The following “comment” from Connie Howard is too good to leave languishing in the comment section.

Connie responds to Rediscovered Gospel

This is for readers out there potentially discouraged about their inability to spiritual discipline, their inadequate interest in things spiritual, and in many cases, their powerfully negative emotional reactions to language of the church or of self-sacrifice.

Steve talks about spiritual disciplines that have been instrumental in his life, and says they are a good way of keeping desire alive and opening the door to rediscovery and new understanding of the gospel. I’d like to propose yet another path by which we can rediscover the gospel.

I spent so many years, too many, berating myself for my inadequate practice of spiritual disciplines, until I learned from Kathleen Norris that in fact all our actions have holiness potential, and that the quotidian hum of domestic and family life are in fact spiritual acts if we see them as such. And more recently, from Ronald Rolheiser and from my own experience, I’ve discovered that going to work, or reading the newspaper or reading the writings of theologians as they try to put words to the mysteries of God, or reading novelists and poets who try put words to the mysteries of human experience, or listening to a child, or sharing a glass of wine and conversation and laughter with friends, are spiritual acts also. Not spiritual disciplines technically, but serving the same purpose.

The gospel is about Incarnation, so to take the time to pay attention to the heart-break and joy of the world around me as told in the face of a child or a friend or a spouse or a parent, or in the news, or in a novel is very spiritual, and becomes an avenue for rediscovering the gospel, for allowing it, the message of grace and incarnation, as Steve says, to read me.

For a number of years during the 90’s until a couple years ago, I used to escape to Ephphatha house, a small Catholic community, and take part in the daily Chaplet of Mercy and Liturgy of Hours. We were a sparse and motley group, aging and bent, a few scattered misfits.

We sat in silence. When the Chaplet began we repeated at length, “For the sake of your infinite passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.” Voices, some halting, some frail, some not, made a foray upon the void. But so weak and hollow and barren and seemingly parochial was this whole effort that I despaired for the survival of Ephphatha into next week.

Leaving, I felt emptier than I did when I came. Maybe that’s not completely accurate, it’s more like I felt the familiar longing more deeply. My emptiness became emptier. But I kept going back. It remained one witness to the resurrection. It also somehow sharped my desire for God and displayed for me a kind of spiritual poverty, and curiously, hope crept in.

While I was there I remember thinking that I would feel embarrassed to bring someone from our church here. I thought that odd but upon reflection it’s probably because there so little here, or so little “here” here.

I wouldn’t counsel anyone to go to Ephphatha. Places like these need to be “personally” found. But it still strikes me as weird to think that the Christian church has these places that are apparently “other” to each other. Ephphatha is a different climate; almost pain inducing in its “uselessness”, yet for me, it was necessary.