Tag Archives: St. Ignatius

Experiential Spirituality: Peter Rollins (Part 7 of 7)

rollins book 2The post-modern pastor and theologian Peter Rollins (1973-Present) is the eleventh and final travel guide along this journey. Growing up in Northern Ireland during the post-Christendom shift of the late-20th century, Rollins embraced the mystical writings of Meister Eckhart and others [2012, xiv]. This led Rollins to promote having a sense of doubt, unknowing and uncertainty within the Christian walk as intellectual theology will never fully capture the Living God. Faith, to Rollins, is “analogous to the experience of an infant feeling the embrace and tender kiss of its mother” [2012, 1].

This does not mean that Rollins is against theology; rather he sees theology as “reflecting upon” the God who “grasps us” [2012, 1]. This embracement of the mystical experience of God all comes down to love. God is personally in love with humanity just as his followers are to be passionately in love with him and their fellow humans. This is a love that “cannot be worked up but is gained only as we give up” and let ourselves become a “dwelling place in which God can reside and from which God can flow” [2015, 75].

Rollins and Williams are fitting ends to this journey along the experiential spirituality path of the last five-hundred years. Both of them are helping the 21st century church retain and explore the value of experiencing the Living God within an intimate ongoing relationship. As St. Ignatius, St. Teresa, Blaise Pascal, Brother Lawrence, St. Thérèse, Martin Luther, John Calvin, George Herbert, and William Seymour taught before them, God is a living God who seeks a personal on-going relationship with his people. Rather than been content to believe a doctrine, however orthodox that doctrine is, or with having a  one-time born-again experience, the people of God are to follow the advice of St. James, the half-brother of Jesus of Nazareth, and “draw near to God” as he “will draw near to [them]” [Ja 4:8].

 

Bibliography

Rollins, Peter. 2012. How (Not) to Speak of God. Brewster, Massachusetts: Paraclete Press

Experiential Spirituality: St. Ignatius, St. Teresa and Blaise Pascal (Part 2 of 7)

The first travel guide along this journey is St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491- 1556) who founded the Society of Jesus or Jesuits, a religious order within the Roman Catholic Church. Writing in the early part of the 16th century, St. Ignatius’ booklet Spiritual Exercises recorded various prayer and meditation practices that he found helpful in experiencing the Living God. These practices placed a “great emphasis on discerning God’s presence in the everyday activities of ordinary life” [Jones 2015]. Similar to St. Paul who saw the Lord as filling “everything in every way” [Ep 1:23, NIV], St. Ignatius refused to embrace the sacred/secular divided that permeated Christian thought then and now.

Saint Teresa of Ávila by Peter Paul Rubens
Saint Teresa of Ávila by Peter Paul Rubens

St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) is the second travel guide drawing travelers into an experiential spirituality of the Living Creator. A proponent of the contemplative life, her book The Interior Castle is an allegory of a soul on a journey through seven mansions within itself to find the Lord. When the soul enters into the seventh and last spiritual mansion, St. Teresa writes about how the Living God will come and dwell within the soul of the pilgrim.

“Oh, God help me! What a difference there is between hearing and believing these words and being led in this way to realize how true they are! Each day this soul wonders more, for she feels that they have never left her, and perceives quite clearly, in the way I have described, that They are in the interior of her heart – in the most interior place of all and in its greatest depths. So although, not being a learned person, she cannot say how this is, she feels within herself this Divine companionship” [2008, 129]

There can be no greater expression of experiential spirituality than to feel the everlasting companionship of the Living Creator.

Living about a hundred years later, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) is the third travel guide along the experiential spirituality journey. Known primarily for his advances in mathematics, physics, and philosophy, Pascal may seem like an odd travel guided into the mystical realm of a personal experience with the Living God. However rather than being a hindrance, it was Pascal’s philosophical mind that led him to the understanding that God was seeking a personal relationship with him. “If we submit everything to reason,” Pascal says, “Our religion will have no mysterious and supernatural element” [1958, 78]. Building upon this understanding, he declares that “it is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason” [1958, 78].

To be continued….

 

Bibliography

Jones, Lorna. 2015. A Brief Introduction to Ignatian Spirituality. Ignatian Spiritual Formation III class handout, St. Stephen’s University, St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada, October 5.

Pascal, Blaise. 1958. Pascal’s Pensees. Trans. T.S. Eliot. New York: E.P. Dutton.

St. Teresa of Avila. 2008. Interior Castle. Trans. E. Allison Peers. Radford, Virginia: Wilder Publications.