Throughout last year’s on-campus Visiting Professor appointment, I deeply considered the diverse, undergraduate faces spread out before me in my Midwest Roman Catholic theology classrooms. Most of these students count themselves among the ranks of the Christian baptized, with the majority engaging at least some faith practices.
Amidst a Roman Catholic majority, a smattering of non-Catholics dotted the room here and there, along with two or three non-Christians admitting little previous exposure to Christian thought and practice. This mix granted me increasing inquiry into the process, effectiveness and meaning of how students had learned and encountered their discrete religious traditions.
As I drew from students’ experience in our often-lively course discussions, I asked my classes to perform a reflective description of the most significant events, persons, occurrences, and classes contributing to either their religious/spiritual growth and change or personal transformation. Carefully written, the brief papers attentively disclosed aspects of students’ experiences. The findings of this unofficial survey proved illumining, catalyzing my own increasing inquiry into the substance and nature of spiritual formation and development.
Their replies suggested three general themes:
Students stated they had been most affected by:
- a specific event in their lives, such as a sports injury (interestingly, number one in the male responses) or a difficult illness in their families;
- a youth group or gathering of friends, usually related to a particular event such as a concert, retreat or outing; and
- church-sponsored CCD confirmation classes or Sunday school during their school-age years.
Throughout the reflections, Catholic students most often mentioned varied types of catechesis they had attended in the context of relationships with friends and family. For example, one student commented her fondest spiritual memory was walking to after-school CCD with a group of friends every Wednesday afternoon, another mentioned taking her younger siblings to classes with her. Almost universally, students’ exploration of spiritual and religious transformation related interpersonal engagement with people in the past, with no mention whatsoever of doctrine or theological ideas. Conceptions of God, Jesus, the sacraments, liturgy, or scripture was rarely if ever mentioned, and students discussed past events, youth gatherings, and church classes as primary focus of their religious experience itself.
There was, however, a striking exception to this trend. The few non-Christian students all very transparently described their experience of God as very meaningful, especially as they experienced the course’s many reflective opportunities. Sharing they had never really thought about “thinking about God,” “reflecting on the meaning of things,” or “looking more deeply into myself,” these students articulated details of their immediate transformations in a very different tenor than their baptized classmates. They spoke in present tense!
I could not help, after reading these student reflections, but think of a passage from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s (1864) poem:
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries. (Browning, Aurora Leigh, Bk. 7)
While assent to religious faith initiates a feast toward the depths of mystery, we—like Browning’s multitude—may often find our meal mundane (and apparently, often in past tense!)
Throughout the ponderings elicited through my informal student survey, I have gained no specific “action steps” toward a more powerfully engaged, transformational enactment of spirituality. Nonetheless, as demonstrated by my non-Christian students’ reflections, the core of authentically enacting the Christian mystery remains a profound expression of intellectual, moral and religious conversions that include but also transcend their exterior symbolization. While those exterior signs are in themselves ambassadors of grace, the interior transformation they invite touches the infinitude of Mystery through its own magnitude rather than its doctrinal expressions. Most deeply,spiritual transformation becomes a thoroughgoing movement toward divine likeness approaching beatitude.
In measured and often halting steps, spiritual development is enactment of the mystery it seeks to apprehend. Authentic mystagogy is encounter with Mystery, taught beyond teaching, known beyond knowledge. Perhaps this is, in part, why my catechized students recalled not doctrine but friends, family, and the interpersonal moments of simply being together.
Bathed in the light of theosis, lifelong efforts of spiritual formation, theological education, and catechetical instruction become clothed in luminous intent. No longer merely rubrical task, imparting knowledge of traditions become enactment of the grace and wisdom they seek to teach. Pointing to word, sign, and symbol, formative spiritual education becomes most effective when it apprehends both these externals and their deeply interior capacities toward transforming union of each human person with the sublimity of divine Mystery.
Knowledge, in this light, follows knowing.