It’s not just about external forms and structures, what’s more important is the spiritual depth that shapes the Church,” hears Pedro Esteva.
As Lent begins, many Catholics ask what shape these forty days should take. Giving something up. Adding extra prayer. Fasting more seriously. Yet there is always a temptation to approach the season as a series of spiritual tasks, boxes to tick, instead of recovering an intentional way of life.
I sat down with Fr Laurence Freeman OSB during a recent visit to Ireland, who suggested a different starting point. “To do the right thing, you need to be connected to that contemplative experience of being, because being comes before doing.”
Fr Freeman, an Irish Benedictine monk and director of the World Community for Christian Meditation, has spent decades teaching contemplative prayer. In his view, the most urgent task facing Christians today is not increasing activity but recovering the interior life.
“We have created a communication structure which has become toxic,” he said. Social media “is doing tremendous harm for young kids… who are at a very sensitive age, and they’re being really damaged by it.” From infancy, children are “put in front of screens to keep them quiet.”
Lifestyle
At the physical level, too, “we have a very unhealthy lifestyle on the whole,” despite spending “a huge amount of money and time” dealing with the consequences. “It’s not a healthy society,” he said. “It’s a society that has lost its balance.”
The pressures are real, and many are looking to the Church for answers. But renewal, Fr Freeman insists, will not come primarily from structures. “It’s not just about external forms and structures and who says Mass and who’s ordained,” he said. “More important than that is the spiritual depth and the kind of spiritual experience that shapes the Church and brings people together to make Church.”
One of the effects of that is to make the other forms of prayer, like the Eucharist and sacraments, much more meaningful”
That depth, Fr Freeman argues, is cultivated through contemplation.
In Balally parish, now become a Christian Meditation Centre and the first fully contemplative parish in Ireland, he described, children from nearby schools come each week to sit in silence and meditate. “Children take to meditation beautifully,” he said. “They need it actually.” He has seen this “everywhere in the world”. The practice, he explained, “changes your mind. It brings about a metanoia (conversion)… and it connects with the culture.”
Far from replacing sacramental life, contemplative prayer deepens it. “One of the effects of that is to make the other forms of prayer, like the Eucharist and sacraments, much more meaningful,” he said. “People connect with them more.” It becomes “discovering that these are not just meaningless old-fashioned practices, but they are life-giving, provided you come to them the right way.”
Change
This inward turn, however, does not ignore the Church’s difficulties.
“We’re not doing very well at the moment,” Fr Freeman said candidly. Christianity, he suggested, has struggled to communicate the Gospel “as a way of life”. Over time, particularly in Ireland, the Church “became rigid” and “as an institution and as a social institution, it became oppressive”. That history, he acknowledged, “has left its mark”.
The demographic reality is stark. It has been observed that if priests over 75 who are eligible for retirement were to step down, the sacramental life of many dioceses “would collapse” as currently structured. “Another organisation by now would have said, well, the writing is on the wall,” he remarked.
“Change is coming,” he continued. “The question is how do we manage the change? How do we take advantage of the moment, see the signs of the times?”
You can’t go back but it remains a very useful and available way of communicating what the Church
is about”
For him, Ireland’s own Christian heritage offers a clue. The early Celtic Church provides “an awareness of an alternative form of the Church and a different way of being Church and of living in Christ”. It was, he noted, “a contemplative Church. It’s not over-centralised… the spiritual role of women is recognised at a high level. And it has both a contemplative and a missionary aspect to it at the same time.”
That era “left its permanent mark on the Irish psyche and the Irish culture and art”, he said. “You can’t go back but it remains a very useful and available way of communicating what the Church is about.”
Integration
Speaking of the Celtic past and its relevance today, he offered an image of monks on the Aran Islands making soil from seaweed and sand, creating ground where life could grow in an unforgiving landscape. Renewal, he suggested, may require similar patience.
Yet he remains confident that renewal will not be engineered from above. “The Spirit doesn’t abandon the Church,” he said. “Jesus said he would be with us until the end of time.” The Spirit, he added, “intervenes but does not interfere, working gradually rather than dramatically.”
If the Church were to “make a pitch” wholeheartedly for its contemplative tradition and “integrate it with the other ways of prayer”, he believes “it would have a huge impact”. In a culture that has “lost its balance”, the rediscovery of the interior life might be a new beginning.
In this season of Lent, the invitation may be to rediscover that “contemplative experience of being” from which real change begins.
For more see. wccm.org
