[Catholic Caucus] Listening to the Holy Spirit or the Spirit of the Age?

National Catholic Register ^ | October 14, 2023 | Larry Chapp

[ebb tide]

There has been a lot of talk at the Synod on Synodality about listening to the Holy Spirit to see where it is that the Spirit wants to guide the Church. But what is not being mentioned is just what, exactly, this means.

Furthermore, little has been said about how to distinguish within ourselves between the Holy Spirit’s authentic voice within us and other “spirits” that are not from God and which can lead us astray. There is instead a kind of vague concept of the Holy Spirit as a kind of oracular voice within us where a conflation takes place between my own feelings about my experiences and the Holy Spirit’s promptings. 

Therefore, there is a grave danger that, in our culture, with its therapeutic view of the self as the creator of its own “truth” and a hyper-individualistic concept of the moral conscience as the generator of its own moral truths, that the category of individual “experience” is being given more weight than it deserves. 

In other words, the process is the point. But is this not rather vacuous? Are we not therefore a bit justified in wondering if the word “discernment” is code for the relitigating of various “opinions” that the Church has, repeatedly, and over many centuries, frowned upon or even denounced as grave errors?

The Church has a long and profound tradition of great spiritual masters who have developed over the centuries proven methods for how to properly discern the Spirit. And in all of them there is a marked emphasis on the need for ascetical discipline, the purgation of vices, prayer, fasting, lectio divina (prayerful reading of Scripture), spiritual direction and contemplation of the doctrines of the Church, before one can reliably gain some assurance that one can discern the Spirit speaking to them.

[ebb tide]

It is strange indeed, since the Pope is a Jesuit, that there has been no mention of one of the greatest spiritual methods ever put forward for discerning the Holy Spirit: the Ignatian method for reaching a state of “indifference” toward my own feelings, opinions and subjective dispositions, before one is ready to finally hear the Spirit.

[ebb tide]

Ping