by Father Robert Lauder
Fourth in a series
I HAVE BEEN trying to remember when I last read an essay as provocative as Father Gerald M. Fagin’s “Are We Relating to God in a New Way,” which first appeared in the Review for Religious, November-December, 1993. Father Fagin’s essay speaks to my experience of trying to relate to God. It also seems to speak to people with whom I have shared it. His insights are excellent. I plan to conduct my own informal survey to discover how many of my friends find the essay insightful and basically an accurate depiction of a change in their own journey with Christ.
No Longer Privatized
One of the changes from what we might call the traditional spirituality that I and many Catholics grew up with in the 1940s and ’50s, to what we might call the new spirituality, Father Fagin characterizes as a movement “from private to communal.” This characterization captures much of the experience that I have had and am still having. Describing traditional spirituality, Father Fagin writes the following:
“This personal piety that privatized one’s relationship with God followed upon an understanding of the church as an institution from which grace flows from the top through a hierarchical structure to the individual. God spoke through superiors and religious leaders, not through the members of the community. Sacraments too were privatized. They were channels of individual grace and a personal relationship with God. Confession was an experience of forgiveness of my sins with little sense of reconciliation with the community. Eucharist focused on the offering of Christ’s sacrifice and my reception of Communion, followed by my private thanksgiving with Jesus. Often Eucharist was a private Mass with a single server symbolizing a broader community that was not evidently there. All of this, of course, reflected a theology of church and sacrament that shaped and reinforced a sense of a private relationship with God.”
If anyone had the opinion that theology was basically irrelevant in relation to spirituality all that would be necessary to demolish that opinion would be to reflect on how the traditional spirituality was rooted in an understanding of God, the Church, sacraments and holiness. The new spirituality is also rooted in an understanding of God, the Church, sacraments and holiness.
There are several reasons why a new way of approaching God has emerged, and in his short essay, Father Fagin does an excellent job of pointing out some of those reasons. Theology is based on the Church’s experience of divine revelation and the faith commitment of the theologian. All sorts of insights from life experience and from disciplines other than theology can influence the theologian. I think that philosophy is one of the more influential intellectual disciplines that can play a role in theological development. I imagine that psychology and sociology can also influence the theologian.
Commenting on the switch to an emphasis on a communal model, Father Fagin notes that we meet God in community. We are the body of Christ in the world. The Holy Spirit lives in all the members of the Mystical Body of Christ. We grow in our faith with others. In fact, one of the ways we grow in our faith is through others. I cannot give a date when I began to realize that one of the ways I met Christ was through dedicated members of His Body. In fact, at this point in my life, one of the main ways I meet Christ is through other people.
I am reminded that in the sacrament of marriage, the husband and wife administer the sacrament to one another. The priest is the Church’s witness. I have come to believe that members of Christ’s Body are channels of grace to other members.
Called Together in Faith
Father Fagin notes that the Church is primarily a community of believers who are called together in faith. Stressing that while the Church is an institution with visible structures and office, it is first the gathering of disciples who find and celebrate God’s presence in their midst. Father Fagin writes the following:
“Liturgy is experienced as ecclesial, as the coming together of God’s people to hear the word in common and share the meal of the Reign of God. Jesus is present, not only in the consecrated bread and wind, but also in the assembly. We find Jesus in the community. Sacraments, then, are experienced as communal moments of celebration that bind us together and deepen our corporal identity as the people of God. Christians share a common story of salvation and live out that story as members of the one body of Christ.”
Father Fagin died a few years ago. I don’t have the opportunity to thank him face-to-face for all his wonderful insights, but I do plan to remember him tomorrow morning at Mass.[hr] Father Robert Lauder, a priest of the Diocese of Brooklyn and philosophy professor at St. John’s University, Jamaica, writes a weekly column for the Catholic Press.