Grace and the Middle Voice of Spirituality
November 14, 2018 Leave a comment
Grace and the Middle Voice of Spirituality
As a little cradle Catholic boy, I think the first prayer I learned was “Bless us oh Lord, and these thy guests, which we are about to receive, Amen.” I thought I used to hear that around our farmhouse table. I always wondered, for a long time, “When are the guests coming?” We did not have any guests yet, but we were about to receive them. They never seemed to come. We called this saying Grace. Those who know me know that I am very hard of hearing. I began to wear hearing aids in my early 40’s. I don’t think God disparaged my prayer of blessing the way I understood such a “simple” prayer. Actually, the words are “Bless us oh Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive, Amen.” Either way, the prayers we do, whether “simple” “verbal” payers in the Mass or at your worship service, or even deep contemplative prayer, should never be disparaged. God receives us where we are, and loves us as sinners as he gazes upon us as a mother gazes upon her nursing child at her breast, or as an eagle takes its babies under its wings.
Whether we are “saying” grace before we eat or are receiving the “gift” of the Eucharist, we are all in God’s grip of grace. Grace has a lot to do with Spirituality of any type, whether one is Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, etc. Even Atheists have to face Grace, although they may deny it or call their spirituality “mindfulness.” Still, grace is involved. My intention for linking the two, grace and the middle voice of spirituality, comes from my studies of Ignatian Spirituality during the Fall Semester of 2018 as I study for a certificate in Spiritual Direction via Spring Hill College. One of the statements that got my juices flowing is from the book, Candlelight, by Susan K. Phillips.[1] Dr. Phillips states:
Linguistically, we have lost the middle voice that lies between the active and passive voices. In using the active voice, one speaks of initiating an action. In the passive, one receives the action that another initiates. … In the middle voice, the person actively participates in the results of an action that another initiates.[2]
In Spirituality in the terms of the English language, one thinks of contemplation as “active” contemplation where we mentally think thoughts about God, Scripture, etc. actively in our minds. We think this contemplation can slip into what is called “passive” contemplation whereby we are supernaturally given thoughts to think by God, or perhaps given no thoughts at all and slip off into a thoughtless state of unknowing, or a state of union with the Divine Presence. What if we thought of spirituality and contemplation in terms of the middle voice, which we do not possess in the English language? This spirituality would be a participation in a gift that God has already given to us, a gift of Grace. Referring to Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address at the looming of the Civil War where Lincoln urged Americans to heed the “better angels of our nature,” Phillips states:
It is, rather, siding with the “better angels” of a person’s nature, his or her middle-voice willingness to participate in God’s grace.[3]
I think back to the creation story, where God made mankind in His image and likeness, placing in mankind a Divine essence, a spirit in man that was the action of God, that gave mankind a receptor, a sixth sense, or a taste for God. This image came from God and is set to autopilot back to God upon our death. It is in fact, eternity set in our being. It is an act of God’s grace with which we should long to participate, in a middle-voice way, the action that another, God in us, in whom we live and breathe and have our being, initiated.
Another book we have read in our studies, Moving in the Spirit, by Richard J. Houser, S.J.,[4] refers to this grace and essence of God within us from an Eastern point of view:
The Western or Pelagian model is clearly at odds with Scripture, misunderstanding the origin of our inner desires and movements toward good. In this model all inner experiences moving toward the desire to love and serve God and others are seen to flow from ourselves apart from the grace of God within us.[5]
Below is a wonderful illustration that pictures what Hauser is speaking of:
Scriptural Model: Self in God:
[6]God initiates: Self Responds
Grace and the middle voice of our participation in the gift of the Spirit that God has initiated are absolutely critical to beginning to understand Ignatian Spirituality. Let us keep the illustration above in mind as we proceed.
Hauser states:
Those of us living with this Western understanding of the self and God will never appreciate the all-pervasiveness of the presence of grace in our life. … they do not acknowledge that the initiative toward the good comes from the presence of grace.[7]
Ignatius was a product of the period in which he lived. The Western Church as a whole may have understood grace in a proper manner but errored in some parts of the Church concerning Pelagianism.[8] An attempt, at the Council of Trent, in the general period of Ignatius’ lifetime, tried to solve the problem of Pelagianism, or semi-Pelagianism.[9] Ignatius himself speaks of the grace that is crucial in Ignatian Spirituality:
When one is in desolation, … He can resist with the help of God, which always remains, though he may not clearly perceive it. For though God has taken form him the abundance of fervor and overflowing love and the intensity of His favors, nevertheless, he has sufficient grace for eternal salvation.[10]
Even from the very start of Ignatius’ Exercises, it is very clear that the crucial understanding is that it is God who first calls us and it is God’s grace that first initiates the acts of God in us, in which we participate. The human Spiritual Director is to keep his or her “teaching” short and allow God’s grace to work directly with the directee.
The one who explains to another the method and order of meditating or contemplating should narrate accurately the facts of contemplation or meditation. Let him adhere to the points, and add only a short or summary explanation. The reason for this is that when one in meditating takes the solid foundation of facts, and goes over it and reflects on it for himself, he may find something that makes them a little clearer or better understood. This may arise either from his own reasoning, or from the grace of God enlightening his mind.[11]
This may remind us of one of God’s first intentions for mankind, spoken of us in the Garden of Eden, that we are to be dressers and keepers of the earth, which by extension would include each other. We are like a tree, planted in the garden, planted by the water.
7“But I will bless those
who put their trust in me.
8 They are like trees growing near a stream
and sending out roots to the water.
They are not afraid when hot weather comes,
because their leaves stay green;
they have no worries when there is no rain;
they keep on bearing fruit.[12]
We are to bear the fruit first nourished by the water of God’s image and Spirit, given us by God, not of our own doing, it is by grace. We are created by God’s grace, we are sustained by His grace, and we are renewed by His grace, bear fruit by His grace, and are saved by His grace for good works. We take of God’s grace, of his sustenance, and give back the fruits of His grace.
In the season of fruition, there may be the experience of enhanced night vision. Suffering may render the world dark, and certain forms of suffering include losing the sense of God’s presence. … We are to bear fruit by loving our neighbor, setting the captive free, giving food to the hungry, sheltering the homeless, loosing bonds of injustice, clothing the naked. By doing so, we will be light in the darkness, well-watered gardens, and pilgrims guided by the Lord.[13]
As we consider our years, what we have done, and what we have failed to do, we think back to the Sabbath, also initiated by God in the Garden, when God rested. Are we not called to rest with God too, to rest our egos as he works by grace in us?
28 “Come to me, all of you who are tired from carrying heavy loads, and I will give you rest. 29Take my yoke and put it on you, and learn from me, because I am gentle and humble in spirit; and you will find rest. 30For the yoke I will give you is easy, and the load I will put on you is light.”[14]
Are we not called to give up our ego, to reject the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, to be a tree of life, to bear fruit for our fellow humans, for God, and all the angels and saints? We are pilgrims on this earth. We are just passing through. We are aliens to earthly kingdoms and citizens of a Kingdom to come. This Kingdom lives in us, a Kingdom for and in which we participate by bearing fruit, by grace, the middle voice of spirituality.
So… Why should we be concerned about this matter? See:
3I thank my God for you every time I think of you; 4and every time I pray for you all, I pray with joy 5because of the way in which you have helped me in the work of the gospel from the very first day until now. 6And so I am sure that God, who began this good work in you, will carry it on until it is finished on the Day of Christ Jesus.[15]
Try doing a computer search of an online Bible, using the words, “Christ in you,” and you will soon find that any spirituality we may claim to possess was because God began the work in which we participate. In other words, I may serve my friend, or I may have been served by my friend, but I also take service in a middle-voice way as I share actively in the service that another, God, first initiated. He placed His Image in us, and continues to sustain this image.
Even a little Catholic boy or girl can receive and participate in this grace.
John Cooper
[1] Candlelight: illuminating spiritual direction, by Susan Phillips, Morehouse Publishing, 2008, ISBN 978-0-8I92-2297-8 (pbk.)
[2] Ibid, p. 168
[3] Ibid, p. 169
[4] Moving in the Spirit, Becoming Contemplative in Action, by Richard J. Hauser, S.J., Paulist Press, 1986, ISBN 0-8091-2790-3 (pbk.)
[5] Ibid, p. 26
[6] Ibid, p. 27
[7] Ibid, pp. 26,27
[8] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pelagianism
[9] http://pauliscatholic.com/2009/07/canons-of-the-council-of-trent/
[10] The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, a New Translation Based on Studies in the Language of the Autograph, Ludovico Puhl, S.J., Loyola Press, 1951, ISBN 978-0-8294-0065-6. P. 143, – 320. 7. (emphasis mine)
[11] Ibid, p. 1, 1. 2. (emphasis mine)
[12] https://www.bible.com/bible/431/JER.17.GNBDK
[13] Candlelight, p. 172
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