Posted on by Kurt Bodling

Luther’s 95 Theses (3 of them, anyway)

If you really, really want to read all 95 Theses from 31 October 1517 to see what all the fuss was about, you can find them easily enough. Today – which some in the Church mark as Reformation Day – I’m just going to post the first 3; plus a few lines from Martin Luther’s later commentary on number 3. Here goes:

"Out of love and zeal for truth and the desire to bring it to light, the following theses will be publicly discussed at Wittenberg under the chairmanship of the reverend father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and Sacred Theology and regularly appointed Lecturer on these subjects at that place. He requests that those who cannot be present to debate orally with us will do so by letter. [There actually was no formal debate following.] In the Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

"1. When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent’, he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

"2. This word cannot be understood as referring to the sacrament of penance, that is, confession and satisfaction, as administered by the clergy.

“3. Yet it does not mean solely inner repentance; such inner repentance is worthless unless it produces various outward mortifications of the flesh.”

Then from Luther’s August 1518 explanation of the Theses, some of his comments on the 3rd Thesis:

“It follows that the three parts of satisfaction (fasting, prayer, and alms) do not pertain to sacramental penance… But since these satisfactions are related to evangelical penance, fasting consists of all chastenings of the flesh apart from the choice of food or difference in clothes. Prayer includes every pursuit of the soul, in meditation, reading, listening, praying. The giving of alms includes every service toward one’s neighbor. Thus by fasting a Christian may serve himself, by prayer he may serve God, and by the giving of alms he may serve his neighbor… Therefore all mortifications which the conscience-stricken man brings upon himself are the fruit of inner penance, whether they be vigils, work, privation, study, prayers, abstinence from sex and pleasures, insofar as they minister to the spirit. The Lord himself showed forth these fruits of the spirit as did all his saints.”

[I especially like that in his next to last sentence he includes “study” as a “mortification.” Something to think about there!]

Luther, Martin. “Ninety-Five Theses, or Disputation in the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences” (1517) Luther’s Works Vol. 31. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1957, page 25;

Luther, Martin. “Explanations of the Ninety-Five Theses, or Explanations of the Disputation Concerning the Value of Indulgences” (1518) Luther’s Works Vol. 31. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1957, pages 86-87.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

birth into maturity

“There is a time for warmth in the collective myth. But there is also a time to be born. He who is spiritually ‘born’ as a mature identity is liberated from the enclosing womb of myth and prejudice. He learns to think for himself, guided no longer by the dictates of need and by systems and processes designed to create artificial needs and the ‘satisfy’ them.”

Merton, Thomas. “Rain and the Rhinoceros.” (1965) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013, p. 221.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

contemplation in community

"And it is unfortunate that even in communities whose observance is supposedly designed to favor contemplation there are elements which seriously frustrate it.

“The regular communal life is usually lived at the tempo of those who are active and extroverted. Impatient of interior subtleties and intolerant of all that does not bring tangible result, these good people want to know, at the end of the day, that they have done something in the service of God. Hence their life is geared to reassure them. The day is divided up into many exercises in which prayer is measured by the clock and by the exactitude with which the ceremonial is executed. Attention is concentrated on exterior performance.”

Merton, Thomas. The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation. Edited and with an Introduction by William H. Shannon. NY: HarperOne, 2003, p. 113. (Merton wrote this in 1959)

Merton was, of course, writing about monastic communities which – if you notice the date – had not even at that point been opened up by Vatican II. It seems to me that the same things could be said about Church-related colleges and about every local congregation: things are lived there “at the tempo of those who are active and extroverted” and not at the tempo of those who are contemplatives and introverted.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

meditative prayer

“In meditative prayer, one thinks and speaks not only with his mind and lips, but in a certain sense with his whole being. Prayer is then not just a formula of words, or a series of desires springing up in the heart–it is the orientation of our whole body, mind and spirit to God in silence, attention, and adoration. All good meditative prayer is a conversion of our entire self to God.”

Merton, Thomas. Thoughts in Solitude. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1958. (pbk ed 1999), p. 40.

This is how we can finally get away from the Sears-catalog-Amazon-wish-list type of prayer that so many Christians are boxed in by.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

diminishment is growth

from a prayer within the text: “When the signs of age begin to mark my body (and still more my mind); when the ill that is to diminish or carry me off strikes from without or is born within me; when the painful moment comes in which I suddenly awaken to the fact that I am ill or growing old; and above all at the last moment when I feel I am losing hold of myself and am absolutely passive in the hands of the great unknown energies that have formed me; in all those dark moments, O God, grant that I may understand that it is you (provided only my faith is strong enough) who are painfully parting the fiber of my being to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance and bear me away within yourself.”

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Divine Milieu. Translated by Siôn Cowell. Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2012, pp. 50-51.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

the perennial tradition

"On that day, you will know that you are in me and I am in you. John 14:20.

“‘That day’ that John refers to in the … epigraph has been a long time in coming, yet it has been the enduring message of every great religion in history. It is the Perennial Tradition. Yet union with God is still considered esoteric, mystical, a largely moral matter, and possibly only for a very few, as if God were playing hard to get. Nevertheless, divine and thus universal union is still the core message and promise–the whole goal and entire point of all religion.”

Rohr, Richard. Immortal Diamond: the Search for Our True Self. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2013, p. 95.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

poverty and simplicity along the way

“Our goal is the renewal of the presently corrupt creation. This makes it clear that the route through the wilderness, the path of our pilgrimage, will involve two things in particular: renunciation on the one hand and rediscovery on the other.” (p. 190)

“The problem is that it is by no means clear what we are to renounce and what we are to rediscover. How can we say ‘No’ to things which seem so much part of life that to reject them appears to us as the rejection of part of God’s good creation? How can we say ‘Yes’ to things which many Christians have seen not as good and right but as dangerous and deluded? How can we (the same old question once more) avoid dualism on the one hand and paganism on the other?” (p. 191)

Wright, Tom. Simply Christian. London: SPCK, 2006.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

silence and awareness

“Silence is not simply about the absence of sound waves. It is concerned with attention and awareness. Silence and awareness are in fact one thing.”

Laird, Martin. A Sunlit Absence : Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 44.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

contemplation, koinonia, liturgy

“In our spirituality, then, there is not to be an opposition between ‘liturgy’ on the one hand, and ‘contemplation’ on the other, with the former being merely communal and outward, for beginners, and the latter being solitary and truly mystical, for the advanced, or something like that. Rather, in the one Christian koinonia our contemplative life is also to be eucharistic and liturgical, and our Eucharist and liturgy are also to be contemplative.”

Hale, Robert. “Koinonia: The Privilege of Love.” in Belisle, Peter-Damian, editor. The Privilege of Love: Camaldolese Benedictine Spirituality. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2002, p. 102.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

persisting in a community of contemplation

"Once a man has set foot on this way, there is no excuse for abandoning it, for to be actually on the way is to recognize without doubt or hesitation that only the way is fully real and that everything else is deception, except insofar as it may in some secret and hidden manner be connected with ‘the way.’

“Thus, far from wishing to abandon this way, the contemplative seeks only to travel farther and farther along it. This journey without maps leads him into rugged mountainous country where there are often mists and storms and where he is more and more alone. Yet at the same time, ascending the slopes in darkness, feeling more and more keenly his own emptiness, and with the winter wind blowing cruelly through his now tattered garments, he meets at times other travelers on the way, poor pilgrims as he is, and as solitary as he, belonging perhaps to other lands and other traditions. There are of course great differences between them, and yet they have much in common. Indeed, the Western contemplative can say that he feels himself much closer to the Zen monks of ancient Japan than to the busy and impatient men of the West, of his own country, who think in terms of money, power, publicity, machines, business, political advantage, military strategy–who seek, in a word, the triumphant affirmation of their own will, their own power, considered as the end for which they exist. Is not this perhaps the most foolish of all dreams, the most tenacious and damaging of illusions?”

Merton, Thomas. “The Contemplative Life in the Modern World.” (1965) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013, p. 228.