Common Sense Spirituality E-Book

David Steindl-Rast

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 248

Beschreibung

This collection of David Steindl-Rast's essays directs us back to the true authority--our inner core of knowing.  An invitation to reconnect with the wisdom that grounds us, draws no limits, motivates moral actions, and makes us exhilaratingly alive.

Leseprobe

Common Sense Spirituality

Other Books by Brother David

Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer:

An Approach to Life in Fullness

Foreword by Henri Nouwen

The Ground We Share:

Everyday Practice, Buddhist and Christian

With Robert Aitken

Words of Common Sense for Mind, Body, and Soul

Foreword by Thomas Moore

A Listening Heart:

The Spirituality of Sacred Sensuousness

Foreword by Matthew Fox

Music of Silence:

A Sacred Journey through the Hours of the Day

With Sharon LeBell, Introduction by Kathleen Norris

Belonging to the Universe:

Explorations on the Frontiers of Science and Spirituality

With Fritjof Capra

Common Sense Spirituality

THE ESSENTIAL WISDOM OF DAVID STEINDL-RAST

DAVID STEINDL-RAST

EDITED AND WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY ANGELA IADAVAIA

FOREWORD BY JOAN CHITTISTER, OSB

A Crossroad Book

The Crossroad Publishing Company

New York

The Crossroad Publishing Company

Copyright © 2008 by David Steindl-Rast.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company.

Printed in the United States of America.

The text of this book is set in 11/14.5 Sabon.

The display faces are Engravers’ Gothic, Voluta Script, and Gill Sans.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN-13: 978-0-8245-2479-1

This printing March 2016

CONTENTS

Foreword: In Search of Questions Too Big for Answers

A Word about Brother David

Editor’s Note

PART ONE

EXPERIENCING OUR SPIRITUALITY

CHAPTER 1

Spirituality as Common Sense

CHAPTER 2

The Monk in Us

CHAPTER 3

Art and the Sacred

CHAPTER 4

Sacramental Life: Take Off Your Shoes!

PART TWO

GOD, RELIGION, AND US

CHAPTER 5

Views of the Cosmos

CHAPTER 6

The Mystical Core of Organized Religion

CHAPTER 7

The God Problem

CHAPTER 8

Shadows

PART THREE

LIVING OUR SPIRITUALITY

CHAPTER 9

Learning to Die

CHAPTER 10

Paths of Obedience: Fairy Tales and the Monk’s Way

CHAPTER 11

Narrow Is the Way

CHAPTER 12

The House of Hope

CHAPTER 13

The Price of Peace

CHAPTER 14

Giving Thanks for All the Little (and Big) Things in Life

CHAPTER 15

A New Reason for Gratitude

Notes

FOREWORD

IN SEARCH OF QUESTIONS TOO BIG FOR ANSWERS

Someone wrote on a wall once, “If you expect to find an answer to your question, you have simply not asked a big enough question.” In Common Sense Spirituality, Brother David Steindl-Rast teaches us to ask the right questions, the big questions in life.

The great enquiries of life are not children’s riddles. Good thinkers do not expect to resolve them. They are simply the subjects serious thinkers spend their lives exploring so that all the other lesser questions of life can have a launching pad from which to commence their pursuit. Questions like What shall I do? Where shall I go? What are my priorities? are all issues that depend in the first place on what I think life is about and goodness is made of and meaning requires if we are to be truly alive, truly spiritual.

In Common Sense Spirituality, Brother David leads us through these slippery dimensions of life with gentle persistence, with spiritual depth. And with common sense. Never have we needed such guidance more.

We live in a very strange world now. It is a world of dazzling technological and scientific achievement. It is, as a result, a world of increasing complexity and confusion.

The more we discover about the mechanics of life, it seems, the less we are certain of the meaning of life, the purpose of life, the essence of life. It is a world, in fact, made strange by our own making.

A people enamored of science and skeptical of religion, we are, nevertheless, unsatisfied by science and tempted to substitute magical thinking for the mysteries of religion. We make for ourselves a vending-machine God and live torn between the verities of science and the spiritual values of religion. And that is strange, indeed, since neither is intended to be the answer to the other, however much we try to make them so.

As a result, we do not know where the world of science begins or where the world of religion ends. We want science to confirm things of the spirit for us, and we want religion to explain the origin of the world to us. Neither of them is up to the task.

Worst of all, we confuse one with the other. We want science, which deals with matter, to explain God to us. We want religion, which deals with the spirit, to be an authority on the biological nature of life.

In the end, we make a thing of God and a god of science. We make “heaven” a place and earth the center of the universe. And that’s when the confusion and the complexity set in; that’s when we begin to lose faith in both. What shall we believe about either heaven or earth when what we have thought of both of them is equally impossible and impertinent. God is bigger than an adult Disneyland designed to reward rulekeepers, and the earth is a speck in the universe too small to explain something as great as the end and purpose of creation.

No wonder we have come to the point where we consider science dangerous and religion spurious. We have asked the wrong things of both and in the doing of it, have misused both of them. Science is simply no substitute for religion and its pursuit of the transcendent. Religion, as much in awe of science as it may be, is not intended to be a self-help manual in biology.

It is precisely here at the crossroads between the two that this book takes up the challenge of marking the boundaries of both science and religion. And, in the doing of it, points up the real contribution each makes to the other.

This book does not pretend to give impossible answers ÿ or catechetical creeds. Instead, it enables us to rethink all the encrusted ideas humanity has conjured up to reduce God to our own dimensions. It stretches our vision of life and so it expands our insight into the necessary nature of God.

This book is a cry of the soul into the darkness of life that gives substance to faith and reason for hope. We cannot be who we are unless the God who made us is greater than we are with all our smallnesses of judgment and nationalism and sexism and absolutism.

The fact is that faith is not about facts. Faith is about surrendering to the goodness of the God who made a universe so purposeful in its existence, so unbounded in its magnificence, that it demands that we consider the munificence of a Creator who exceeds both ourselves and our universe.

Then, we find ourselves asea in God.

Then, we need to rethink both ourselves and our life.

Then, we discover ourselves in the grip of a God greater than the gods we have made of ourselves.

Then, we need a guide to the heart of a God too great to be thought, too present to be ignored.

Then, because we finally settle down to take the questions seriously, this book takes us seriously enough to lead us from the obvious to the metaphysical. Then, this book takes us to the height of our humanity in the most simple of human ways.

That’s Brother David’s gift and strength. He refuses to be obscure. He resists being dogmatic. He disdains being simplistic. He is unwilling to be obscurantist. He himself 10 is the epitome of “common sense spirituality.”

He simply takes us by the hand and invites us to rethink what the great thinkers of all time have posited in their own attempts to be their own most human selves. He invites us to live into an answer of our own rather than either swallow the answers of others or begin to live on the surface of life with neither awe of the questions nor respect for the breadth of the responses.

In the end, then, faith is not the refusal to face what cannot be answered. It is the commitment to think beyond what is to why it is. It is the conviction that we must stretch ourselves beyond what can only be seen to what it is meant to enable us to understand about what cannot be seen. About life. About goodness. About purpose. About creation. About the self. About God. About what constitutes “common sense spirituality.”

This, then, is a book of big questions — about the mystical, the mystery, the cosmos, the spiritual, and the nature of obedience to it all. It is not only about the kind of questions that concern us all our lives but the kind of questions because of which we finally make a conscious commitment to live life one way rather than another.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke puts it this way in his Letters to a Young Poet (1903):

I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.

This book of Brother David’s will not resolve those questions. No, it does much more than that: it gives a reader the substance it takes to live these questions till, as Rilke says, “perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” Then, perhaps, as Brother David has taught us, we will begin to contribute to the meaning of life for others by raising questions of our own.

Joan Chittister, OSB

A WORD ABOUT BROTHER DAVID

David F. K. Steindl-Rast was born on July 12, 1926, in Vienna, Austria. He spent his childhood in a small, predominately Catholic village nestled in the Alps, where he lived with his mother and two younger brothers. Celebrating religious feasts, attending a two-classroom school, and skiing on weekends defined the calendar for children of this village. It was here that he first experienced “the sacred, the cultural, and nature as one piece.”

By 1938 when the Nazis invaded Austria, Brother David was attending a secondary boarding school in Vienna. Religion continued to be a dominant presence in his life, only now it was practiced underground. At a time when teenagers typically reject their religion, the opposite was true for him and his classmates. Pursuing their religion was their act of rebellion. Every year the graduating class in their school had to join the army, and almost every week those left behind attended a Mass for a former student who had been killed in the war. David was also drafted when he graduated, but he never was sent to the front. After a year, he escaped and was hidden by his mother.

After the war, David was given a copy of the Rule of St. Benedict, in which the tenet “keep death always before your eyes” caught his particular attention as did the authentic life proposed by this Father of Western monasticism. While this was one of the happiest times in David’s life, he also knew then that unless death continued to be at the forefront of his awareness, he “would not be much alive anymore.” This was on his mind as he became involved in art restoration and studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, where he received his master’s degree. Drawn to the paintings of both children and primitive cultures, he then received a doctorate in psychology with a minor in anthropology from the University of Vienna.

In 1952 after joining his family who had emigrated to the United States, Brother David heard of a newly founded Benedictine community in Elmira, New York. It took only one visit for him to decide to join Mount Savior Monastery, of which he is now a senior member. Over the next decade, Brother David became a postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University, where he also was the first Roman Catholic to hold the Thorpe Lectureship, following Bishop J. D. R. Robinson and Paul Tillich. Like the dozen monks at Mount Savior, he also enjoyed a rich spiritual and intellectual life in the monastery. Dorothy Day and members of the Catholic Worker as well as Daniel Berrigan, well known for his pacifist stance during the Vietnam War, were frequent visitors.

After twelve years of monastic training and studies in philosophy and theology in this milieu, Brother David was sent by his abbot to participate in Buddhist-Christian dialogue, for which he received Vatican approval in 1967. His Zen teachers were Hakkuun Yasutani Roshi, Soen Nakagawa Roshi, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, and Eido Shimano Roshi. He co-founded the Center for Spiritual Studies in 1968 and received the 1975 Martin Buber Award for his achievements in building bridges between religious traditions. Together with Thomas Merton, Brother David helped launch a renewal of religious life. From 1970 on, he became a leading figure in the House of Prayer movement, which affected some two hundred thousand members of religious orders in the United States and Canada.

For decades, Brother David divided his time between periods of a hermit’s life and extensive lecture tours on five continents. His wide spectrum of audiences has included starving students in Zaire and faculty at Harvard and Columbia Universities, Buddhist monks and Sufi retreatants, Papago Indians and German intellectuals, New Age communes and naval cadets at Annapolis, missionaries on Polynesian islands and gatherings at the United Nations, Green Berets and participants at international peace conferences. Brother David has brought spiritual depth into the lives of countless people, whom he touches through his lectures, his workshops, and his writings.

He has contributed to a wide range of books and periodicals from the Encyclopedia Americana and the New Catholic Encyclopedia, to the New Age Journal and Parabola magazine. His books have been translated into many languages. Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer and A Listening Heart have been reprinted and anthologized for more than two decades. Brother David co-authored Belonging to the Universe (winner of the 1992 American Book Award), a dialogue on new paradigm thinking in science and theology, with physicist Fritjof Capra. His dialogue with Buddhists producedThe Ground We Share:Everyday Practice, Buddhist and Christian, co-authored with Robert Aitken Roshi. His most recent books are The Music of Silence, co-written with Sharon LeBell, and Words of Common Sense for Mind, Body, and Soul.

Brother David contributed chapters or interviews to well over thirty books. An article by Brother David was included in The Best Spiritual Writing, 1998. His many audiotapes and videotapes are widely distributed.

At present, Brother David serves as founder/advisor to the worldwide “network for grateful living,” through www.gratefulness.org, an interactive website with more than ten thousand visitors daily from more than 240 countries.

EDITOR’S NOTE

These essays span more than thirty years of Brother David’s evolving thought about what he has come to call Common Sense Spirituality. They illuminate our understanding of three essential themes:

♦ our peak or mystical experiences — an essential part of our spirituality that helps us find our own “firm basis of knowing,”

♦ the sacred traditions that are expressions of our spirituality — flawed but nevertheless with the potential to be lifelines to faith, hope, and love; and

♦ our response to our spiritual experiences — our willingness to let them define who we are and to shape our lives, meaningfully and with gratefulness.

The essays come from a variety of sources: published articles, interviews, and transcripts of talks. Many have been edited to eliminate repetitions. On occasion, points have been clarified or more relevant examples substituted. See www.gratefulnesness.org, where the original essays area available.

Special thanks to Patricia Carlson, executive director of A Network for Grateful Living, for her help in preparing this book. Special thanks also to Ariana Cox for her thoughtful insights and assistance, and to Paul Cox; he and Ariana, my children, are my best teachers. To Brother David — who has lived every word of these essays — my gratitude for his willingness to always come out of the hermitage and share his insights with us. Believing that we all belong on this planet together, he embodies Common Sense Spirituality.

PART ONE

Experiencing Our Spirituality

Brother David brings the ordinary to the extraordinary. Growing up in Austria during World War II and, in the subsequent decades, witnessing the loss of entire species of plants and animals, prompted him to realize that we are at a new threshold of moral consciousness — one that recognizes we all belong together and we must treat one another and our planet accordingly. We have reached a crucial point in history, he says, where there can be no exceptions. It would be immoral to believe otherwise.

But what does this mean for each of us personally? How can we renew our spirit so that we respond authentically and wholeheartedly to this need for belonging?

In this first group of essays, “Experiencing Our Spirituality,” Brother David speaks to us from this new ground on which he firmly stands. From this vantage point, he takes us back to our starting points, where we can find our own firm basis for knowing and acting. To do so, he encourages us to rely on our spiritual senses for cues and guidance: to let go of our preconceived notions, to be open to discovery, and to see and listen with our hearts. Our own experiences — from seemingly everyday occurrences to our most treasured memories — will be the territory for exploration. Surprisingly, what can appear at times to be detours turn out to be the most direct ways to discover what we are looking for.

Slow reading and rereading of these essays are recommended. So is taking time to reflect on the poetry interspersed throughout the text and on our own personal experiences as Brother David often suggests. The attention and openness we bring will be richly rewarded.

CHAPTER 1

SPIRITUALITY AS COMMON SENSE

This chapter lays the groundwork for the first group of essays, with its vision of what it means to be fully alive in mind, body, and spirit. This is, in essence, our spirituality and in order to make it part of who we are, Brother David appeals to our common sense. But his is not the typical notion of common sense in which a few practically minded people know how things work in this world. To him, common sense is a way of being attuned to the world around us. It is rooted in a knowing deep in our bones. It is everyone’s birthright as well as responsibility to cultivate and practice. It is what we share in common with the whole of creation. This knowing that comes from our own experiences is at the core of Brother David’s vision — and it must become part of our core.

By linking our spirituality and common sense, this essay gives us an opportunity to regain our footing. If we can connect our spirituality to common sense, and vice versa, we will have a true sense of direction for our journey.

As far back as we can trace, when speaking about spiritual matters, people used a term that simply means “life breath.” Spirit means “breath” in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Spirit is the very aliveness of life as we know it. It is as essential to life as the air we breathe. But what does this mean? We know this aliveness is more than just physical and mental capabilities. Think about the comment we often hear about a person’s vitality, “He seems so alive!” Something more is at play here than just a steadier pulse or higher IQ.

The great spiritual traditions often use “aliveness” interchangeably with “mindfulness.” This term emphasizes not so much mind as it stresses fullness. Aliveness is a fullness not only of the mind but also of body and spirit. This is quite a different notion from popular interpretations of mindfulness that create — or perpetuate — a common split between body and spirit. True spirituality, true aliveness, on the contrary, is deeply rooted in our bodies, something often underplayed or negated entirely in religions but readily identified in people regarded as deeply spiritual. Think of the Dalai Lama: his gestures and his belly laugh. The term “mindfulness” seems too limited in describing him, but what word would we use? When a word is lacking in a language, an insight is often lacking — in this case, the insight that full aliveness is mindfulness and body-fullness and that this full aliveness is at the heart of our spirituality.

Poetry provides us with examples of this extraordinary aliveness that we can relate to in our everyday life. A poem by William Butler Yeats celebrates one such moment. It sets an essentially religious experience in a context where we would not expect it. We are often disappointed in churches, mosques, and temples where we think we “should” have such an experience. But moments of aliveness don’t come on command. When they come, we are, as C. S. Lewis puts it, “surprised by joy.” So is Yeats in the poem “Vacillation, IV.”1

It starts at an unlikely age for great aliveness — “My fiftieth year had come and gone” — and in most unpromising surroundings, he says:

I sat, a solitary man,

In a crowded London shop,

An open book and empty cup

On the marble table-top.

We all know that feeling of being solitary in the midst of a crowd, all the more lonely because of the crowd. The book is open. He seems to have lost interest in the middle of it. The cup is empty, and so seemingly are his thoughts. The cold stone table-top expresses perfectly his lack of any feelings at the moment. This man doesn’t see what’s going on around him. He gazes absentmindedly.

But something occurs unexpectedly and takes hold of him, a wondrous contrast to the emptiness with which the poem opens:

While on the shop and street I gazed

My body of a sudden blazed....

Notice that Yeats says he experiences this sudden awakening, his aliveness, in his body. He doesn’t say anything about his mind or his thoughts. At that moment, he is not thinking. This awareness that makes the body blaze with aliveness vastly transcends thinking.

... And twenty minutes more or less

It seemed, so great my happiness,

That I was blessed and could bless.

The twenty minutes, “more or less,” indicate that this was a timeless moment. But a tongue-in-cheek quality to the “more or less” also comes through. The experience is too overwhelming, and the poet has to distance himself by this colloquial expression. While he speaks merely of his “happiness,” religious reality breaks in with the word “blessed.” As in true spiritual experiences, the proof is in the fact that he can pass his blessed aliveness on to others. This is what religion (re-ligio, in Latin) is: literally the re-tying of ligaments that have been torn, bonds that connect us with all other creatures, with our own true self, and with the Divine. We are no longer lonely and solitary; we belong.

True aliveness is the expression of a profound belonging. Our body may not “blaze,” but in some blissful moments, we do know, for one split second at least, that we belong. We know it in our bones. It’s the ultimate way of knowing, not limited to thoughts, not limited to feelings, not limited to any other way of knowing. This is not the knowing we refer to in everyday conversations. It’s not what Hui Tzu, the Confucian sage and stickler for words, meant by knowing. And this leads to an amusing exchange of words between him and the great Taoist master Chuang Tzu, an episode in which Thomas Merton delighted and which he translated in his book The Way of Chuang Tzu under the title “The Joy of Fishes”:2

Chuang Tzu and Hui Tzu

Were crossing Hao river

By the dam.

Chuang said:

“See how free

The fishes leap and dart:

That is their happiness.”

Hui replied:

“Since you are not a fish

How do you know

What makes fishes happy?”

Chuang said:

“Since you are not I

How can you possibly know

That I do not know

What makes fishes happy?”

Hui argued:

“If I, not being you,

Cannot know what you know

It follows that you

Not being a fish

Cannot know what they know.”

Chuang said:

“Wait a minute!

Let us get back

To the original question.

What you asked me was

‘How do you know

What makes fishes happy?’

From the terms of your question

You evidently know I know

What makes fishes happy.”

And then comes the decisive statement, a pronouncement of greatest significance:

I know the joy of fishes

In the river

Through my own joy, as I go walking

Along the same river.

Is there any other way of knowing this? Obviously not. But consider what this implies.

Our most exhilarating knowing comes not from thinking but from the awareness of a shared aliveness — in this case, between Hui Tzu and the fish.

The Taoists called this shared aliveness “the Tao.” This word simply meant “Way” or “Path,” but Taoists stretched its meaning. We need a phrase for this reality, and “Common Sense” is the best one English has to offer. By calling this kind of knowing Common Sense, we are stretching the definition of what we normally mean by this phrase, but if we listen to it with fresh ears, it is an exceptionally good phrase. Often common sense is used to denote conventional assumptions, the exact opposite of full aliveness. But the Common Sense of which we now speak is so vibrant, so alive, so expansive that it gives a new color, a new flavor to everything we do, everything we are. It is a sensuous knowing, and it springs from what we have in common with the whole of creation. Inherent in our experiences is the realization that we are not separate bodies, but that in this universe, everything is interconnected, all is part of all. Out of this awareness springs the only knowing that makes sense. This knowing goes so deep that it is embodied in our senses and has no limits. The whole universe holds it in common. We need only plug into it.

Isn’t this what Chuang Tzu is saying? By our own bliss we know the bliss of the fishes and the bliss of everything there is in the world. In that blissful moment we have reached a spiritual — fully alive — knowledge at the core of the world.

As we practice Common Sense, it becomes a basis for knowing, a basis for action. In Common Sense, action and thinking are closely connected. So Common Sense is more than thinking. It is a vibrating aliveness to the world, in the world, for the world. It is a knowing through belonging. And it becomes a basis for doing, for acting. To act in the spirit is to act as people act when they belong together. We all belong together in this “earth household,” as Gary Snyder calls it so beautifully, and to live a spiritual life means to act as one acts in one’s own house where one belongs together. This, and this alone, is moral action. All morality that was ever developed in any tradition in the world can be reduced to the principle of acting as one acts toward those with whom one belongs together.

It is often said that notions of what is moral and what is not differ completely from society to society. What is considered moral, even virtuous, in one is branded as immoral in another. But these are only surface contradictions. In its depth any moral law that was ever expressed basically says: “This is how one acts toward those with whom one belongs together.” The differences are determined by where we draw the limit that separates those to whom we belong from those we consider outsiders.

Common Sense — precisely because it springs from the realization that we have our deepest identity in common — draws no limits. When you practice Common Sense, you practice a morality that includes everybody. You behave toward everybody as one behaves when one belongs. When I was young, there was still room in our world for different sets of morality. Within my lifetime, we have passed a threshold: from now on, to draw a line and to exclude anybody is simply immoral. Even plants and animals must be included. We have been awakened to this consciousness that springs from Common Sense by the suffering of two World Wars and subsequent wars as well as from the loss of entire species of plants and animals that form essential parts of our earth’s interdependent ecology. We have seen our globe from space, and the vision of it as an undivided blue-and-green whole reminds us that we are one earth family. This universally inclusive community is what Jesus meant by “the kingdom of God.” By making community all-inclusive, he triggered an earthquake that is still reverberating in our world. The epicenter of this earthquake is the notion of authority.