Religious but not spiritual?

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I shall certainly have a listen to that. I like his voice very much.
 
do_justly_love_mercy said:
For example, I used to be vaguely acquainted with a female Anglican priest who was also a Franciscan tertiary.
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The Franciscans accept non-Catholics, especially women priests? That’s a new one on me. The Franciscans can get pretty weird so it wouldn’t surprise me though.

As for the rest of your post, all it seems to be saying is that contemplative prayer doesn’t work for you. That’s fine, contemplative prayer doesn’t work for everyone and there are plenty of other different forms of prayer out there. Not everyone is meant to follow the example of the Desert Fathers or St. Teresa of Avila or Thomas Merton, and there have been plenty of saints who attained sainthood through avenues other than contemplation, such as through active work serving the poor.

We all have prayer forms that work for us and prayer forms that don’t work so well for us. “Spirituality” can take many different forms. Being “spiritual” doesn’t mean someone has to be sitting for a couple hours each day practicing hesychasm or whatever. The multiplicity of religious orders with all different charisms attests to this.

As for “silence”, do you make a lot of noise when you pray in whatever form you use, for example thinking about Scripture you just read, or going to Mass and thinking about God, or when you’re at Adoration? “Silence” just refers to being quiet and turning off your outside distractions so you can focus on God.
 
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Along with that talk, round it off with this one, to be heard regularly to make it part of our Christian mission:
 
Tis_Bearself said:
The Franciscans accept non-Catholics, especially women priests?
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There is an Anglican Society of St. Francis, the largest of several Anglican Franciscan orders.
Tis_Bearself said:
do you make a lot of noise when you pray in whatever form you use, for example thinking about Scripture you just read, or going to Mass and thinking about God, or when you’re at Adoration? “Silence” just refers to being quiet and turning off your outside distractions so you can focus on God.
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True, I do not make noise while praying, going to church, etc. I was thinking more about people who spend hours, or sometimes even whole days or weeks, in silence. I know that monastic communities observe daily periods of greater and lesser silence, take meals in silence, etc.

I think what I am getting at is that many people seem to have some kind of intense emotional experience, sometimes almost like a physiological response, when they have a sort of indescribable, ineffable experience of direct or immediate communion with the realm of the divine. I have read, for example, that hesychasm is the highest form of Christian experience. I’ve never had that experience of apparently being united with Jesus in a kind of trance-like state. Like I said, I find the mystics very hard to understand. I feel on much firmer ground reading about history, something I can easily pin down. The mystics often use rather vague, elusive language that leaves me uncomprehending.

But maybe we don’t all have to have that St. John of the Cross or Thomas Merton type of interior life. I guess God also needs more practical people whose experiences are more mundane.
 
Not everyone is called to be a mystic. I am also sure there are people who knock themselves out trying to learn mysticism and it just doesn’t result in the great experiences they were hoping to have.

As St. Paul noted, we all get different gifts. The “highest form of Christian experience” is when we manage to join ourselves with God for a short time. We can have that experience each time we receive the Eucharist. Then we can go about our day serving God in whatever manner we’re called to do. If the Lord wants to favor someone with a mystical experience, he’s perfectly capable of sending it to them while they’re minding sheep, or gathering firewood, or walking to church. He doesn’t require you to sit for hours in silence or learn special prayer forms.

I’m not knocking mysticism, I rather favor some forms of it myself, but we all have different personalities and it’s no more going to work for everybody than toiling 12 hours a day in a orphanage is going to work for everybody.
 
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Maybe I’ve met some people who have given me a bit of a distorted view of what is expected of us spiritually. Like that female Anglican Franciscan priest… As I said at the top of this thread, the people who talk a lot about being “spiritual” are often not even religious. Or liberal Protestant types. I guess Catholicism is in general more grounded, and from what people say, it seems like most of us recognize that these mystical experiences are not something that most of us need to experience. Oddly, when I’ve met High Church Anglicans and ultra liberal Presbyterians and Congregationalists and so on, the spirituality that they are into is invariably drawn from Catholicism.

I think I’d find 12 hours per day in an orphanage a bit exhausting, but that’s actually a bit of a dream of mine, albeit possibly not a wholly realistic one. My career is in working with children and families. When I was living in the UK, my boyfriend (and, as it turned out, future husband) and I spent a summer volunteering at a shelter for homeless Roma children in SE Europe. Ever since then, I’ve had this idea that I’d like to learn Romanian or Bulgarian and get a job working with gypsy children in the longer term. I also know, realistically, that there are kids in the US and Britain who I can work with just as usefully, and that SE European countries have their own professionals who may be more expert in the situation of gypsy children. Anyway, given a choice between becoming a mystic and working in an orphanage, I’d leap at the chance of working in the orphanage!
 
My personal opinoin is that if liberal Protestant types want to practice Catholic spirituality then they would be better off just converting, rather than trying to cherry-pick mystical spirituality while they continue to reject many of the teachings of the Church. It’s cultural misappropriation in my mind. I do know some former Methodists who are really into Catholic mysticism (to a degree which sometimes causes me to shake my head a bit) and they did indeed convert into devout Catholics, so it can happen.

In any event, I would not look to any non-Catholics for my spiritual practices, unless it is something quite basic that Catholics should do anyway, such as daily Bible reading or loving my neighbor as myself.
 
I completely understand OP. I don’t have much to impart but I feel we are very similar in our faith journey.

In fact I shy away from any kind of ‘spiritual’ talk. I heartily enjoy an intellectual/theological debate however. I put it down to character types.
 
do_justly_love_mercy said:
I’ve never seen the point of silence, contemplation, meditation,
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In the brief talk below Archbishop Sheen explains that “in vocal prayer we go to God on foot; in meditation we go to God on horseback; in contemplation we go to God on a jet”

This brief talk will put you in the right track for huge spiritual progress in your life of prayer:
 
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Blessings
We start out believing w our head. Later, we mature & commit w our heart. Being Born Again , is hard to understand. It is a fire that overcomes your soul. How do we find the fire. Seek the Holy Spirit.We received Him at Confirmation. Allow Him access to your heart.
Tweedlealice
 
No one has ever seen God but for Jesus.

Through him , with him & in him.

The greatest commandment given by the only person who saw God… Which is written in all 4 Gospels.
And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind…

So for me personally, how can you fully love God without the Spirit ?
 
Best way I’ve heard it explain was by our local Priest.

Imagine the Father and then imagine the Son separately , they speak together back and throw through the Holy Spirit which brings all three together as to speak.

This is how God communicates with each of us through the Holy Spirit.

Through the Holy Spirit we speak back to God (Holy Trinity).

That same Holy Spirit is what renews the face of the Earth and our minds.
 
tweedlealice said:
Blessings
We start out believing w our head. Later, we mature & commit w our heart. Being Born Again , is hard to understand. It is a fire that overcomes your soul. How do we find the fire. Seek the Holy Spirit.We received Him at Confirmation. Allow Him access to your heart.
Tweedlealice
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The Holy Spirit dwells in me through Baptism. And His fire was further intensified in me through my confirmation. Stick around and you will learn a lot here. Seek first The kingdom of God. Blessings.
 
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do_justly_love_mercy said:
I’m very interested in understanding things like the Christological controversies in the early Church.
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And I bet you can’t explain in an intellectual, rational way why and where this interest comes from. In other words, there’s your particular mystical gift right there 😉
 
Blessings
As a Catholic, enjoying the sacraments & mass, you are receiving Jesus & His graces. It’s NOT the same as being a Jew or pagan. FEELINGS are nice & help w joy but there is a song they say,”WE BELIEVE IN THE SUN, EVEN WHEN IT ISN’T SHINING. WE BELIEVE IN LOVE , EVEN WHEN THERE IS NO ONE THERE. WE BELIEVE IN GOD, EVEN WHEN HE IS SILENT.
As Catholics, the BORN AGAIN EXPERIENCE, isn’t stressed. I’ll tell you, when the Holy Spirit, zaps you into the Born again experience, you’ll feel. As we received the Holy Spirit, as young teens, He lays dormant till we avidly seek Him. My thinking on it. We should exhibit some of the gifts of the HOLY SPIRIT.
After the HS awakens in you, the gifts become more evident,
God bless
 
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