Fr. William Fennelly: Contemporary spirituality tends to identify holiness with wholeness. Given that theology has always affirmed that grace builds on nature, that equation is, if taken correctly, good algebra. What is less emphasised in contemporary spirituality is how difficult it is to attain any kind of wholeness.
Why is this? I think it’s partly because we are all so incredibly complex. We spend much of our lives sorting through various rooms within our hearts trying to find out where we’re really at home and trying on various personalities the way we try on clothes. It’s hard to come to wholeness when we aren’t always sure who we are or what’s ultimately truest within us.
I recently saw an interesting interview in youtube with Catherine de Hueck Doherty, the foundress of the Madonna House Apostolate, an originally lay spiritual movement in the US in the 1940’s. Like St Brigid whom we celebrate today who also founded a monastery that had such an impact on her native Kildare so Doherty had an important impact in Canada. She was already 80 years old in the clip and was reflecting upon her own spiritual struggles. “Inside of me,” she said, “there are three persons:
There is someone I call the Baroness. This person is very spiritual, efficient, and given to asceticism and prayer. The baroness is the religious person. She has founded a religious community and writes spiritual books challenging others and herself to dedicate their lives to God and the poor. The Baroness reads the Gospel and is impatient with the things of this world. For her, this life must be sacrificed for the next one.
Then there is Catherine. Catherine is, first of all and always, the woman who likes fine things, sensual things. She enjoys idleness, long baths, fine clothes. Catherine enjoys this life and doesn’t like renunciation and poverty. She is nowhere as religious or efficient as the Baroness and they don’t get along at all.
And finally, inside of me too there is another person, a little girl, who is lying on a hillside in Finland, watching the clouds and daydreaming. This little girl is quite distant from both the Baroness and from Catherine.
… And as I get older I feel more like the Baroness, long more for Catherine, but think that maybe the little girl daydreaming on a hillside in Finland is the true me.”
Had these words been written by someone with a lesser within the spiritual life, they would not be as meaningful. Human personality is so complex and the struggle for wholeness is so difficult. Like St Brigid who today has to carry the 5th century Brigid, modern Brigid of Brigid’s day festival also has to carry also the Celtic goddess Brigid who was celebrated at Imbolc.
Like Catherine Doherty, all of us have a number of persons inside of us. Inside of each of us there’s someone who hears the Gospel call, that’s drawn to the religious, to the beatitudes, to self-sacrifice, to a life beyond this one. But inside of us there is also the hedonist, the person who wants to luxuriate in this world and its pleasures. Beyond that, inside of each of us there is too a little boy or little girl, daydreaming still on some hillside somewhere.
John XXIII once said that to be a saint is to will one thing, “to desire holiness above all”. However, given all of these people inside of me, what can I really will?
Moreover, given that grace is not meant to demolish nature it is too simple to say that the spiritual life is merely a question of having the “spiritual person” win out over the “lover of this world,” and the “daydreaming child.” Wholeness must somehow mean precisely a making of one whole out of all of these parts. To ignore, demolish, invalidate, or bypass one part for another is unlikely to achieve real wholeness.
The truly spiritual person is a whole person and a whole person is, as Christ was, the ascetic and the lover of this life and the lover of the next life, the dreamer and the realist, and many more things, all at the same time. What must be rejected in our spiritual quest is not our own nature, with its endless paradoxes and seeming schizophrenia, but all spiritualities, ideologies, and conventional wisdom, which tell us that it’s simple, and would have us believe that holiness can be achieved quickly, without confusion and without great patience and perseverance. Doing holiness, wholeness is lived in time and over time.
All of us are pathologically complicated. Each of us could write our own book on our multiple personalities. But that points to the richness, not the poverty, of our personalities. It doesn’t suggest that there are parts of us that aren’t spiritual, but that the attainment of wholeness is a lot more complex than any one part of us would have us believe. Nikos Kazantzakis once wrote that “the spirit wants to wrestle with flesh that is strong and full of resistance … because … the deeper the struggle, the richer the final harmony.” This becoming is as St Paul wrote God choosing the foolish of the world to shame the wise. To be as Zephaniah says one of the humble of the earth seeking the Lord. One of Matthew’s “poor in spirit” who are promised the kingdom of God.