Sacred Fire

**When one reaches the highest degree of human maturity, one has only one question left: How can I be helpful?--TERESA OF ÁVILA/b> Beloved author Ronald Rolheiser continues his search for an accessible and penetrating Christian spirituality in this highly anticipated follow-up to the contemporary classic, The Holy Longing. With his trademark acuity, wit, and thoughtfulness, Rolheiser shows how identifying and embracing discipleship will lead to new heights of spiritual awareness and maturity. In this new book, Rolheiser takes us on a journey through the dark night of the senses and of the spirit. Here, we experience the full gamut of human life, pleasure and fervor, disillusionment and boredom. But, as Rolheiser explains, when we embrace the struggle and yearning to know God we can experience too a profound re-understanding to our daily lives. “What lies beyond the essentials, the basics?” Rolheiser writes. “Where do we go once some of the basic questions in our lives have been answered, or at least brought to enough peace that our focus can shift away from ourselves to others? Where do we go once the basic questions in our lives are no longer the restless questions of youthful insecurity and loneliness? Who am I? Who loves me? How will my life turn out? Where do we go once the basic question in life becomes: How can I give my life away more purely, and more meaningfully? How do I live beyond my own heartaches, headaches, and obsessions so as to help make other peoples’ lives more meaningful? The intent of this book is to try to address exactly those questions: How can we live less self- centered, more mature lives? What constitutes deep maturity and how do we reach that place? And, not unimportantly, what constitutes a more adult, Christian discipleship? What constitutes a truly mature following of Jesus?” As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke suggests, “Live the questions now.” In Sacred Fire, Rolheiser’s deeply affecting prose urges us on in pursuit of the most holy of all passions--a deep and lasting intimacy with God....

"Ronald Rolheiser is one of the great Christian spiritual writers of our time, as well as one of my own personal favorites.  I have read, and recommended, his beautiful book The Holy Longing more times than I can remember.  His sequel, Sacred Fire, is a superb book--one to give to a seeker looking to find God, to a friend struggling with a relationship with God, to a devout believer looking to deepen his or her faith--or best of all, to yourself, as a way of coming to know the God who desires ever more to know you." —James Martin, SJ, author of Jesus: A Pilgrimage
 
"When Ron Rolheiser writes, it is clear, compelling, and challenging, plus it is about issues that matter to the soul.  Well, here he does it again--and does it well!" —Fr. Richard Rohr, O.F.M., Center for Action and Contemplation, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Autorentext
RONALD ROLHEISER O.M.I., is a specialist in the fields of spirituality and systematic theology. His regular column in the Catholic Herald is featured in newspapers in five different countries. He is the author of the prizewinning The Restless Heart as well as Forgotten Among the Lilies. His book The Holy Longing has more than a quarter of a million copies in print.

Leseprobe
Chapter 1

Discipleship and the Stages of Our Lives

What we choose to fight is so tiny!

What fights with us is so great!

If only we would let ourselves be dominated

as things do by some immense storm

we would become strong too, and not need names.

—­Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Man Watching”

The Seasons of Our Life and Their Interface with Spirituality

The human soul is like a fine wine that needs to ferment in various barrels as it ages and mellows. The wisdom for this is written everywhere, in nature, in scripture, in spiritual traditions, and in what is best in human science. And that wisdom is generally learned in the crucible of struggle. Growing up and maturing is precisely a process of fermentation. It does not happen easily, without effort and without breakdown. But it happens almost despite us, because such is the effect of a conspiracy between God and nature to mellow the soul.

How does it happen? What are the various barrels within which we find ourselves fermenting? How is the soul mellowed within the crucible of struggle? We mature by meeting life, just as God and nature designed it, and accepting there the invitations that beckon us ever deeper into the heart of life itself. But that is a simple cliché, more easily said than done, because as we go through the seasons of our lives the challenges we meet there can just as easily embitter and harden the soul as mellow it.

So we need to be patient with one another and with ourselves. Maturation is a lifelong journey with different phases, human and spiritual. And it has many setbacks. What can be helpful is to have a grasp of the natural seasons of our lives and how these interface with a vision of Christian discipleship and its particular stages. What are the seasons of life and what are the stages of discipleship?

A parable might help set the stage: in his autobiography, the renowned writer Nikos Kazantzakis shares a conversation he once had with an old monk named Father Makários. Sitting with the saintly old man, Kazantzakis asked him: “Do you still wrestle with the devil, Father Makários?” The old monk reflected for a while and then replied: “Not any longer, my child. I have grown old now, and he has grown old with me. He doesn’t have the strength . . . . I wrestle with God.” “With God!” exclaimed the astonished young writer. “And you hope to win?” “I hope to lose, my child,” replied the old ascetic. “My bones remain with me still, and they continue to resist.”

The lesson here is that we struggle with different forces at various times in our lives. We are always struggling and doing battle with something, but the forces that beset us change with the years. When we are young and still trying to establish an identity, these forces are very much embedded in the chaotic, fiery energies of restlessness, wanderlust, sexuality, the quest for freedom, and the sheer hunger for experience. The struggle with these energies can be disorienting and overpowering, even though they are the engines that drive us and propel us into adult life. The process of growing up is rarely serene. It is a struggle, a wrestling match with every kind of untamed energy. Everyone has his or her own tale, usually involving a lot of painful restlessness and a few shameful humiliations, of the not-­so-­gentle passage from childhood to adulthood.

Moreover, it is not that these energies ever go dormant or disappear from inside us; other struggles just set in and begin to eclipse them. As we sort out more who we are, make permanent commitments, and take on more and more responsibilities, we soon find ourselves beset by a new set of struggles: disappointment, tiredness, boredom, frustration, resentment. Consciously and unconsciously, we begin to sense that the big dream for our lives is over, without its ever paying the huge dividends we expected. We become disappointed that there is not more, that we have not achieved more, and that we ourselves are not more, as we sense ourselves stuck with second best, reluctant to make our peace there. All those grandiose dreams, all that potential, all that energy, and what have we achieved? Most all of us can relate to Henry David Thoreau’s famous line: “The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length,…