Charismatic Retreat

Ok, so anyone who knows me knows that I am a pretty traditional sort of guy. In college my friends and I used to refer to ourselves at the 80 year olds trapped in 20 year old bodies.

However, despite this persona and my proclivity for traditional liturgy, conservative politics, and playfully elegant antique dress, I have enjoyed praise and worship music for a long time. I enjoy country, folk, and rock & roll so why shouldn’t I enjoy these same genres when they speak about Christian themes? This being said I have always thought that praise and worship was secular music with religious themes, something I still believe. As a secular music form it has its uses promoting thoughts about God and even prayer—as Msgr. Luigi Giussani used to say all music comes from the heart and thus conceals the search for God that is in our hearts—praise and worship does this overtly. Back in the states I had experienced the attempt to impose praise and worship onto the liturgy and was not impressed with the results. However, It wasn’t until I got here to NAC that I had my first experience of Praise and Worship combined with a distinctly charismatic renewal element. I wasn’t too impressed by it—quite frankly I was turned off!

So why would a traditional priest go on a charismatic praise and worship Retreat? For two reasons: first because among faithful Catholics it seems to me that there are two main groups, traditionalists and charismatics, and in my diocese there are probably more charismatics, so if I am to be able to shepherd these people I must understand where they are coming from. More importantly, however, is the fact that I am a traditional priest—I believe in angels and demons, miracles and prophecy, healings and even spiritual warfare—intellectually at least, and so if the Spirit is still working in the Church in these ways, as I believe He is, then maybe the Charismatics are on to something. We have lost something of our practical belief in the unseen realities in the Church, I believe as a result of rationalism and modernism. The Church doesn’t want to be seen as primitive or cultic, it doesn’t want to be seen as superstitious, but its not superstition if its real and the Scriptures reveal to us several aspects of the unseen reality that De Fide we must believe.

Anyway, I went on the retreat to understand and to be touched by the Spirit. I went with an open heart and open eyes so that I could see what I needed to, and I must say that it was awesome—I really did feel God working in my life. As I told some people, it is my firm belief that it was God’s will for me to be on that retreat because he used it to heal some real wounds in my heart and to call me to conversion—and also to help me understand my brothers in Christ who pray and worship in this way.

One of the first things I realized was that the subject plays a big role in how the Charisms of the spirit manifest. As I mentioned during the Q&A at the end of retreat its dangerous to say that the gifts of the spirit are limited to the particular manifestation of the Charismatic renewal. Twenty centuries of Catholic Tradition have shown these gifts manifested in many ways that I would be more comfortable with, that are just as authentically Charismatic—so its important not to claim a monopoly on the gifts! Frs. Francis and John Mark of the Intercessors of the Lamb, did well to acknowledge and highlight this fact. As Fr. Francis did say, however, the gifts of the Spirit are non-negotiable. It makes no sense to call yourself a Catholic and be closed to the Spirit of Jesus with which we were sealed at our Baptism and Confirmation. Amen to that!

Thinking about the workings of the spirit within us it seems to me that the gifts of the Spirit are always being poured out into our spirit, we have only to access these gifts. Two things said over and over again on the retreat, that I think are key, were that God doesn’t force himself on us, ever, and that the purpose for this retreat was to unlock the gifts that we already have that are bound up and chained within us because of sin, fear, and unawareness. God’s Spirit is in us, if we truly believe what the Church teaches about baptism and confirmation—how few of us act like be really do believe this. I think many of us think that we have the Spirit in us like a tenant who will do what he wants when he wants without our cooperation or consent. This is the insight of the charismatic renewal movement—the realization that God’s Spirit will not act in us without us. The subject plays a big role in the manifestations of God’s charisms because the Grace of the Spirit within us is completely on the invisible level, beyond sense perception just as God is beyond this realm. Rather by willing to use, that is cooperate with, the Spirit that because of Faith we know we have our Faith influences our intellect which in turn influences our bodies (sensibly, emotionally, and even mechanically).

For me one of the most interesting conversations was about the gift of tongues—a gift which Paul himself says is one of the least of the gifts and yet EWTNs Fr. Corapi says is one of the most powerful. Tongues for me was one of the things that I was most critical of, but as the Intercessors explained they are simply a gift of humble prayer. Praying in tongues is praying in a language you don’t know, because as St. Paul says, we know not how to pray! When praying for an individual there is no question who knows better what the person really needs: God or us. And so praying in tongues is a way to call up our loving desire for the good of the other without wordiness, providing the basis of language, without provide the content, which we believe will be provided by the spirit. This can take the form, I think provided by us, of groaning, sighing, pure sound, or language like sounds. One of the reasons this appealed to me was that it reminded me of something St. Augustine said about the Christians of Milan—he notes that they sang with such joy that the words became lost in pure joy. “Make a joyful noise to the lord.” While I still may have a problem with, as one deacon called it, the “gibberish,” I see the intrinsic value of this idea and its roots in the apophatic theological tradition.

Fundamentally the Charismatic idea is that we trust God wants to and will work through us when we ask him to share the Spirit in us with others. This isn’t magic, trying to command and control God, but a willingness to be his cooperator and instrument. I think it is important to anchor this idea in the Tradition and Doctrine of the Church, which provides an invaluable too for discerning spirits. If Doctrine is an icon of the face of God revealed to man in Sacred Scriptures then it should also be a good indicator of how he will continue to act in the world. I was slightly concerned at a suggested anti-intellectualism that seems to me not to be intrinsic to the idea.