radical, permanent and real problem. Such refusal to grow and develop marks for Lonergan a travesty of our humanity. For him humans are more or less unique in their ability to transcend self. Lonergan understands such transcendence as an integrated process leading from empirical subjectivity to intelligent perception to all-embracing rationality, and finally to a moral and religious subjectivity where informed consciousness is routinely and consistently operating out of the values, “be holy, be loving, be responsible.” Humans are more or less responsive to God’s call to the extent they succeed in being self-transcendent in their cultural and personal symbols. In contrast, they turn away from the vocation to which God has invited them to the extent they allow inattentiveness, irrationality, bias and irresponsibility to shape their lives. To be fully human, (which is to resist sin) is to live constantly out of the following demands: be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be holy, loving and responsible.

Why do so many of us fail to grow, according to Lonergan. It is because we need to be blocked at only one of these levels, for then all our energy is absorbed into attempting to get around this particular blockage.

“Unauthenticity is realized by any single act of inattention, obtuseness, unreasonableness, irresponsibility. But authenticity is reached only by long and sustained fidelity to the transcendental precepts. It exists only as a cumulative product. Moreover, authenticity in man or woman is ever precarious: our attentiveness is ever apt to be withdrawal from inattention; our acts of understanding a correction of oversights; our reasonableness a victory over silliness; our responsibility a repentance for our sins.”

To grow to the fullness of the person to which God invites each of us requires a constant awareness of our daily conversion at the three linked levels of intelligence, morality and religion. The only basis that can sustain such unremitting attention is the energy that flows from love; only love provides the facility to act with the needed passion and freedom. Such integrity and holiness does not lie within our ability to command at will; it can flow only from the free gift of God’s love. Such attentiveness flourishes only within those “who act with the easy freedom of those that do all good because they are in love.”

B. Our Common Moments of Conversion
When faced with the paradox of grace it is easy to feel discouraged. We are exhorted to petition, even beg for it, then assured that we can never earn it no matter what we do. It is here that relatively recent sociological and cultural research has opened up a whole new field of awareness that might help us to see the world of God’s presence and action anew. The focus for this work is the research conducted by Professor Alister Hardy in his Religious Experience Research unit at Oxford from 1969 onwards. Hardy had been a professor of zoology at Oxford University but on his retirement went back to scientifically analyse and compare a number of intense personal religious experiences that he had stayed with him from his boyhood. His unit collected and collated thousands of responses to the question: “Have you ever been aware of, or influenced by, a presence or power, whether you call it God or not, which is different from your everyday self?” In their early work about one third of the responses to this question were positive. This question was later clarified and reformulated by Hardy’s co-workers David Hay and Ann Morisy, and positive responses reached as high as 50%. A new focus was to switch to large groups of school children at English comprehensive schools. A survey of 6500 British teenagers found that 80% recorded some sort of mystical experience. The range and interpretation of such experiences was very diverse but their commonplace occurrence was striking. Such data forces on theologians deep reflection about the a priori and polemical character of much of their writing since the Middle Ages and the Protestant Reformation. Have we so focused on the universality and morphology of sin that we have understated and under-reported the presence of grace manifest in this world.

C. The Importance of Place
In his analysis of so many of these encounters with the transcendent, Inge finds that the category of place plays a leading role. When reading the visionaries’ accounts one is struck by how frequently the exact location of the event is recorded with utter clarity. Part of the reason for this is that the experience is often described as if a veil has been lifted between that place and some ultimate destination, and that the two are enfolded one within the other, the inscape of the landscape, as it were. Though it would take us too far away from our immediate topic to pursue this avenue it may also be pointed out that this sense of the holiness of place is firmly rooted in Christian theology from Jewish history onwards. In the Jewish bible the concepts of the promised land, the eretz Israel, the tent of tabernacle, the holy city of Zion, and the return from exile are utterly central. In the New Testament there is a major transposition so that Jesus becomes the new temple and the new Israel; the event of Jesus repeated sacramentally puts Christians in contact with the power and presence that has been embodied in those original places.

As we traverse Christian history we see that critical moments of conversion are frequently linked to particular places. We recall Francis of Assisi and his deep attachment to the Portiuncula, the impoverished church that Christ called him to rebuild, and to which he frequently returned. We remember Ignatius of Loyola and the months he spent in the cave of Manresa where he had many of the insights that formed the basis of his Spiritual Exercises that did so much to rebuild the Post-Reformation Catholic Church. We can add a whole range of figures such as Paul, Constantine, Pascal, and John Wesley to the list. Nor does it stop at the twentieth century. Thomas Merton, the Cistercian contemplative and social critic, locates his life-changing vision of the hidden beauty of even the most ordinary person in the street, precisely on the corner of Fourth and Walnut in downtown Louisville, Kentucky. Even in my own limited experience I can recall such a moment. It came during on my thirty day retreat at Teschemakers, near Oamaru. I had a profound moment of insight and healing that involved the surfacing of a memory of what I had seen as an unjust punishment by an old teacher of mine who had bestowed so much care and attention on me for two years. Even now I could walk down that rutted old bit of path outside the tired and decaying classrooms and show you precisely the spot where this grace came to me.

If we turn to the historical embodiment of this insight in Christian history we find that holy shrines and places of pilgrimage have been central to the faith of many Christians. It is not that these places are intrinsically special or provide guarantees of divine encounter. It is rather that key moments of Christian history took place or deeply graced people lived in these places. They are thick or redolent with shades of transcendence and it seems that this very atmosphere and sacred memory makes others more open to the transcendent hidden in their own spiritual potentiality. In this context we can note a comment by the American writer on the spirituality of place, Belden Lane, “Repeatedly, it is place that lends structure, contextuality and vividness of memory to the narrative of personal experience.” These moments, which the poet Emily Dickinson labels ‘bullets from immortality’ can occur anywhere and everywhere because of Christ’s sacramental presence in our world.

The only news I know
Is bulletins all day
From immortality;
The only shows I see
Tomorrow and today,
Perchance eternity.
The only one I meet
Is God, the only street
Existence; this traversed
If other news there be
Or admirabler show
I’ll tell it you.

The unique feature of such sacramental experience is that it comes as gift, an action of the Spirit which makes the ordinary and opaque, radiant and mysterious. But the two are not detached and separable; the one is contained and hidden within the other. For this reason this sacred intuition of place is not reducible to the univocal space that has become so dominant in our globalised planet as one of the children of Enlightenment science and Western economics. From the eighteenth century onwards a particular sense of place has increasingly become secondary to scientific stress on time. All is portrayed as homogeneous and reducible to quantified and basically identical building blocks. Particular places are swallowed up by universal space and are seen as just the end product of vast outcomes of time. In our century the growing impact of globalisation is busily reducing all lands to markets, and all nations to interchangeable tourist destinations. Each is to be provided with exact replicas of shopping malls, so many Walmarts, McDonalds and Kennedy Fried outlets, each a clone of the original in every corner of the planet, all subject to the global imperative of shopping and consuming.

Some Practical Implications
A year ago I was on study leave in North America. My time was divided between a theological consortium in Chicago and the rural setting of a Catholic bible college in the midst of the vast plains of central Alberta. Between the two places I talked to four different people who in the last five years had made the pilgrimage to St James in Compostella in Spain, one of the truly ancient holy shrines of Europe. By one of those flashes of serendipity I chanced to see a TV-4 documentary in which an English pilgrim walked the last four days of the journey accompanied by TV cameras. All of them testified to a sense of inner voyage and discovery, and a deepening of their sense of the divine in this world. These meetings made me question if there were some sort of New Zealand equivalent. Some have disclaimed the recent Maori hikoi to parliament as a political gimmick. Yet there is no doubt that it provoked deep sentiments and questioning of the roots of the First Peoples of New Zealand with the foreshore and seabed and the more ambiguous feelings of us fellow pakeha with regard to this land.

I believe that a sense of the holy shrine is already shimmering in our national awareness. Many who have been to Parihaka, under the shadow of Mt Taranaki, come away bearing the mantle of the longing for interracial peace and non-violence worn so illustriously by the prophet Te Whiti. They also sometimes carry something of the guilt of the legal violence and outrage wrought by the colonial government on that day in November 1881. In the last year since the return of the remains of the first Catholic bishop, Jean Baptiste Pompallier, to the far north of New Zealand thousands of pilgrims have worked their way to the remote settlement of Motuti. Again what draws them is the presence of a man who despite his evident faults had a great love for the Maori people and a feeling for the possible co-existence of different nations in mutual respect and honour.

A number of practical questions suggest themselves out of such considerations. The first is the need for each person to identify and bring to full awareness the holy places of their own experience. These may lie back in childhood or come from moments when they first encountered at first hand the uniqueness of another land or culture. The next step is to realise that abiding communities also have strong links with place. Parishes, community or interest groups need to reflect on their roots to uncover common, perhaps buried histories and memories. They might want to reflect how the values that bind them: gratitude, beholdenness, openness, commitment are a legacy of particular rooted communities. They need to explore the historic and geographic origins of where they now live and work. For Churches that have a sacramental tradition probably the most important place to begin this exercise is in their eucharistic gathering. Certainly in most cities in New Zealand now congregations come from an immense variety of ethic and racial backgrounds. Most congregations try to create a social and welcoming inclusiveness. That is an important first step but it needs to go further. For a profound and genuine growth of community the congregation needs to keep on reflecting and sharing together how they can embody and show forth the universal and catholic Church while accepting the very different custom, backgrounds and culture of each group represented there. Part of such a process will also involve the need to name and fight against the false economic and cultural cannibalisation that is taking place in the name of globalisation.

To conclude I make use of a citation from authors who are talking about the critical role of place in architecture. It applies also to the Church community in place and environment:

“Our environment consists in terms of our actions and meanings; it is an existential space which is neither external object nor internal experience. Architectural space may be defined as a concretisation of this existential space. Space is perceived only as places. Through the cultural artefact of a name, undifferentiated space is transformed into marked and delimited place. Stories and tales may be attached to such places, making them resonate with history and experience. The culturally constructed elements of a landscape are thus transformed into material and permanent markers and authentications of history, experience, and values. Although the stories change in the retelling, the place provides an anchor of stability and credibility.”

There are many accounts of Lonergan’s levels and types of conversion. The one I am following is found in chapter 8 (pp 179-204) of Tatha Wiley’s work Original Sin (cf bibliography). I believe that she fails adequately to deal with the historical and ecological dimensions of the doctrine of original sin. Nevertheless, her summary of Lonergan’s work on conversion is excellent.

White Lynn, “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis”, Science, 155, 10 March 1967, 1203-07.
Wiley, Original Sin, 183.
Lonergan, “Dialectic of Authority”, A Third Collection, ed. Frederick Crowe, New York, Paulist Press, 1985, 8, c.f. Wiley, op cit, 192.
Lonergan, Method in Theology, New York, Herder and Herder, 1972, 107 c.f. Wiley, 190-91
for this section of my paper I am heavily reliant on John Inge’s A Christian theology of place (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003). I am also aware from earlier reading of the American Jesuit and sociologist Andrew Greeley that he came up with remarkably similar results in a totally different cultural context in the United States of America.
Op cit, 71 This analysis appeared in The spiritual nature of man (published in 1979).
Inge, A Christian theology, 76-90.
Belden Lane, “Landscape and spirituality: a tension between place and placelessness in Christian thought”, The Way Supplement, 73(1992), 6 c.f. Inge, A Christian theology, 70.
Emily Dickinson, The complete poems, London, Faber and Faber, 1970, 577, cf Inge, A Christian theology, 88.
This final paragraph is a very brief summary of Inge’s first chapter, ‘Place in Western Thought and Practice’, 1-32, op cit.
Parker Pearson M and C Richards, Architecture and order: approaches to social space, London, Routledge, 1994, 4 c.f. A Christian theology, 105.