Editor EMILIO CASTRO

Managing Editors T. K. THOMAS MARLIN VANELDEREN

Editorial Assistant JOAN CAMBITSIS

The quarterly of the World Council of Churches

Editorial The articles in this issue of The Ecumenical Review are attempts by people from

different backgrounds to reflect on their own understandings of spirituality. As they do so they throw light on three questions: - Why this sudden interest in spirituality? - What are we talking about when we use this term “spirituality”? - What is its relevance for the ecumenical movement today?

There is indeed a hunger for a different, deeper, more integrated way of living. Two of the writers here speak of this when they describe their childhood in traditional settings - environments where they experienced ordinary daily life as shot through with religious meaning; communities bound together in mutual responsibility and celebrating that belonging; a connectedness with creation which gave meaning to life. In pointing to this hunger a Western writer said years ago:

The question is.. . whether.. . the Church will be enabled by God’s grace to discover a new synthesis between a saving Gospel and a total, unbroken unity of society. For there are many who feel that the spiritual sickness of the West, which reveals itself in the divorce of the sacred from the secular, of the cerebral from the instinctive, and in the loneliness and homelessness of individualism, may be healed through a recovery of the wisdom which Africa has not yet thrown away. The world church awaits something new out of Africa.’

How passionately that is echoed by the women in Heidemarie Langer’s article on

What has been lost is justice, the sharing of goods and gifts. What has been lost is the possibility of living peacefully together. What has been lost is the wisdom of the opposite poles and their harmonious coordination in dark and light, female as well as male, above as

what was lost and found:

’ The Growrh of the Church in Buganda, J.V. Taylor, London. SCM Press. 1958, p.259.

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THE ECUMENICAL REVIEW

well as below, heaven and earth. What has been lost is the harmony with the regularities of nature, astonishment at the miracle of the diversity of races and species, of the equal worth and distinctiveness of us women and men. What has been lost is thc harmony of emotional and rational knowledge, of intuition and reason, flesh and spirit. What has been lost is the grateful acceptance of boundaries and finitude.

There is a hunger, an ongoing search, and there are discoveries. Something new, yet old, is being rediscovered. Listen to this from the article by Don Battley:

Many of the younger clergy and laity have alreacly decided that there is no future in Modernist Liberal Protestantism, and these people are already going in the direction of a full-blooded apostolic Christianity.. . .

But if you look at the church worldwide, this is not just a direction, it is a living reality - including the “full-bloodedness” of the spilt blood of martyrs. We are witnessing the work of the Holy Spirit in bringing to birth at the base of the church a way of living the Christian life which connects prayer and struggle, biblical reflection and political analysis, the eucharist with the life of the world. As in those earliest days of Christianity it is often amongst the poor that the new life has room to grow. One group on one front line of the struggle says: “Our spirituality is contemplative, charismatic and politically conscious.”

The Sixth Assembly of the WCC in Vancouver was a clear expression of the deep search for spirituality, evident among churches all over the world. The liturgical life of this Assembly was not an accident. It was the culmination of a long pilgrimage of the World Council of Churches, looking always with more and more passion to express its real being, its ecclesial and spiritual ruison d’trre. Behind the worship of the Assembly was the recognition that confronting the great problems of humanity, our human resources are utterly inadequate, that only through a new and radical grounding of our actions in the very heart of our Christian conviction will it be possible for us to come by the courage, the patience and the perseverance to continue our struggle, that for the Christian there can be no struggle if it is not undergirded by and grounded in a deep and pervasive spirituality.

The ecumenical movement serves as a meeting place for the diverse spiritual traditions of our churches. They are our common treasure, containing as they do the essential ingredients of what we describe as ecumenical spirituality. The articles included here reflect our diversity; they also point lo our fundamental unity which is the gift of the Holy Spirit.

The other religions of the world have their own spiritual traditions, and in recent years they have had a considerable impact in Western countries. Men and women, especially the young, weary of material affluence and disillusioncd in the pursuit of secular utopias, have been seeking consolation and meaning in the spiritual disciplines of Eastern religions. We include a few articles on spiritual traditions which are not Christian, because in the search for an ecumenical spirituality we need to commit ourselves, in humble openness, to discern the work of the Spirit everywhere.

In the WCC we are organizing now a centre of resources for the worship life in the parishes. We are collecting music, liturgies, prayers from the most diverse traditional and cultural contexts, in an effort to serve as a centre of reference for all those who are concerned with the improvement of the liturgical life of their churches and the deepening of spiritual life in their congregations.

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It is also within this common search for spirituality that we should understand our longing for a common eucharistic celebration. There are many doctrinal difficulties and canonical regulations that make it impossible at present. But we need to confront this problem, not so much in its ecclesiological or canonical dimension, but in its dimension as a unique spiritual event, absolutely necessary for our pilgrimage in faith.

Whatever else spirituality is about, it is about discipleship. During a discussion in Geneva in 1984 Metropolitan Anthony of Romania challenged a small group of the Executive Committee and staff to give a one-sentence definition of spirituality. His own was: “a life lived under the guidance of the Holy Spirit”.

The life of discipleship is always in and for the world. As Frieda Haddad points out, “the Orthodox understanding of the monastery is of ‘high places’ of worship and nourishment wirhin rhe local church to which people come to be refreshed”. Even the contemplative vocation is never for escape; rather it is for “solitude for solidarity”, as suggested by one of the articles in this issue. Mark Gibbs, whom we salute here for his lifetime stxuggle to wake up “God’s frozen people” and to make the church take seriously the vocation of the laity, insists on the arena of the Holy Spirit being the world and work and family.

However, monsters are bred in the name of spirituality and not least today. False and distorted spiritualities abound and we need each other as a mutually correcting community, gathered around the Bible, bringing the perspective of history and tradition and with the gifts from the many-hued cultural heritage of Christianity. This is why the small WCC consultation in December 1984 in Annecy on the search for “A Spirituality for Our Times” found itself compelled to address the question of discern- ment: “What are the marks of the spirituality to which the church is being called today?’ It was a first step in an exploration which will, and needs to, continue and for which the churches all over the world are the resource.

What other significance does this attention to spirituality have for the ecumenical movement? According to Max Thurian, the convergence statement on “Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry” “invites a real inner spiritual conversion”. So often it is not that we do not know the way forward. It is not that we cannot go forward, we will not. It is at the level of will that a deep conversion is needed.

Will we for the sake of justice.. . Will we share our goods amongst each other? WiN we die to pride of churchmanship, to special interests?

Most of the articles in this issue of the Review were secured by Ms Gwen Cashmore, director of the WCC Sub-unit on Renewal and Congregational Life and moderator of our Task Force on Spirituality. We are deeply grateful to her and to her colleagues in the Sub-unit.

EMILIO CASTRO

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