[MJ]Your life is characterized by a remarkable ethic of hospitality; you go out of your way to walk alongside people in their individual journeys. In fact, in one of your books you state that “We can always know when we are in the presence of those who are near to God if they are sensitive to human suffering and human struggles … such people will know, in the depths of their lives, the comfort, stillness, grace, and kindness of God.” Considering your years of work with Amnesty International, how would you say your commitment to social justice and hospitality work together in the larger context of a Christian vision?
First of all, I think that the core of the Christian vision is embodied in the Beatitudes: the Magna Carta of the Christian faith.
Unfortunately, there has been a fragmentation between an understanding of evangelism and social justice. Liberals do the social justice and evangelicals do not. Evangelicals often do the large events, the born again experiences, but infrequently say enough about injustices, war, human suffering or tragedy.
There are actually a few frameworks of the Christian faith. One is the pietist or devotional model. In the pietist method people retreat into the personal/ private world in which they don’t deal with the public responsibilities of the larger issues of hospitality, justice, peacemaking, and environmental concerns.
Then, the second is the model that reinforces power. We call this one the Constantinian or caesaropapism model. In this paradigm, faith reinforces the crassest understanding of power.
Finally, the third is the prophetic vision. The prophets of both the Old and New Testament were always very concerned with the treatment of the single mother, the orphan, the outcast, and the foreigner. Indeed, that prophetic vision gets very congealed in the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount.
So of the three models, the pietist devotion, the Constantinian and the prophetic, I would say I come out of the Hebrew Christian prophetic tradition in which hospitality, justice, peacemaking, and environmental concerns are at the core and centre of the good news.
What’s a current problem you see with how many people approach the “gospel” message?
In my opinion, you can’t tell people about the good news if you only define it by “born again” experiences. It’s not good news to people when we preach almost a gnostic gospel of the soul cut lose from the material conditions of life. A message that leaves the earth being polluted, people living in injustice, and wars going on is not the good news.
That is a very distorted notion of “gospel”; that is not good news to people who are suffering. And so, the question in terms of Christianity is, what do we mean by “good news”?
Good news has to do deal with freeing us from our ego or false self. It also has to do with bringing good news to people who live under terrible oppression and situations of war; bearing the good news is being agents of transformation in those contexts.
What is good news to the earth? Well, you’re not polluting it, first of all. There’s always been a triangular understanding in terms of Christian faith: God, humans, and nature.
The true question of the gospel has been, how do we bring harmony into spheres where there is disharmony and dis-ease? The notion of hospitality and social justice, I would argue, is the backbone of the good news in terms of a mature and integrated understanding of how evangelism brings the good news. I actually hesitate to use the word “evangelism” because unfortunately it has been so distorted and reduced in meaning that it often excludes issues of social justice, hospitality, war and peace, and the environment: the truth is, it’s not good news for many people.
I think there probably has to be a deconstruction of the pietist/devotional tradition so that people can get to the much more integrated holistic tradition of Christianity: a tradition in which justice and hospitality are an essential part. They are like the spiritual air that is breathed.
How do you think a pietist tradition, combined with our fixation on individualism, plays into our retreat from cultural involvement?
Individualism is close to pietism because it says, “my faith is about me.” “It’s my life with God.” “My life with prayer”; this is the sort of liberal individualism which really emerges in the 16th century, and then gets accelerated in certain forms of the evangelical tradition. Pietism is a product of liberal individualism, which is about me, my closet, and my life with God.
That also leads to people saying, “I’m spiritual, but not religious.” You see, with the spiritual but not religious terminology, we’re back to individualism again. Actually, you get the same thing in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
It’s about the protagonist, Christian, who has to leave family and everyone behind in order to complete his own personal spiritual quest. I would actually assert that Pilgrim’s Progress is a quintessential manifesto of individualism. For example, if you compare it to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, you can see that while one is an organic understanding of what Matthew Arnold calls “God’s plenty,” the other is about puritan individualism. I see the same thing in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Milton is much more sophisticated in his presentation of puritan individualism whereas Bunyan is a cruder variety, but they’re the same message.
You can see then that individualism antedates what we call the political theory of individualism, which actually prepares the way for liberal individualism. In other words, it was Protestantism that prepared the way for liberal individualism as a secular philosophy. I argue that it’s not the enlightenment that birthed liberal individualism: Protestantism birthed it.
So far you’ve spoken about the importance of being agents of restoration rather than simply being on an independent spiritual quest. However, in your books and previous conversations, you are very clear that we must not simply act for action’s sake. For example, you emphasize the significance of action coming from a place of contemplation. Can you tell us about the relationship between contemplation and action in a spiritual vision?
Well, if Protestantism on the one hand is the birth of individualism and liberty, it’s also been the death knell of the contemplative. With the coming to be of Protestantism, the monastic tradition is trashed or devastated.
The problem is that Protestantism has resulted in the elevation of the active life: the vita activa. This is the life of busyness, accomplishment, success, of defining one’s worth by these sorts of things. It’s a subordinating or banishing of the vita contemplativa.
The Christian mystic Evelyn Underhill writes that we spend so much time conjugating three verbs: to want, to have, and to do that we’ve forgotten how to conjugate the verb to be. The contemplative is about conjugating the soul and society. The verb to be. The hyper-busyness of our culture is just a secularizing of the Protestant vita activa in that sense.
Our culture is addicted to the vita activa. If you ask people to slow down, to be still, and to be a little quieter, they have the same symptoms of a drug addict or an alcoholic. They get the jitters; their hands start moving in all directions, their feet start twitching, they’ve got to get a blackberry, a blueberry, a thimbleberry, they’ve got to get to a computer, they don’t know what to do, so they pop another pill of the vita activa.
Some of the finest political philosophers and philosophers have attempted to challenge this tendency in the 20th century. For example, TS Eliot would say we are in a wasteland. Indeed, in the Four Quartets, probably his finest work of contemplative poetry, he attempts to offer an alternative: he says that we tend to be distracted by distraction through distraction, which, of course, is the vita activa.
We find ourselves in a capitalist civilization where there’s always the jingle of “try this” or “consume this” or “buy this.” It has created a whole generation of people who are hyper-restless and don’t know where to go to nourish their soul: they’ve forgotten the depths of what it means to be human.
This is why, I think, there is a turn today to an interest in a Catholic tradition because people intuitively sense that there is a mother-load there that we’ve lost, and Protestantism has not been able to fulfill the lack.
When people turn to other faiths, people from protestant traditions worry they’re losing their faith, but really, they’re finding it. Philosopher George Grant once said, “I belong to the Hindu wing of Christianity.” What he was saying was that Christianity has lost its contemplative way. And, a significant element of Hinduism and Buddhism have maintained that, so in fact they can take a person to depths that the current Christian church cannot because it is so fixated on the vita activa.
We’ve lost our memory of the vita contemplativa vision. When we lose our memory, we don’t even know where to go.
This is where Plato is very concerned that people lack memory of who they are meant to be.
How do you suggest we recover a contemplative vision of our humanity, and therefore become equipped to engage in our culture as agents of social justice and hospitality?
I would start by reading George Grant, Martin Heidegger, Evelyn Underhill, TS Eliot, Thomas Merton, and Bede Griffiths: these are all women and men who are attempting to call people back to the vita contemplativa. They are not against an active life by itself; they are for a more discerning contemplative life that then leads to the issues of justice and peace and environmentalism.
When people neglect to cultivate the contemplative, they lose the very ground in which their soul and society and faith emerges: they retreat into a private world in which Rilke says, they keep going in small circle turns.
Contemplation takes us into the bigger world of the imagination, thought, literature, and poetry. When we’re grounded in these things, we are better equipped to enter the public domain because we are no longer simply tantalized and mesmerised by the vita activa.
There is clear historical precedence for this, too. For example, in Plato and Aristotle, the contemplative was the highest form of being. We see this in Plato’s Symposium or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Cicero, Seneca, Augustin. Aquinas, Macrina, Benedict’s sister Scholastica, as well as Chrysostom, and Olympia: these are the great stories of the Christian faith and the fruitful relationship between men and women who were committed to the vita contemplativa. We see that it’s out of a framework of contemplation that these women and men engage in the most important public issues of their time.
For example, Chrysostom is actually banished for challenging the emperor for the luxury and wealth they had while there is poverty on the streets. Chrysostom was the leading critic against the expensive games people went to and the injustice of slavery. Moreover, Olympia was an abbes in a convent of over four hundred nuns who were at the forefront of social justice movements.
In other words, we see examples of people who were grounded in the contemplative and directed their lives in generous contributions to tragedy, suffering, injustices, and war in the late antique world of both the east and west. This is why memory is important. We must remember that the contemplative emerges from a place of stillness, a place of listening, and place of asking, “what am I called to be” and how can I birth these gifts into the world that I live in.
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