Healthy Spirituality

Today will see another writing from St. Alberto Hurtado.  Here he speaks about what represents a healthy spirituality.  He was perhaps even ahead of his time a bit, as today many people look in all kinds of direction for spirituality, but fail to look at the right place: the Scriptures!  This hypothesis of mine was confirmed by the most recent Apostolic Exhortation Verbum Domini #86: "The Word of God is at the basis of all authentic Christian spirituality."

What did St. Alberto have to say?  I think what he says is brilliant and true.  Here is what he wrote:

A Healthy Spirituality

Those who are concerned about the spiritual life are not numerous and unfortunately, among them, not all are on a sure path.  How many have made their meditation and their spiritual reading for dozens of years without much benefit?  How many are more concerned about following a method rather than the Holy Spirit?  How many wish to literally imitate the practices of one saint or another?  How many aspire to extraordinary states, to the wonderful, to sensible graces?  How many forget that they are part of suffering humanity and create an egotistic religion that does not remember these brothers and sisters?  How many read and reread the manuals, or search for recipes without ever really understanding the Gospel, without ever remembering Paul? 

For others, the spiritual life is confused with pious practices: spiritual reading, prayer, examen.  The active life comes to be like a band-aid that is applied but is not a prolongation or a preparation for the interior life.  The concerns of ordinary life, the difficulties to be overcome, the duties of our state in life are kept out of prayer: it seems unworthy to mix God with these banalities. 

In this fashion a complicated and artificial spiritual life is forged.  Instead of searching for God in the circumstances where He has placed us, in the profound needs of our own personality, in the circumstances of our temporal and local milieu, we prefer to act as though we were in the abstract.  God and real life never appear together in the same area of thought and of love.  We struggle to maintain an affective sentimentalism toward the divine and with enormous effort we maintain our gaze fixed on God to sublimate ourselves intensely, or, on the contrary, we content ourselves with sugary formulas taken from so called pious books.  All this brings to mind the comment of Pascal: man is neither angel nor beast but he who wishes to be like an angel, acts like a beast.

Even more serious: priests, men of study, who work with the supernatural, preachers who spend their days dedicated to the miseries of their brothers, in aiding them, will try to disassociate themselves from the memory of the poor while they assist at Mass.  Apostles overwhelmed with responsibilities for the Kingdom of God will consider it almost a fault to find themselves distracted by their concerns and anxieties. 

As though all our life should not be oriented toward God, as though thinking about everything for God, weren’t the same as thinking in God; or as if we could liberate ourselves by our own free will from the concerns that God Himself has put before us.  On the other hand, it is so easy, so necessary, to raise ourselves to God, to lose ourselves in Him starting from our own misery, our failures, our great desires.  Why then would we try to cast them from us instead of using them as a springboard? Then let us throw down the bridge of faith, hope and love between our soul and God. 

A healthy spirituality gives all spiritual methods their relative importance but not the exaggerated importance given by some.  A healthy spirituality is one that accommodates itself to individuals and personalities.  It adapts itself to temperaments, to education, culture, experiences, means, states, circumstances, generosity. It takes each one as he is, in his full human life, in the midst of temptation, in his work, in all his obligations.  The Spirit blows wherever it pleases;  you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going (cf. Jn 3,8); it uses each one for its divine ends respecting the personal development of each, for the construction of the great collective work that is the Church.  Every person serves a purpose in this march of humanity towards God; all find their tasks in the construction of the Church; the work of each one, which is dear to God, will be revealed in the circumstances in which God has placed them and by the light given to them at each moment.  The only spirituality that suits us is the one which introduces us into the divine plan, in accord with our own dimensions, in order to realize this plan in total obedience.   

Any method that is too rigid, any direction that is too absolute, any substitution of the letter for the spirit, any failure to take into account one’s individual reality, will achieve nothing more than to decrease one’s progress toward God.

Any method imposed with uniformity will prove to be false.  Likewise will prove false all those methods that pretend to lead us to God by making us forget our brothers and sisters; all that causes us to shut our eyes to anything beyond the universe instead of teaching us to open them in order to elevate all to the Creator of all being; all those that make us egoists, folded back upon ourselves; all those that pretend to frame our lives from the outside without penetrating us interiorly in order to transform us; all those that give humans the advantage over God . 

When we compare the Gospel to the lives of the majority of us, we as Christians feel uncomfortable. The majority of us have forgotten that we are the salt of the earth, the light on the candlestick, the yeast in the mass (cf. Mt 5, 13-15).  The breath of the Spirit does not animate many Christians; rather a spirit of mediocrity consumes us.  There are among us active people, too active, perhaps agitated is a better word; however the causes that consume us are not the cause of Christianity.  

After looking at oneself over and over and at what one finds around oneself, I take the Gospel, turn to St. Paul and here I find a Christianity that is all fire, all life, all conquering; a true Christianity that takes all of a person, that rectifies all of life, that exhausts all activity.  It is like an incandescent river of burning lava that gushes from the very depths of religion.

Surrender to the Creator! In every devout spiritual path there is always the beginnings of the gift of oneself.  If we multiply the readings, the prayers, the examens without arriving finally at the gift of oneself, this is a sign that we have failed. Before any practice, method or exercise a generous and universal offering of one’s entire being, all that one has and possesses is demanded.  The secret of all progress is in this complete offering of oneself, an act of the spirit and of the will, whereby we are brought into contact with God in faith and love.