Sources for Paulist Spirituality: Part 2

Paulist Spirituality – A Personal Take II

Certain themes from the Paulist heritage have been particularly fruitful for me as I try to relate them to my own experience:

Community

Hecker said: “A Paulist should cultivate personal freedom without detriment to the community spirit; and vice versa…” For him, it was a liberating experience to recognize that the same Spirit who was at work in the soul was at work in the community of the church. Spirituality is a shared reality, and is evident in our deep capacity for relationship. Recognition of the communal sources of our spirituality can lead us not only to appreciate our diversity, but to see and utilize our complementarity.

Paulist mission pushes us to the margins of the church. Mission activities like evangelization, reconciliation, and ecumenism are practiced at the boundaries. They call for courage and risk. We can go to the margins of the community because we are fed at the center of the community. We must look for communal sources of nourishment for our spirits and our mission.

Nowhere are we more at the “center” of the community than at the Eucharist. Caring for the authenticity of our communal relationships becomes a spiritual discipline that bears fruit in, and is strengthened by, celebration. We are nourished by our place and activity within the body of Christ.

We have to find those people and care for those relationships that feed us at whatever level — friendship, work, community, family. More than that, this means cultivating certain relationships where we are able to share the spiritual journey explicitly. This requires a spiritual discipline of sharing our identities and what really matters to us. Our “faith sharing” and communal prayer become truly meaningful as they reflect the truth of who we are and our care for one another.

Individuality

Hecker said, “Great fidelity in action, with a great and large freedom of action, should be the spirit of our Community.” In this I hear an appreciation for the dynamic balance of individuality and communal life. Recognizing the unity of fidelity and freedom requires trust: trust in the ways of the Spirit who speaks within and among us, and trust in ourselves to affirm the liberty we have through our lives in Christ. This trust makes possible a community in which individuality is held sacred.

Hecker’s optimistic American character, with its stress on individual liberty, also offers a critique of the shadow side of American culture. Instead of celebrating individuality, our cultural environment can promote individualism, egotism, and a negative kind of competition. The Spirit, however, promotes fruits of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (Gal 5:22-23). This is how the individual will thrive: by being attentive to how the Spirit is acting in the soul to bring about its full and unique flourishing.

Contemplation and Action

In his early life, Hecker’s desire for a deeper place of prayer and contemplation in his life perplexed him, given his simultaneous drive for activity. Later he would be able to articulate the unity of these movements: “Genuine contemplation and action are inseparable,” he noted.

Contemplation brought an experience of the dynamic, active nature of God. To be grounded in this experience is to find the source from which directed and meaningful action flows. Paulists recognize that creative and effective ministries flow from this spiritual center; but, because of this unity of the contemplative and active, creative mission activity itself is a source of spiritual awareness, nourishment, and growth.

Devotion to the Holy Spirit

“What a member of another religious community might do from that guidance which is external, the Paulist does from the promptings of the indwelling Holy Spirit,”  Hecker wrote. He also uses the terms “immediate” and “instinctive” to describe our unity with the Spirit.  His devotion to the Holy Spirit, his radical awareness of God active in his life, so formed Hecker’s outlook and activity that this has become the chief note in his charism, his gift to the Paulist community. To cultivate this charism, and to discover more deeply what this devotion is leading us to, will allow us to experience and model the conversion, the power, and the joy we invite others to.

St. Paul the Apostle Church, New York City

Mark A. Villano