I feel icky about how closely wedded effort and egoism are. Y’all know I have struggled with the neurotic egotism that comes from my dualistic mind. And “spiritualizing” that egoism doesn’t help matters, either. Y’all know I’ve been guilty, in the past, of spiritual materialism: of treating the tasks and the experiences of the spiritual life like they are possessions that make me good or bad—and moreover, better or worse than others.
Maybe I’m seeing my own hang-ups everywhere, just because they’re mine. But it seems to me that the Church can be just as guilty of spiritual materialism: perhaps there is a corporate, ecclesial egoism that treats spirituality like it’s a merit badge. Perhaps the church “collects” the virtues of its saints so as to convince itself of its own specialness. Coupled with its failure to articulate its tradition of “orthomorphosis,” or transformation, the Church has put its capacity for receptivity—the “passive volition past posts have talked about— in serious jeopardy.
Spiritual Materialism is a thing, both for me and the church. This makes evangelization an egotistical objective. In the hands of a church that hasn’t yet faced the dangers of spiritual materialism, such proclamation can be lethal. The council of Jerusalem, the meeting that declared gentiles needn’t first become Jews to accept Jesus, failed to articulate what transformation in Christ looks like. And when St. Paul decided to camp out in the center of the Roman Empire, he failed to notice that, in spreading the gospel, he was also spreading imperialism. In Rome, you were a good citizen if you sacrificed to their gods. By and by, you were seen as a good disciple of Jesus if you accepted the homogenizing influence of a christianized Pax Romana. In later years, for instance, exploration of the Americas permitted us to use Christianity to legitimize slavery and cultural genocide. The whole, dysfunctional union of church and state was transmitted, undiagnosed and uncorrected, until Pope John XXIII’s 1962 opening of the second Vatican Council.
The errors of pre-Vatican II models of Church were obvious. The Church triumphal relied unquestionably on modern nation states, failing to diagnose and challenge their oppressive tendencies. In El Salvador, at the time Rutilio Grande’s 1977 death radicalized Oscar Romero, he surprised heads of state who expected him to play governmental lap-dog. The Church militant, bent as it was on the spread of the Gospel, disregarded religious freedom, the primacy of conscience and enculturation. Mary appeared at Tepeyac as an indigenous woman in 1531, but it wasn’t till 350 years later, in October of 2002, that the church canonized Juan Diego, the indigenous man to whom she appeared.
Vatican II’s calls for religious freedom and enculturation seemed novel, and that is the first indicator that something was amiss with evangelization. When the Vatican said, in 2015, that the Church should not evangelize Jews, the cries of heresy were loud enough to be disconcerting. Meanwhile Jesus, our Lord and Messiah, never intended Catholicism to be a separate entity from the Jewish faith. It was only subsequent egotistical clinging to theological truths that gave enmity between Jews and Christians a divine mask.
Admittedly, the way I approach theology is my own. I would hazard to guess, (cue egomaniacal laughter,) that it has a message for the wider Church. The point here’s that if the church preaches what it lives, verbal preaching is unnecessary. A few sources support this view: while studying, I was attracted to Ignatius of antioch, a bishop who wrote a famous letter from prison, right before being fed to lions in the Roman coliseum. “If Christ’s suffering was pointless” he asked “then why am I in chains?” When I was working as a youth minister, I remember the conference presenter and colleague who said “we tell our children to love Jesus, but we don’t teach them to make Jesus’ journey.” When I was first attracted to monasticism, it was because I saw in them people who shut up and lived. They say they’ll pray seven times a day, and they generally do. They say they’ll be silent, and generally they’re silent.
In proper Evangelization, life preaches. In the transformative journey, teachers fail, disciples fail, and teachings fail. (I first addressed some of this in Kairos Koans and Conversion 6.) At the time of his death, Christ accomplished none of what he was expected to accomplish. Afterward, Peter’s resolve failed: he returned to his boats. Judas, ultimately dissolusioned with Jesus’ shortcomings, hung himself. The prevailing expectations for a messiah failed utterly before switching, in christ, from a “judges model”—in which messiahs save their people from their political enemies—to a “prophetic model” in which jesus saves his people from their sins. There’s a “mystical corollary” here too. When a person prays vocally, the words at some point give way to devotion in the mind (what Catholics call meditation). Thought yields, by and by, to what Catholics call contemplation. So words yield to thought, and thought yields to presence. While those stages aren’t hard and fast, it is important to note that often, one form of prayer has to die, or be surrendered, before another can live. Both ego and desire perish before we die physically.
If I am right about this (again, I would hazard to guess that I am—cue egomaniacal laughter a second time) then the relationship between the church and evangelization needs to change. In short, evangelization should be a consequence of conversion, not an end in itself. If we Catholics conveyed the particulars of transformation, then the acceptance of Christ would happen on its own.
Christ himself says as much. In Luke’s Gospel, when Jesus’ disciples enter Jerusalem, hollering about Jesus being the foretold messianic king, the powers-that-be tell him to order his disciples to stop. He refuses. “I tell you,” he says “if these were silent, the stones would shout out.” In the context of the narrative, Jesus’ triumphal entrance into Jerusalem, verbal proclamation is important.
But under normal circumstances, it’s different. The danger of under-proclaiming the gospel needn’t be a concern here. Preaching the gospel should be like making love. It’s great when consent has been obtained, gross and criminal when it’s not. Rightly, Pope Paul VI’s Evangelii Nuntiandi lays out 5 steps: 1) change your life. 2) people will see it and be curious 3) they’ll ask you why you change your life 4) only then do you rightly bring up Jesus 5) they change their life prompted by the grace your example has transmitted.
Even though I need trusted others to unpack my spiritual search, I don't like talking about faith. I refuse to proselytize. If there's any sort of verbal statement of intent that I can honestly make it’s this: be honest with yourself and rigorous in self examination. If people convert to Christianity, that's a party bonus and it's God’s work. Meanwhile I have an obligation to change, to learn about other traditions and assimilate what wisdom they have to teach me.
I don't particularly think the church needs to preach the gospel either. Remember the words: If these were silent the stones would shout—it’s at the very least permission to be about our own transformative journey and to have the whys and the wherefores of that journey be a consequence, not an objective of my journey. I believe that the Joy of the gospel will take care of itself, and that humans have no problem experiencing joy. We have more of a problem in spaces of unwillingness, suffering, diminishment or death. It would behoove the human family to concentrate on allowing itself to be transformed
We find both the proof of all this and the way we’re to achieve it in the example of Blessed Charles De Foucault. Nowadays he’s been declared an almost-saint: someone who’s blessed is, to sainthood, what a cub scout is to boycotts. Charles de Foucault wanted to start a religious community but was murdered by thieves before a single person joined him. His ideas caught on sometime later: his writings were found and two people founded the community he had hope to establish in the first place. These days His community claims among its members such figures as PhD's who sell ice cream in pushcarts on the street and sisters with masters degrees who work for the circus.
The point is, they, too, refuse to preach the Gospel. Their lives do the proclaiming. People see highly educated men and women working menial jobs and caring for others. Foucault’s spiritual children, when focusing on their own authentic transformation, inspire others’ curiosity.
If I don’t change my life, my verbal evangelization smacks of hypocrisy. If my proclamation happens without someone asking for it first, I risk coming across as pushy. But if I keep my focus on my own transformation, the body of Christ will proclaim itself.
Christ, in the gospel of Mark, teaches something that is useful here. After he does a miracle, when his disciples are amazed at his power, he often tells them to remain quiet about the event. This is called the “messianic secret.” His purpose was obvious: don’t proclaim me the messiah based on half of the messiah’s work. What I mean is, what miracles showed (the power of God in Jesus) were only part of the story. Jesus overtly asked his disciples to wait on their proclamation. Wait, he asked, till I rise: wait till you yourself have failed, till your own desire and zeal and resolve have risen again. And then, allow your own transformation to speak for itself.
Peter is a good example here: early on, he proclaims Jesus the messiah, and Jesus calls him Satan. Ultimately he will betray Jesus three times. Ultimately Christ will show up as a stranger, ask if Peter loves him, and put the wind of the spirit back in Peter’s sails. Ultimately the spirit will come, and how Peter is to speak will not be in doubt.
If the whole church were able to await the power of God in the same way, it might find there’s less work to do. On the seventh day, God rested. If the church’s proclamation is yet marked by anxiety—about whether Christ is accepted or not—then the Church’s spiritualized ego has further dying to do. If we’re doing our job right, our work is much more a matter of healthy grief than first thought. But if we can allow our egotistical sense of Spirituality’s demands to die alongside us, then our proclamation will be what God wishes.
Christ is manifesting himself in us—whenever and however he wishes. For my part, anything more active is egotism. I hope I can get out of my own way: it’s my only identifiable part allowing the whole world to proclaim Christ. I’ve quoted John’s words before: Christ must increase, I must decrease. May the words do their work in me, and God willing, in us all.
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