Breathed into Wholeness: Catholicity and Life in the Spirit. #88
Breathed into Wholeness:
Catholicity and Life in the Spirit
by Mary Frohlich, RSCJ: Professor of Spirituality at Chicago Theological Union
Beginning the Précis by Helene O’Sullivan, MM
Foreword by Ilia Delio
“Catholicity” is a word that evokes a consciousness of wholeness that is dynamic and engaging, a spiritual connectedness to the fullness of life. Catholicity is a word coined by Greek philosophers to describe cosmic wholeness. It entered into Christianity to describe a new cosmic whole where God is center. This divine center of vitality is the Spirit of God.
The “breath-less” world that we live in today is in dire need of a renewed center of connectivity, a reawakening of the Spirit as the vitality of life. The author’s approach to this urgent task is to develop “catholicity from within.” The Spirit is the bond of interpersonal love who mediates divine communion to creatures. The Spirit is the mediator of love who is both sharer and shared, giver and receiver, lover and co-beloved. Where the Spirit of God is, there is newness and creativity of life. Saint Paul wrote that the Spirit is constantly working through the unfinished beingness of creation into the fullness of life. The Spirit is God’s fidelity to life, forever breathing new life in us.
To be fully alive is to inhale the gift of divine love and to exhale with the gift of one’s life. The Spirit of God constantly searches our hearts and invites us to co-create this world in loving freedom where God and creature are entangled in the breath of new life. How do we develop a consciousness of whole-ness in a breathless world of anxiety and competition?
How can we overcome narrow individualism by expanding personhood to include all creaturely life?
The author offers a simple paradigm:
Breathe in and Breathe out.
This is God’s rhythm, God’s Spirit. This breath of life enkindles a consciousness of the very gift of life. God breathes in and all things are created anew; God breathes out and everything dances in its unique personality, filled with God. To live in a spirit of catholicity is to live with deep awareness of God’s life everywhere present and filling all things, the life of the whole.
It is in and through the Spirit that the activity of God permeates the world and promotes all that is life-giving. Our primary aim, therefore, is not so much to develop a new theology of the Spirit as to explore the relation between human spirit and divine Spirit.
In doing so, we compare the interaction between divine and human spirits to the rhythm of breathing: God breathes in and all things are made whole and gathered into God; God breathes out and each thing dances forth into its diverse individuality, still filled with God. Catholicity concerns this rhythm of divine “in-gathering” and “diversifying.” On that basis we develop a model of the “catholicizing” (wholeness-seeking) spirit and explore how to enhance its life.
Chapter 1: Catholicity from Within
From a “Below-Above” Paradigm to a “Within” Paradigm: A traditional “from above” perspective focuses on the revealed action of a transcendent God who is ultimately the creator of life and spirit, while a strictly “from below” perspective, such as that of science studies what can be measured, documented, and verified in the physical and/or social worlds.
Fifty years ago, Christopher Mooney noted that all Christological doctrines begin “from below” ~ that is, with people experiencing Jesus and trying to understand him. Our approach here builds on developments in theology that open the door to a paradigm of observing God acting “from within” creation.
Theologically, this approach is based in the conviction that the Spirit of God has been, and is, active always and everywhere in creation. Thus, I do not envision the Holy Spirit as an independent character but rather as a Person within the divine Trinity and the fullness of the activity of the Holy Spirit cannot be envisioned apart from the complete participation of the Trinity.
Denis Edwards develops the image of the Spirit that breathes in creation. He writes:
“As the universe expands and evolves in an emergent process, it is the Breath of God that empowers and enables the whole process from within. The Spirit enables the emergence of the new at every stage from the first nuclei of hydrogen and helium, to atoms, galaxies, the Sun, bacterial forms of life, complex cells, the wonderfully diverse forms of life on Earth, and human beings who can think and love and praise.”
Edwards refers here to scientific theories of “emergence,” which assert that over time, natural dynamics can produce new levels of complexity that operate in ways which are not predictable. Emergence theories do offer a way to envision creation as bearing within itself an endlessly creative potential that is not locked in by what we currently are able to see and understand.
From a theological perspective, this is an opening for a theology of the Spirit as working in creation from within.
Deep Incarnation
The theology of “deep incarnation” is a more recently developed approach to articulating a “from within” approach. “Deep incarnation” is the view that God’s own Word was made flesh in Jesus the Christ in such a comprehensive manner that God, by assuming the particular life story of Jesus the Jew from Nazareth, also conjoined the material conditions of creaturely existence (“all flesh”), shared and ennobled the fate of all biological life forms (“grass” and “lilies”), and experienced the pains of sensitive creatures (“sparrows” and “foxes”) from within. The theology of “deep incarnation,” then, is another way of articulating what Teilhard would call the cosmic nature of Christ as totally implicated in every aspect of the evolving physical universe.
Spirituality and the “Within” of Experience
Spirituality is a lived experience of the human spirit desiring, seeking, and celebrating communion with what is perceived as worthy of love and self-giving. The perspective of “catholicity from within” is that the Spirit of God in mutual indwelling with the human spirit fuels the spiritual urge to find and participate in ever more profound dimensions of communion with what one perceives as worthy of love. This is true of all human beings, even prior to conscious awareness or intention to seek God explicitly. Of course, as in any relationship, conscious intention and commitment open far greater potential depths of communion in the Spirit. Yet the essential longing is built into us; we seek the ecstasy of belonging to a greater whole.
Spirit as “Field”
Considering our focus on how the rhythms of the Spirit play out in human life, we introduce here a helpful comparison or analogy.
The Hebrew word ruach is both the breath of life that God breathed into the human being made from dust in the Book of Genesis, and the wind or storm that blows over the formless void at creation. While the metaphor of breath evokes the vitality and the intimacy of the Spirit, the metaphor of wind evokes the vastness, variability, and unpredictability of Spirit as always with us yet “other.”
Wind has some characteristics that make it a good analogy to the “field” in field theory, which some theologians have proposed as a helpful way to think about the Holy Spirit. The value of field theory is that it shifts focus from individual particles or objects that exert force upon one another to an influence on all of us.
Wolfhart Pannenberg, who may be the most widely known theologian to have presented the field analogy, responds that the broader concept of field theory is not limited to its meaning in physics, since there are also field theories in psychology, sociology, and mathematics. Familiar examples of such physical fields are gravity and magnetism, which measurably move objects without having material presence.
In psychology, a field is understood as the total life space encompassing everything that influences a person and that the person influences. Pannenberg does not claim to use the term field in exact correspondence to any of these scientific fields but instead develops it uniquely as a theological example. The Holy Spirit, then, is like a field of force or energy in creation that animates and unites all things and draws all toward consummation.
God can give creatures freedom in space and time while being “the ground or the field in which the drama of creation unfolds.” The divine Spirit-field is eternal because it is simultaneously present to all of history and all of life.
Thus, the field analogy for Spirit offers a view that combines the independence of creation with God’s eternity. It also describes how individuality and radical interconnectedness are both integral to each created being. Theodore James Whapham summarizes:
“The spirituality of God is constituted by the field of being which allows the other to be in its own uniqueness and independence while simultaneously securing the unity of the individuals through their interrelationships.”
The inner capacity of nature to self-organize into new, more complex forms, and sees this being accomplished by the mechanism of random events working within law-like regularities over deep time. If the source of nature is the Creator Spirit, then divine power is acting here in a self-emptying, infinitely humble and generous way, a Christic way, endowing the universe with the capacity to become itself. It is as if at the Big Bang, the Spirit gave the world a push saying,
“Go, have an adventure, see what you can become.
And I will be with you!”
In more classical language, the Giver of life not only creates and conserves all things, holding them in existence over the abyss of nothingness, but is also the dynamic ground of their becoming, empowering from within their self-transcendence into new being. This is not a denial of omnipotence, but its redefinition.