Authority and Tradition

I have been pondering how authority and tradition work together.

I have thought for many years that spiritual direction offers an opportunity to relocate the locus of authority from without to within. I mean by this that, rather than constantly looking to scripture, church tradition, books on theology and spirituality, or teachers, preachers, and leaders to learn about God, a person incrementally finds that she can trust her unmediated experience of God. Within each of us is a place of knowing that can discern and know truth. By ‘knowing’ I mean an embodied awareness that is available to be reflected upon and thought about, rather than the end of a process of thinking – though they should never be at odds in the last analysis. This place goes by many names, the most familiar being, perhaps, “a still small voice” or “a sound of sheer silence” (1 Kings 19.12).

So far, so Julian. Spiritual direction is a process of learning to trust oneself.

In Bishop Auckland, there is an art gallery called the Spanish Gallery, “the UK’s first gallery dedicated to the art and culture of the Spanish Golden Age”. The first time I visited it, about 18 months ago, I read this sentence, inscribed on the ceiling:

Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.

~ Gustav Mahler

Now, I’m a fan of Mahler. The best composers show us something original whilst building on the foundation of those who preceded them. Mahler was no exception to this. His assertion has the ring of truth.

Meanwhile, so much of what passes for Christian worship, teaching, and practice is a tiresome stirring of ashes – or a desperate grasping at novelty and entertainment. People are averse to Christianity because it is boring, dogmatic, judgmental, and excluding. I notice how embarrassed I am to identify as Christian. I long to apologise and distance myself from what people generally think about religion. Ashes!

So, I have questions: How do I relate to the Christian tradition? What is the fire I wish to preserve? Where can I find wisdom, profundity, understanding, and transformation (that somehow I know has been around for millennia) clogged up beneath the boredom and the hype?

Given my proclivities, I have taken to reading books about mysticism: William Johnston, David Henderson, Cyprian Smith, and Andrew Louth; which naturally led me back to a first love, The Cloud of Unknowing (in various translations), and William Johnston’s doctoral thesis on The Cloud (twice!); which led inevitably to Cynthia Bourgeault’s two books on Centering Prayer and The Cloud of Unknowing. Parallel to this, I have read some John Horgan, Janet Sayers, Marion Milner, Ron Cole–Turner, and Albert Camus.

I’m digging into what might be called the Christian Mystical Tradition: a connected and evolving weave of experience and thought – spirituality, theology, and doctrine, not unnaturally separated from each other – laid on a foundation of tradition’s embers that are waiting to be nurtured back into fire by a practice of prayer, study, and right living.

Thus Thomas Merton:

Contemplation, far from being opposed to theology, is in fact the normal perfection of theology. We must not separate intellectual study of divinely revealed truth and contemplative experience of that truth as if they could never have anything to do with one another. On the contrary they are simply two aspects of the same thing. Dogmatic and mystical theology, or theology and “spirituality” are not to be set apart in mutually exclusive categories, as if mysticism were for saintly women and theological study were for practical, but alas, unsaintly men.

~ Seeds of Contemplation, p. 197

And Bernard McGinn:

[I]t is important to remember that mysticism is always a process or way of life. Although the essential note—or better, goal—of mysticism may be conceived of as a particular kind of encounter between God and the human, between Infinite Spirit and the finite human spirit, everything that leads up to and prepares for this encounter, as well as all that flows from or is supposed to flow from it for the life of the individual in the belief community, is also mystical, even if in a secondary sense.

~The Foundations of Mysticism, xvi (Thank you, Ron Cole-Turner)

The wisdom of the tradition and the inner authority of knowing God should not be separated. So, what then of spiritual direction and the authority within?

I have come to a new respect for and trust in tradition. We are adrift without it. This has been the damage done by the postmodernism assertion that because values are human creations (true) then all values are relative equally meaningful (untrue). That is nonsense. Tradition harbours wisdom hard-won by our ancestors through their mistakes and failures. We relinquish it at our peril. Of course, we must question received ideas. Of course, we must challenge the prejudices of the past and stand up for inclusion and justice. Of course. AND, over many millennia, our ancestors have reflected upon their experience of life and God, and we are unwise to discard their conclusions thoughtlessly.

But the received tradition is not speculative philosophy. It is not a thought experiment. Tradition only makes sense in the light of living: a grounded discipline of prayer, discernment, and daily living with oneself, in community, and with God. How are we to understand The Cloud unless we try it out? How are we to make sense of Eckhart or Juliana unless we have submitted ourselves to the presence of God?

‘Authority’ is an interesting word. It is linked with the word ‘author’, the root of which has to do with origin. We like to think we are the author of our lives. The tradition says otherwise. We are authored. Authority within – which spiritual direction can lead us to; the still, small voice; the sheer silence – is the Author speaking directly to us in the awareness of our being. This is the trajectory of spiritual direction. This is the longed-for experience of prayer. And this is the message of the tradition, which can aid us, chivvy us, challenge us, help us to put words around our experience, and, with a gentle push in the small of the back, press us to let go into wordlessness.

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