Karl Rahner: Christus in the Prisoners

Chr. Herwartz & Chr. Albrecht: The Beginning of Something Being Broken:
See also: RETREATS ON THE STREETS,
in: The Way April 2006 Volume 45, Number 2 page 11 -24

Christoph Albrecht: Sacramental Experience on the Streets

Klaus Mertes: Theological Considerations After the Retreat in Kreuzberg
Chr. Herwartz: The Road to Community

You, who are prison chaplains, have come together here for an hour's meditation as priests. The meaning of such an hour can precisely not be to think out how the charge laid upon you is to be made fruitful and beneficial for those entrusted to your care, but must be directed to considering how such a pastor with such a charge is himself to find God. This does not mean that the task of caring selflessly for others, and Christian neighbourly love itself, are being changed into egotism. We are merely giving scope to the simple, fundamental insight that in our priestly lives we can only serve others insofar as we are ourselves filled with the grace of him to whom we are bearing witness, and whom we are there to mediate to men, in his word, his sacraments, and his grace. Nor is anything changed in this either by our objective official mission or by the power of the opus operatum. For both of these have got to be accepted by men if they are to be effective. But they will only be accepted if those who bring them are such as to make their objective mission and objective grace credible by the quality of their own Christian living. Nor can he simply say 75that selfless service is itself holy, and that the more a person forgets himself in it and dies to himself, the more he will be filled with the grace of God, and the more he will be apt to win his neighbour by the witness of the Spirit and of power. In its positive sense, this statement is true. But it would turn into a dangerous lie if we supposed that it could provide the one single all-embracing norm for our mission. There are no maxims in the spiritual life capable of providing, on their own, a total formula covering the whole thing. There is no way of including everything in one exercise. For we are creatures who, even in this respect, have no abiding city, but must humbly, in our finitude, do many different things in order to reach the whole. So we have got to take pains over our nearness to God if we are to be able to serve our neighbour, and we draw near to God by serving our neighbour: each depends on the other, and yet they are not both the same thing. And that is why, in an hour of meditation such as this, it is our task und our office themselves which bid us to take to heart our concern over our own salvation in the midst of our task.

What we shall be considering during this short meditation can be summed up in two sentences. In the prisoners entrusted to our pastoral care we find Christ our Lord; and in these prisoners we find ourselves, what we see in them being the concealed truth of our own situation.

1. CHRIST IN THE PRISONERS

We find Christ our Lord in the prisoners. We have got to find him there; he is really there to be found, and to be found in such a way that our encounter with him will also be for our salvation and our happiness.

There is no need for me to remind you of your own experience as prison chaplains. This experience, in all its bitterness und horrible realism, is more present to you than anything I could describe or suggest of it: the experience of shattered human existences; the mental and moral defectives; the unstable characters; the psychopaths; the vicious, the smooth, the cynical, the hypocrites and liars; the merely impulsive, the victims of circumstances, of addiction; the inevitable recidivists, the religiously impervious, the poor devils, the imbeciles. Even though this kind of experience is not the only one that you have in prison, even though you also meet people there who strike you immediately as no different from anyone else - normal, decent men -, yet it still remains true that you have often been struck with horror by the humanity you encounter there. You have so often been let down, shown up as stupid, rewarded with ingratitude; so often knocked in vain for admission to hearts that were locked and barred; so often provided help only to be rejected yourselves as representatives of the77 hated system. You have suffered the sense of futility and the hopelessness of all such efforts; you must often have had the impression that all your efforts, your concern, your love, your patience, and your work are being dropped into a bottomless abyss from which no response ever comes. You are men who continually encounter evil in all its dreary, nerve-racking, hopeless, detestable reality. You know all that better than I do. And now let us read the words of Christ, his incredible, provocative, thrilling words: "'Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for ... I was in prison, and you came to see me.' Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see thee ... in prison and visit thee?' And the King will answer them, 'Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.'" (Mt 25, 34-40).

I think that the first thing for you to do is simply to rejoice over these words. They apply to you without any kind of translation, just as they were spoken then. They do not need to be translated and adapted and transported into a new set of circumstances. What you live is a primary, abiding form of life which Jesus saw clearly in its abiding pattern; he gives it expression in a statement which he then raises to the level of a concrete utterance of God's judgement, the judgement which brings world history to its fulfilment,78 treads out as in a wine-press the ultimate meaning of that history, and transforms it into the wine of eternal joy. There are few vocations with such words to rejoice over, few that find themselves being addressed in so unchanged a fashion by the mouth of the Son of Man, with words at once realistically human and divinely heavenly.

But the next response to these words has to be one of terror: you are commanded to find out Lord in these people whom you visit in prison. What a terrifying and exacting task! Do not say that these words are not meant to be taken quite so seriously as that. Do not say that all that is a little human compassion, a certain amount of reasonable allocated help: some of that sober realism which has no illusions but at the same time is not too ready to despair of humanity: which has the humanist optimism to believe in the good in every human being, stimulate it, and give it another chance to do better; and which, when that fails, consoles itself with the thought that after all there are psychopathic conditions which can be as incurable as other diseases and ought not to break one's heart any more than the others: the patients all die in the end anyway, but the human race doesn't let itself get excessively depressed over it. No, no - and again, no. More is asked of you than this.

You are to find our Lord in these prisoners. 79You yourselves are to encounter him there to your own saving benefit. Are we not under the temptation to ask our Lord, impatiently and (as we like to see it) unsentimentally, in the name of sober realism, reason, and our own experience, "When did we see you in prison?" Are we not tempted to say: "We were in the prisons, but we didn't find you there. We found pitiful human beings, poor devils, and cynical criminals. But you? No, not you"?

Perhaps we shall say: "We've nothing against it if you like to be so magnanimous and gracious as to use a sort of splendid heavenly fiction to count these services rendered, these visits to the prison, as if we had done them to you. That's all right, that's fine, we have no objection to a fiction of that sort. But a fiction it remains. You are you and these people are these people. And we did not find you in the prisons. Not there, of all places."

But Jesus says otherwise. Jesus rejects all our realism as unreal. He does not identify himself with these people by a legal fiction, but in such a way that we are, in very truth, encountering him in them. We have got to let his words stand as what they are - and believe them. We can think about how they can be true, but we have got to take them as true. We can be horrified at how little we must have grasped of the self-emptying love of God in Christ, the agape of God, if we80 have not understood that there really is a love in this world - the love of God, that is - which accepts when to us it seems that there is no longer anything there to be accepted; a love which is not a matter of gracious condescension, but truly, in all reality and effectiveness, identifies itself with these sinners; a love which strips itself utterly; in which the lover can no longer find himself except in and through the beloved. We can consider the truths that this love is creative and transforming; that it is genuine and radical even to death, the death of the Cross; that it has dared to descend into the uttermost emptiness of God-forsaken, death-stricken lovelessness and has there been victorious and taken all things to itself; that it is a love which brought the Son of God to make himself a curse that he might really save what is really and inescapably lost - that which is, of itself, dead, without future and without hope; that which grimly locks and bars itself against all love; that which, with cold contempt and unambiguous cynicism, scorns love, purity, kindliness, and loyalty as utopian pretence. It is with such sinners that this love has, in strict reality, identified itself. For otherwise they would not be redeemed. Otherwise, only what is sound in itself would have been saved (whereas no such thing exists, though it often seems to; so that we think that this thing, basically good in itself, has been accepted by God81 because it is good, instead of believing that what was truly lost has been accepted in order that it should be made good). We must think about the truth, accepting it in faith and against out own "experience", that the Lord is in these lost individuals whom we meet in the prisons; that he is in them by his will to love, which calls nothingness and that which is lost by its name and creates it; in them by his patience, by the almighty power that sees, even in this bit of the wreckage of world history, a person, an eternity, a brother of the incarnate Word of God, a beloved, someone to be taken seriously with divine seriousness: sees him as this, or, better, creates him as this, by looking on him with love. He is, in all truth, in them; because the primary mystery of that love which creates and makes one, which is God himself, is not understood, and hence the essence of Christianity is radically misunderstood, unless this improbable, paradoxical truth, with its radical reversal of all our short-sighted experience, is unconditionally accepted in faith.

But if we want to understand our Lord's words and find him in the prisoners, we must not only think, in faith and prayer, about the truth that he is in them; we must think even more about how we can find him in them. For this is the appalling thing, the deadly danger: that we can fail to recognise him, even though he is in these lost, unfortunate brothers of his, one with them. We are liable to82 pass him by; our eyes can be held, our hearts be dull and closed against him, so that we do not see him. In this time of faith and not of sight we shall indeed never find him except in a hidden fashion. When the last day comes, we shall still be amongst those who ask wonderingly, just as much as those who have not visited the Lord and not found him, "When did we see thee in prison, and visit thee?" (Mt. 25; 39, 44). As far as experience goes it will always be like this. It will seem to us that it is not he, that it is not possible to find him in the prisoners. But this is precisely what Christianity is, this finding when we think we have not found, this seeing when we seem to be gazing into darkness, this having when we think that we have lost. And so it is here. We have to seek and find him in the prisoners. And it is not easy. It is possible to ignore him and walk blindly past him, even when you are there in the prisons with your bodily presence and your "carrying out of your duties", even when you have the reputation of being a good prison chaplain.

What does it mean to find Christ himself in his brothers in prison? First and foremost, it means a reverent humility in face of this other human being, who is a child of God and a brother of Jesus Christ, one who is called and beloved by God, one who is embraced by the power of divine love. We all know (and anyone who denied it would be at the very least a Jansenist heretic, doubting God's universal will to save) that every human being still on pilgrimage through this life is called to salvation, beloved of God, and embraced by the grace of Christ, even if he has not yet freely accepted it. We know that we cannot ultimately judge anybody, that we cannot say of anybody with absolute certainty that he is living in God's grace, and so equally cannot say of anybody that he has lost it. And so, as we must with absolutely certain confidence in God hope in God's merciful grace for ourselves, we have the same duty of hope (since we must love our neighbour as ourself) on behalf of each of our neighbours. And we know that in every human being there is an eternal destiny in the making, coming to maturity through all the trivialities of everyday life and commonplace humanity. We know all that. We have never disputed it. But we do not live it. This infinite dignity, this indestructible nobility, this fact, that every human being is infinitely more than a human being, remains to a large extent a sort of thin Sunday-ideology, something we do not dispute in theory because it does us no harm and does not prevent us from sticking to everyday norms and attitudes in the everyday world. But suppose that our sober everyday eyes should look at this neighbour of ours and see through all his physical degeneracy, through the screen of his instinctual life, his conditioning, his psychology insofar as it is physiologically de84termined. Suppose they should see even through all that this other person thinks about himself and desires for himself, through all his self-interpretation, which is never capable of saying the ultimate truth about a man; that they should see through all that fate has done in the course of such a life, in terms of heredity, upbringing, environment, latent sickness, psychopathology; and even through true and appalling guilt, since it too is not the ultimate thing, it too (as Paul says) is embraced and included within the greater and mightier mercy of God. Suppose that our eyes, seeing through all this, should seek and find that which is most real and ultimate in this other person: God, with his love and his mercy, who has conferred an eternal dignity upon this person and offers himself to him, without repentance, in the incomprehensible prodigality of the divine foolishness of love. Suppose that we should see in this way not at some solemn, ceremonial moment but at the point where this man confronts us with his blank gaze, his lack of receptivity, his reek of poverty; at the point where he rises up before us, sullen and resentful, malicious, unteachable, stupidly cunning. Supposing we could indeed see in this way, then we should really come to meet this man with a reverent humility, in which we would realise that we cannot recognise any higher dignity or holier calling in ourselves than that which is present in him.

And if we did look at him like this, in reverent humility, then we would see Christ in him: the incarnate Word of the Father, who is everywhere honoured and adored (whether this is realised or not) whenever one human being is taken absolutely seriously by another; whenever a person recognises that it is impossible to have any experience with a fellow human being, however evil and appalling, which would involve looking through him into emptiness instead of into the mystery of God, in whom is hidden the eternal image of this man, without which (as Angelus Silesius says) God "cannot for a moment live". Man, in his nature and his determination toward grace, exists because God has willed the God-Man: because he has willed himself as man; because henceforth there is no longer any truth of God which is not truth of man; because (this is so only out of free grace, but it really is so) God would not be, if man were not. And so, whenever the most wretched of human creatures, some mean, stupid scoundrel, is received reverently and humbly into our own hearts, it is Christ who is being received and discovered. And - may one dare to say? - there best of all. For where have we a better hope of finding God than in such a case? When the spell of man's own greatness and beauty, his own goodness and splendour, is cast upon us, this may indeed act as a door into the infinite greatness, beauty, goodness, and splendour86 of God. It may, in itself. But we are so apt in such a case to stop short at the human greatness as such. This is something we cannot do with poor sinners, when we discover what is abiding and indestructible in them, when we honour what they perhaps take no account of in themselves, when we believe in God in them, though they do not find him in themselves.

And there is still another sense of finding God in our humiliated neighbour. When we go to meet this wretched neighbour in the way that we should, when we care about him without any supporting feeling of instinctive, physiologically conditioned sympathy, when we forgive even while feeling that we are being made fools of by doing so, when we really pour ourselves out without the reward of a feeling of satisfaction and without any return in gratitude, when our very encounter with our neighbour makes us unutterably lonely and all such love seems to be only an annihilating leap into an absolute void, then that is really God's hour in our life; that is when he is there. Assuming that we don't turn back; assuming that it doesn't get us down, that we don't find ourselves some sort of compensation elsewhere, that we don't complain, that we don't feel sorry for ourselves, that we keep quiet about it and really accept and commit ourselves to the absence of ground under our feet and the foolishness of such love. Then it is God's hour; then this seem87ingly sinister abyss in our existence, as it opens up in this hopeless experience of our neighbour, will be the abyss of God himself, communicating himself to us; it will be the beginning of the coming of his infinity, where all roads disappear, and which feels like nothingness because it is infinity. When we have had such an encounter with our neighbour, an encounter in which we break through the instability of what is earthly in him and seem to fall into void; when we have to let go of ourselves in it and no longer belong to ourselves: when we have denied ourselves and no longer dispose of ourselves for purposes of power or self-enjoyment; when everything in such an encounter, and ourselves too, seem to have fallen away from us into infinite remoteness, then we begin to find God. Then this lonely, silent void of the interior man, who seems to have been as it were destroyed, begins to be filled with God; then we find God, we find Christ, who fell into the hands of the Father when, as he was dying, he recognised his God-forsakenness. At the beginning, this may seem alien to us; this loss of ourselves may terrify us, and the temptation may come upon us to flee in our terror back to intimacy and gratitude and the sense of being loved. Indeed it will often be right and necessary for us to do so. But we should gradually learn to find life in this death, intimacy in this loneliness, God in this forsakenness. It is only when we can do88 this, when we can find and experience God himself in this disappointment of our love for our neighbour, that our love for our neighbour becomes mature, and an act of the Holy Spirit in us. It can then become really long-suffering and patient, without malice, never ceasing to hope, never disillusioned. It will always find God.

It is not to be thought that this means that our neighbour, especially when he is a disappointing neighbour, is simply a means by which we practise ascetical renunciation so as to create that void within us which God then freely and mercifully fills with the unutterable intimacy of his presence. For none of this happens unless we truly love the person in question, truly accepting him for what he is, and not making this love into a means to anything. But if, without aiming at it, this God-loving love to our neighbour does find God while seeking our neighbour, then this lonely experience of God, taking place within the death of all self-seeking, becomes a final possibility for us, a final source of strength for loving our neighbour "to the last". We really die of this love; to die without despair (and despair puts an end to love) can only be done if we die into the infinite life of God. So we must love and seek our neighbour, and not our own fulfilment and perfection, but this can only be done "to the last" if we find God in it and if this true love of our neighbour is embraced and redeemed, preserved and liberated by happening89 within the love of God, as a finding of God in Christ. Anyone, then, who exposes himself to this death-dealing adventure of an unconditional love of his neighbour will find God; and whoever finds God can love his neighbour as himself. He will receive that clearness of vision which belongs to the faith which sees the reality of God even in the most abandoned of men, making him in all truth worthy of being loved with humble reverence.

We find Christ our Lord in the prisoners; we have got to find him there; he is really there to be found, and to be found in such a way that our encounter with him will also be for our salvation and our happiness.

2. OURSELVES IN THE PRISONERS

We find ourselves in the prisoners when we see in them the hidden truth of our own situation.

Every human being is continually running away from himself. Only those saints who have attained perfection could say that they no longer deceive themselves about themselves. Only the perfect have stopped repressing the truth of God within them. The truth that we are sinners; the truth that we are self-seekers; the truth that in a thousand different ways, crude or subtle, we are always trying to God and ourselves; the truth that we are cowardly, easy-going, lazy, refractory servants of God; the truth that we do not90 do what we ought to do: love God with our whole heart and all our strength. Together with the Scriptures and the teachings of the early Church, we can express the content of this repressed truth by acknowledging that we are unfree, prisoners, unless the Spirit of God, his grace, sets us free. We may be free in a bourgeois, legal sense: we may be responsible for our actions, not only in the sight of men but also in the sight of God and his most merciful and just judgement. But if we have not been set free by the Spirit of God into the freedom of Christ, then for all this earthly freedom and its corresponding responsibility in the sight of God, we are nevertheless helpless and hopeless prisoners in the prison of our guilt, our unsaved condition, our inability to perform any saving act.

And these people whom we visit are an image of this: an image of all those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death, imprisoned in the dungeon of their own finitude, the dungeon of a freedom which has not yet been set free by Christ and is still enslaved to sin, the flesh and the power of the evil one. The prison in which your work goes on is an image of this prison of the world, not in an external, artificial sense, through some artificial analogy, but an image in the sense of a manifestation, a true and real type, the making visible of a hidden reality which makes itself manifest and tangible in this real symbol. For no matter what may be the immediate causes of prisons and91 of the plight of their inmates, the one ultimate cause is the guilt of mankind from its beginnings onwards: the guilt which propagates itself through all individual personal guilt; the same guilt which confronts us incarnate in poverty, sickness, and unhappiness; the guilt which is a power in our own lives too, so that what we call prisons and penitentiaries are, to a Christian understanding of things, simply individual cells of a perceptible kind in that one great prison which Scripture calls "the world", "this age", "the evil world", the domain of the prince of this world, the realm of the powers of darkness, death and evil. When you go from your own surroundings into a prison, you do not go out of a world of harmony, light and order into a world of guilt and unfreedom: you stay where you have been all the time. It is merely made clearer to your bodily senses what has been surrounding you all the time: the unfreedom of guilt, the imprisonment from which Christ's grace alone can set us free into the freedom of the children of God.

But (it might be objected), true though all this is, we ourselves are nevertheless those who have been redeemed, who have been liberated into this freedom, we are no longer in servitude to sin, the law, vanity and death! So it is with us; we hope it is; each day we strengthen our hearts anew in this hope, which may often, alas, seem like a hope against hope. We comfort our hearts anew each92 day with this hope, which faith alone, and no experience or pharisaic self-consciousness of ours, can give us. But equally, so long as we are pursuing our pilgrimage in hope, not in vision, and are redeemed in hope, so long as we are still marching and not yet at the goal, we are still as it were prisoners, whose prison door is opening at this very moment, who are suddenly being bidden, by an unlooked-for miracle of grace, to get up and go, like Peter being struck on the side by the angel: "Get up quickly, dress yourself and follow me" (Acts 12, 7-8), while the chains fall from our hands. We are people who have entered into freedom and can be said to have attained it precisely insofar as we do not think of it as a possession that can be taken for granted; insofar as we are aware, in fear and trembling, of whence we come; insofar as we know that we can only receive this gift of the freedom of Christ with impunity, if we accept it simply and solely as our redemption from slavery by the grace of God.

And again: even if we are the redeemed; even if in those who are in Christ Jesus, those who believe in him and love him, there is no longer anything worthy of damnation; even if the ground of our being, its innermost centre, is graced and filled with the holy Pneuma of God; even if, then, what is in us can no longer make us, as indivisible subjects before God's judgement, worthy of damna93tion, yet the heritage of the past is still at the same time ultimately and indissolubly still in us. Or is concupiscence not still to be found in us? Is there not in us that which in the world, the lust of the eyes and the flesh and the pride of life? Are we not sick, compulsive, only too apt to deceive ourselves, egoists, slaves (if only in an attenuated form) to our cravings for this and that? Supposing someone came to us - supposing God came to us, und lit up the interior of our hearts not merely with the cold inexorability of a psychotherapist but with the incorruptibility of the ultimate truth of the Thrice-Holy One; supposing he were to analyse our motives, our attitudes, our behaviour patterns, our secret impulses, hidden even from ourselves; if he were to confront us with ourselves, stripped and naked, as we are, not as we like to appear to ourselves, should we not then have to fall down in terror before this judge of our hearts, crying "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord"? Would not his grace, by which we are made holy, then appear to us as something which we simply are not; would we not have to say, brokenly and with tears, "That is you, that is your inconceivable love, the unreasonable prodigality, so to say, of your mercy; but I am not that; I am dull and cowardly and shut up within myself, I am a confused and tangled bundle of impulses and chances and external determinisms of which it is never possible94 to know at any moment what is genuinely my own, what is mere façade, what is real, whether shabbiness is the humility of the virtue that is in me or virtue is the disguise for the wretchedness in me"? Should we not have to pray with tears, "If thou, O Lord, shouldst mark iniquities, Lord, who shall endure it? Enter not into judgement with me, cleanse me from my secret sin!"?

Should we not then have to recognise and acknowledge that we are not so essentially different from those poor sinners whom we visit in the prisons? Should we not have to say that what distinguishes us from them is merely the fact that the formes peccati, which is in us in the same way as it is in them, has not - because of circumstances which are no merit of ours but matters of situation, fate and chance - brought us into conflict, as it has them, with the external order of men and society? We can indeed be grateful to God for these very circumstances: even extremely so. But does that differentiate us so much from them that, because we are the redeemed, we can no longer see ourselves in them, and must deny that our own image, stripped of its masks, looks out at us from them? The more so as we can never say that they are not in the grace of God, since everything that confronts us in them is just as liable to be sickness as guilt, or to be the guilt of society, in which we too may perhaps have our part, having drawn on it, and continuing to draw on it, for our95 revenue of comfort and bourgeois security and affluence. And the more so again, since we are not certain that we are in God's grace.

So, then, we meet ourselves when we meet prisoners in prison. They present our own image to us, that image which we must face continually, day after day, if we hope to find the grace of God for ourselves; for that grace is only given to those who acknowledge themselves as sinners and build their lives on one thing only, the incomprehensible grace of God who takes pity on the lost. We have no choice: either we are going to go through the prisons like Pharisees, saying "Lord, I thank thee that I am not as one of these, robbers, swindlers, adulterers", or like the publican in Luke's Gospel. He stood afar off, just as our unredeemed feelings find the prisons far off from God, beating his own breast and not someone else's (a thing we are apt to do when visiting in prison), and said "God, be merciful to me a sinner!" (Luke 18, 9-14). Only if our attitude in the prisons is that of the publican in the Temple will the prison become for us poor sinners, a Temple from which we can return justified to our own homes. Otherwise we shall be going into the true prison of our own blindness, hypocrisy, and pride, against which God sets his face, while those inside, perhaps, may be the ones who are justified and free in God's sight.

So, then, we find ourselves in the prisoners,96 seeing in them the hidden truth of our own situation.

In every life, and even in the holiest office a man can hold, there is one deadly enemy: habit and routine. Oh, we need habit and routine. We cannot live for long without them. They make many things easier for us which would otherwise soon be too much for our powers; they may often be a mild narcotic which God has mercifully supplied against the pain of living. But they are also the deadly enemy of our life and of the holy office we hold. They blunt us, they keep us going long after the real substance - spirit and love - has faded out of our work. And thus they may give us a "good conscience" when what we ought to have is a bad one. They make us take credit for our good deeds instead of beating our breasts because there is in them so little love, so little heart, so little humility and reverence for men, even those who are outcasts from society. We must keep fighting this deadly thing, habit, as though it were a cunning and mortally dangerous enemy. This applies to your job, too. It is a grace from God to have his providence sustaining you in this battle, not only through the grace of that holy joy you feel as pastors over someone whom you have been able to bring back to the love of God, but also through all the sharp disappointments and bitterness of the job, all its failures, all the indifference which it meets, all that it can do to97 torment you an wear you down. If these experiences, these hard and bitter ones, force you out of the mediocrity of habit and routine, confront you with the question of what you really are trying to do in a job like this, and compel you to think about the real meaning and grace of such a calling, then this too is God's grace. And - again through the gentle and unobtrusive workings of grace in you - you should come to meet this grace, thinking and praying in the sight of God about what you are and what you are aiming at in this calling. And if, in the course of such a meditation, you also perhaps consider that, in the prisoners entrusted to our priestly care, we can truly and indeed find Christ for ourselves, and that, by encountering in them the reflection and likeness of our own situation, we may be recalled to that humility to which alone God's grace is promised, then such a meditation may well build up to greater fullness and completeness that unity between your calling and your life, your office and your own personal existence, which is, in the nature of things, made possible to an unsurpassed degree of splendour and grace in the calling of a priest.

From: Karl Rahner, Mission and Grace, Volume 3, pp. 74-97,
Sheed and Ward - London and Melbourne 1966,
translated by Cecily Hastings;
the text was supplied by the Karl-Rahner-Archiv
(since mid-February 2008) in Munich

1

The foundation of the retreat and the starting point question are: "What saddens me most? What annoys me most?" These questions are asked to find out behind the 'no' of mourning and annoyance the 'yes' which I affirm quite deeply in my life, more perhaps, as I know it. In this starting point question, put as question about my foundation, there is a memory of the faith confession within the baptism rite.

We are used to it to say in Sunday services the creed, but in a different form as with the baptism rite. There we say 'no', before we say 'yes'; we revoke, before we assure. This is often forgotten, so as if my foundation, with which I enter into life or also into the retreat, were something positive "per se" at the bottom of my existence, something that is temporally and essentially before all negative and endangering things. But the positive actually already consists in the gift, to be able to negate, to be able to say 'No'. So as the act of creation does not simply put something positive into an empty space, but does negate: does part the life-threatening tides, does free from slavery.

This foundation opening in saying 'no' relates me to my concrete environment. It does not lift me beyond reality into an ideal reality. I am not to look for something positive that in reality does not exist so. And I need not peck out the positive from the always ambiguous reality or try to see above all the positive, in order to discover therein the foundation. The foundation meditation is not an exercise of "positive thinking". Rather I find the foundation of the retreat, of my way with God in the critical meeting with reality as it is.

2

To "differentiate" critically is something that already belongs to the procedure of recognizing the foundation. If I want to understand my foundation - the fact that I and other people are created - religiously, then I must be able to understand more deeply wherein this foundation does not lie. That corresponds to the first requirement of the Ten Commandments. The acknowledgment of God, who created and freed me, goes along with the denial of the other gods who ensnare me with their wrong promises of creation and liberation, in order to be able in such a way to destroy and to enslave me.

Hence in the foundation there is thus also a separation from the outset: God stands on the side of creation and liberation. Classically expressed: The experience of divinity is connected with the experience of the ethical: "God is good, there is no bad in him." It may be that in the further process of my history and the history of mankind "dark sides" of God will show up, but the clef before the text of the life with God allows me to read also the dark tones, the minor keys, the ruptures in my life melody before the background of this clef: God is good. He wants liberty, not slavery. He wants the creature, not a puppet. He wants love, not hatred. He wants life, not death. He wants unity, not separation.

The approach to the foundation over an ethical question is an approach over a generally accessible experience. That is actually self-evident. But just when we out of the inner area of faith ask the question about the foundation, then it is often already blocked by too much "knowledge" about the scripture, about the dogmatic tradition of the church, about too many conditions from outside and from others. Then my foundation has only little embodiment in my own experience, but so much the more in the tradition which I met from childhood, and which is based on its part upon experiences of others.

Of course, the experience of others is not at all to be written in small letters; in particular not the experiences which are recorded in the canonical writings of the faith and in the dogmatic tradition of the church. But when I set out on the retreat way, I go on the way of my experience. Well, then it is about the same God as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Father of Jesus, but that does not mean that I will make the same experiences with him.

The ethical is something universal, that means also: somewhat non-exclusive. The foundation, headed for by the experience of the ethical, brings me actually in contact with God the creator, because God is the creator of all men, not only of the faithful. But by that it brings me at the same time in contact with all men, with my fellow creatures. So an individualistic access to the retreat is already in the foundation impossible - as if it would concern only my relation to God. I stand before God always already as member of a body, as part of his creation which belongs to me. I do also not reproduce a special church world when I deal with the foundation question, but I see me and the world before God in their solidarity and in their vocation to unity before and with God.

The "material" of the meditations during the retreat in Kreuzberg is the city. As by "normal" retreats the life of Jesus is meditated with all senses, so I meditate the city with all my senses in the "city retreat". And I meditate on it religiously, i.e.: I count on the presence of God in it.

The meditation on Biblical stories in retreats is not meant only as a work of the fantasy, in order to have a most plastic feeling for somewhat historical. On the contrary, I regard the life of Jesus, the life of Israel with God in the retreat, in order to be - while meditating - in God's presence, and to meet God Father, Son and Holy Ghost. In the gospel as historical text Jesus talks to the disciples, to the Pharisees, to the people. In my meditation of the gospel Jesus says the same words now to me personally, "in the spirit" - exactly the same words; the same words in other words; possibly even new words, like once with St Paul. That anyhow distinguishes religious retreats from mere exercises: I count on it that in them the dimension of mere training is overleapt, and suddenly the great earnestness and the great joy of life are met, the meeting with the living deity. And the same applies also to the meditation of the own life, in particular in the "first week" of the retreat: Here too I do not simply meditate only, in order to become aware of something of me, but I open to God's spirit who will awaken me to something.

If the Bible, the tales of the gospel and also my life are and can be the subject of meditation, the "holy ground", on which I meet the deity, why should it then not also be the city, the life of other people, in particular the life of those who live at the margin of society, i.e. outside of the perspective of my everyday life? Naturally, it need not be Berlin-Kreuzberg; it can be any city. But from the gospel there are accents (hence the gospel always is and remains also the eyeglasses through which I see my life or the city): Jesus promises to be in particular with the poor and sinners, with prisoners, homeless people, prostitutes, hungry, thirsty, and small criminals.

Therefore, in order to speak in the Berlin language, Kreuzberg suits as starting point of the God search better than the Potsdamer Platz, Plötzensee better than the "Goldene Else", the Turkish café better than the pizzeria. That does not mean that one could not also go to the Potsdamer Platz, into the Goldene Else, or the pizzeria. A retreat participant did it: He visited the Postdamer Platz and met there the Tempter.

In our discussion we spoke then for a long time about the question whether one should visit places at all, if one knew that they are inhabited by the Tempter. Biblically spoken: Jesus did not go voluntarily into the desert, but he "was thrown" there (Mk 1,12). And also to Jerusalem did he not go voluntarily, but because he "had to" do it (Mk 8, 31).

But how can a coincidental meeting on the street become a meeting with God?

I sauntered on the street and was addressed by two slightly drunk homeless people, "We waited for you!"

I sat on the drug transhipment place at the Kottbuser Tor, and what happened there became a lecture for me.

I stood in a queue by the soup kitchen and became a guest, due to an invitation.

A flute playing woman by the wayside impressed me, and I became aware that I usually do things only to fulfil functions and purposes.

I talked with a small criminal, and was freed by this meeting from my attitude of judging.

I visited the Reconciliation Church, and felt the pain of the things not reconciled in my life.

To be able to experience a place in the city as "holy place", I have to open, so as I open in the retreat to meet Jesus in the gospel, and God in my heart. But I cannot make the meeting. It must be given to me. It is also important not to allow being set under strain by other people's narrations about other places which became holy places for them. The holy place is for me the coincidental place - the place coincidental for me.

Let's take the example of the two slightly drunk homeless persons who invited me with the words, "We are waiting for you to come! " I sat down by them and spent two hours with them - not in the attitude of the helper, the problem settler, but in the readiness to get a present by their word, by their invitation. I have not in my hand the things which develop. Only later, in the evening exchange I can perhaps discover that this was a holy place and a holy meeting for me.

That is theologically very interesting: The two homeless people did not know that their sentence, "We waited for you to come" became God's word for me in the retreat - just as little as I can know whether I am God's word for others or not. Only: That is just the misery of so many pious people, my misery too:
I want to pass on by my life, by my word, by my charitable commitment something of God's love, I want to be God's word for others - and I am it just so not. To "Christ's letter" (2 Kor 3.3) for me God makes those people whom he wants. And I discover God's working in the message just by the fact that also the messenger does not know at all, whose messenger he is for me in the word that he addresses to me. The letter does not know that it is filled with writing. Thus I am invited to believe. I do not pursue a purpose with the acceptance of the invitation. I follow the invitation, and that is my faith. When the invitation ends I walk on.

In the Eucharist, in the exchange with the brothers and sisters I let give me the interpretation, as I let give me the invitation. But just also in the exchange it is not the brother or the sister who interprets, but here too is the interpretation the present, and it is then most gift when the one who interprets does not know at all (in the moment her/his interpretation), that and which s/he gives to me.

Is it naive to make a retreat in this way? Not only an "exposure" (I expose myself to a certain social borderline situation in order to imagine how it is to be in this extreme situation), but an opening toward God in the "exposure"? Naturally, it is naive, but I do not know how one can open to God at all, without simply reckoning quite naively with him, with empty hands, "poor before God" (Mt 5.1). Without this naivety I am also unable to meditate the gospel, and without this naivety I can also not look after the traces of God in my soul.

How ridiculous sounds sometimes the din and tinkling of theological theories, which cannot admit that it is naivety that lies at the bottom of all their discourses, a naive reckoning with God. There is a naivety of faith, which has to be protected against all fundamentalist pocketing, against all experience orientated religious mistakes. That can only be done by serious self-examination, and by the readiness to let oneself be examined time and again: Is it I who is doing something here, or do I really do nothing, so that somewhat can actually happen that is not be done by me? Faith is a going into darkness, mystery, things beyond me, which cause me to stutter and to become silent, which make me weak and vulnerable. Faith is naivety at the price of the renouncement of home-made securities, of mad experiences, and impressive education. The non-naive language of theology has only the purpose to protect this area of naivety from being pocketed - and also against the intimidation attempts of great words and systems. Because also the great words of theology cannot be understood without faith at all.

Are such retreats "Ignatian" retreats? I hear asked. But who then has the monopoly to know which retreat is an "Ignatian" one? Were the old lecture retreats, only because they were not individually given retreats, not "Ignatian"? The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius ("Ignatian") are not to be pressed into one form only. I see a lot of "Ignatian" elements in street retreats: They take place in an environment, in which just also Ignatius and his first companions preferably lived, especially also in the time of their own Spiritual Exercises and "retreats". "The street is our house", Nadal would say. The "exercises" speak of the longing to follow the poor Jesus poor - where then should you be able to discover the poor Jesus better than among the poor?

The Spiritual Exercises speak especially in the First Week of conversion, in view of the encounter with the merciful God - where else do I experience my need of change more clearly than where I meet the stranger? Perhaps only there where I suddenly, unexpectedly meet the victims of my guilt, of which I had not at all been completely conscious myself.

The "Second Week" begins with the Incarnation - where then can I meet God more than in living human beings? Christianity is not a book religion. The Father in Heaven dictated no text to his Son on earth. The gospel as book can become mere letter; it can ossify to mere letter and knowledge, mere education and Bible knowledge. But God's word of the gospel is above all incarnate in men today and here. I at least could not understand it otherwise as "God's word" at all, also not the book itself, so far the gospel is also a book.

"Looking for God and finding him in all things" (Ignatius) - and just on the street, in the encounter with people stop this search? The street serves as lecture: the discovery of the tales of the gospel on places of the city in which I live. That is a way to make Ignatian retreats. In particular "Ignatian" retreats are not a play, because if therein the present of the meeting with Jesus is given to me, then it will probably be connected with changes of my life also in the time after the retreat - not with a great Pelagian "yo-ho!" in form of "good resolutions", but in small steps which are confirmed by religious joy (see "Rules to Distinct the Spirits"). And therein again something special "Ignatian" of the Spiritual Exercises will appear: Ignatius and the first companions offered Spiritual Exercises above all to searching people, and to people in crisis situations. Because the goal of the exercises is not simply stabilization of the status Quo by those who take part in a retreat, but "fruit": something new, some change, and some new step.

Berlin 25.8.2001

About ten years ago a young Jesuit asked if he could make a retreat in the community flat located in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. All sorts of questions arose. ‘Where are you going to do it? There are so many people here, living at such close quarters: people who have come to us for help from prison or from psychiatric care, refugees, and homeless people. There is no peace and quiet! And I’ve never given a retreat before.’ But the young man just dismissed all the doubts and came.

There was no chapel where he could pray undisturbed. But that did not matter, because there are many living tabernacles in which Christ is present. The flat was an important place of meditation during his retreat, where he could listen attentively to God’s call and pray among strangers, the hungry, and the sick. He also meditated near the site of the Berlin Wall, and close to other wounds in the fabric of the city: bomb sites, and ostentatious new buildings symbolizing wealth and greed. On his way to church one day, he suddenly saw a beggar sitting on the steps of the U-Bahn, the underground railway. The scales fell from his eyes and he was given an answer to the questions that were concerning him. All of which made the Kreuzberg community realise how privileged they are to live where they do, and what a good place their crowded, noisy flat might become for making a retreat.

This is not the only gift that the Kreuzberg community has received from a spiritual searcher. A priest came who found that he could no longer read and meditate on the Bible. It had become nothing more to him than a book that he needed for work, in order to preach. It no longer had anything to do with his personal life of faith. So hew was given a story from everyday life for his meditation each day. Then he decided to go to a quieter house on the outskirts of the city for a day to meditate in silence. Before he went he was sitting at the kitchen table, going over the day he had just had. While we were talking the doorbell rang, and a stranger entered—he looked like someone needing shelter. He came and sat as the conversation continued. After half an hour the stranger said, ‘Right, now, let’s go’—he too wanted to drive to the outskirts of the city and stay the night. So they both went off together.

In the next day the two of them were tidying the house where they had slept before returning to the city. The priest told the stranger that he should take the rubbish out to the bin; the stranger replied ‘take your own rubbish out’. The priest was immediately taken aback. ‘Yes’, he thought, ‘I am always getting other people to deal with the rubbish that I don’t want to carry’. He said goodbye to his companion, whom the community has never seen again, and came back to Kreuzberg for his daily interview. He had begun to pray for his own conversion, and on the last day of his retreat he was able once again to connect a story from the Bible with his own life.

The First Group Retreat

Then an older Jesuit arrived, an experienced spiritual director. He wanted not only to make his own retreat in Kreuzberg, but also to direct a retreat for Jesuits with one of the community afterwards. The homeless shelter was closed for some weeks during the summer, and so the group could have a room with some mattresses to sleep in, and a kitchen. In the evenings it would meet, after a service in the church room, for a meal and—to our surprise—to share about the retreat day. Nobody had planned to do this; everybody had intended to make an individually directed retreat with one of the two designated directors. But such openness developed in this simple place that nobody wanted to withdraw with a guide into a mere one-to-one conversation. So the group remained together, and discovered how helpful others’ searches could be as we pursued our own. During the day the Kreuzberg director, who was a worker-priest, worked at a factory as a forklift driver and warehouseman. But in the evening he could hear how the Jesuits on the retreat had sought an encounter with God.

Somewhat later, Teresa, a Notre Dame Sister, asked whether she and some of her community, along with a few friends, could make a similar retreat. Two women and two men from a group of religious in Berlin who were working to support asylum-seekers were ready to direct it. Accommodation was found in a cellar in St Michael’s parish, which is used as a homeless shelter in winter, and we were also allowed to use the parish rooms. The direction took place in two small groups, each guided by a man and a woman together.

The experiences of the retreatants were quite overwhelming, and led to a request for similar retreats the following year. About five retreats have taken place in the last few years in different German cities, and also abroad. This has happened because there were people with listening skills, and with direct knowledge of social exclusion, who were prepared to guide curious people on the way to their own burning bushes—to the things that disturbed their lives. The burning bush may appear among drug-addicts, in a soup kitchen, in a mosque, in a playground, at a memorial to the German Jews, in front of a prison, or by a lake which resembles the place where a friend died. The reports that retreatants give about their days each evening are often like stories from the Bible, which likewise tell of encounters with Jesus at specific places, situations and times.

Take Off Your Shoes

The experience of those first participants had been inspired by the story of Moses before the burning bush. Moses is told that he is on holy ground, and he takes off his shoes. It was as though he had gone into the temple, before the sanctuary, and removed his shoes out of reverence. Moreover, wearing shoes was—and still is today in some parts of the world—the privilege of the relatively rich. When Moses took off his sandals he put aside his social position, his pride, and the resource that would enable him to run away. Moses had to lay aside everything that hindered him from listening and meditation.

Furthermore, there was nothing in that desert place but a mere thorn bush, nothing that demanded reverence. This was not an important place, culturally, aesthetically, economically or spiritually. Thorn bushes were part of Moses’ everyday environment, no more than a nuisance. Nevertheless, this one bush attracted his attention: it was burning but was not burnt up by the fire.

Moses’ perceptiveness, Moses’ response to God’s call, led to a moment of new awareness of his people’s sorrow, and to the beginning of a sense of liberating mission. When people make retreats on the streets, we can certainly hope for a widening of sensitivity and for a new sense of vocation. But the burning bush, the holy place, will be different for each individual. God is waiting in the city to reveal Himself to each person in a way that is always unique.

Getting Started

How do we begin a retreat on the streets? Here is an approach that we have developed. There is nothing indispensable about this particular approach—you do not have to do things this way for the reality of the Resurrection, the presence of Jesus, to become manifest. But it is a form that is often chosen. Through it we can hear God’s own prayer, something that is always with us, and somehow tune into it.

On the first day we ask retreatants to do awareness exercises, and specifically to call to mind the forms of anger or sadness that they regularly feel. There is a pattern to these spontaneous experiences. Some people cannot get annoyed but become sad instead; others are driven into a rage by ‘this kind of thing’.

Why do they feel sadness or anger? Because something is not happening in the way they would have liked. Their hopes for what life should be like have been dashed. They want others and indeed themselves to behave differently. They have a yearning.

This yearning is particular to each individual, and it is very significant: it fuels their hope for a better world; it expresses their personal hunger for the justice that is indispensable to human life. Jesus glorified this hunger in the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled’ (Matthew 5:6).

Who put this longing, which we did not conceive for ourselves, into our hearts? It is a gift, just as our whole life is God’s gift to us. It is in this longing that God’s own reality is being expressed in us, entrusted to us. In this longing, God is showing us one aspect of the divine abundance. If we acknowledge the anger or sadness we feel in certain situations, this can open a way for us to discover the divine presence latent in our longing. Usually there are one or two aspects of an experience that are particularly important for us. These can become clearer for retreatants in the evening discussions together.

How can I respond to the God present in my yearning? One possibility is that I use the language of my longing as a way of addressing God. In the end, it is only in personal prayer that I can discover how my longing and my quest are throwing me back on God.

Though we are here in a space where no one can mediate between me and God, spiritual guides and fellow retreatants can make suggestions. Often other people can recognise what is crucial in my yearning before I can, and it is important that they are able to name what they sense not only respectfully but also courageously. In my experience such suggestions should always be addressed directly to the person, using the word ‘you’; in that way, they help the person to place themselves personally before God. If the suggestion seems somehow initially to fit, then they can begin to use it in their prayer, and the next evening they can talk about how the prayer went.

Yearnings, Names and Scriptures

The effort to sharpen awareness and receptivity can help open our inward eyes to what is happening in us and around us. If we stay with our longing, we can see how it reflects an attribute of God that I am being called to express particularly, an attribute that may be focused in a name for God that is somehow special to me. Three examples from religious tradition can help us understand this way to personal prayer

The Story of Hagar

Hagar was the Egyptian slave of Sarai, the wife of Abram, and her story appears in the book of Genesis, chapter 16. Sarai finds that she apparently cannot become pregnant, and she gives Hagar to her husband as a surrogate who can provide him with an heir. But when Hagar conceives the two women come into conflict. Hagar becomes so angry at Sarai’s treatment of her that she flees into the desert.

Here, then, we have a yearning: Hagar’s yearning that both she and her child be respected. Initially given to Abram ‘as a wife’ (Genesis 16:3), she finds that she has become insignificant in the eyes of both Sarai and Abram. And this yearning is satisfied. In the desert Hagar meets an angel of the Lord at a well, who tells her to return to her mistress. But to strengthen her on the journey, the angel promises that she will give birth to a strong son, who will stand up to his brothers. Hagar gives God a name: ‘El Roi’, the one who sees. She marvels that she has looked on God and yet remained alive (v.13). Her son is named Ismael, which means: ‘God had heard’.

The Story of Moses

In another biblical story (Exodus 2-3), children’s names again express much about spiritual yearnings. During Israel’s exile in Egypt, a married couple from the tribe of Levi have a son. But Pharaoh has commanded that all Israelite boy children must be thrown into the river. The parents place their son in a basket which floats on the water, and he is saved by the daughter of the Pharaoh. ‘I drew him out of the water’ (Exodus 2:10), she says, and therefore calls him Moses, which means ‘to draw out’.

Brought up as an Egyptian, Moses becomes estranged from his own people. But as adult he encounters his kinsfolk working as slaves, and kills an Egyptian who is beating one of them. He flees into the country of Midian and finds refuge in the family of Jethro the priest, marrying his daughter Zippora. Moses’ pain at this exile, and also his gladness at being allowed to live as a guest in a foreign land, is expressed in the name of his first son, Gershom (‘ger’ means a foreigner settler).

Then a divine name becomes significant. Moses’ yearning for belonging, for a homeland, is reflected in the name for God that he is given at the burning bush: ‘I am who I am …. This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations’ (Exodus 3:14-15). This name affirms God’s abiding presence for the people. The frustrations of Moses’ exile are taken up into God, and are thus liberated for a creative use: Moses becomes free to accept his role as liberator of his people.

The Hundredth Name

Muslims often incorporate one of the many names of God found in the Koran into the names that they give their sons. ‘Allah’ appears, for example, in the name Abdullah, which means ‘servant of God’. Parents hope that their sons will express in a special way the divine characteristics suggested by the name—God’s mercy, or royal dignity, or holiness, or peacemaking. Muslims remember the 99 most beautiful names of God in prayer, often using a string of pearls which resembles the rosary. According to a mystical tradition, the hundredth name of God is personally revealed to each individual by God. In this tradition Muslims meditate on some of the names of God during a forty-day retreat in order to discover the name that is also their own. The names learned from the Koran and the name personally revealed to them belong together.

The Prayer of the Name

During one of our group retreats, a young woman spoke about the anger that she felt when people in her district are neglected or ignored. Seeing people treated with contempt in social situations always made her furious. It was easy to understand her desire, her yearning that everyone should be accorded their own proper respect.

Someone in the group suggested that her name for God might be, ‘you, who are looking at me with love’, and she decided to use this as a starting-point for prayer. The next morning she went straight out to a hospital and just looked at the people smoking outside the door, with their wheelchairs, their plaster casts and their drips. And in this context, as she was thinking on the names of God in Muslim tradition, she was shown as a way to talk to God in her prayer. She sensed that the name personally entrusted to her was ‘the one who sees beautifully’. And in this name, there was a task given her by God: to recognise how God saw people as beautiful and then herself to pass on this message to others. This name, affirmed by her prayer, went with her not only during the retreat but also in her everyday life. As time went on, the name was extended: ‘you, the one who are already looking at me and are teaching me love’.

When we pray using a particular divine name, whatever it is, the question can obviously arise: what is it that God is observing when God sees me as beautiful, or as reflecting some other divine attribute? How am I to fulfil my task of making this attribute visible in a special way, so that this special attribute of God is present in the world? How can I draw on my new way of seeing in such a way as to glimpse a little more how God’s abundance is being unfolded among the people around me? How can I see the desires and initiatives within them? How can I praise God for all this?

The name is entrusted to me; its reality expands, and also becomes ever clearer to me. As such, it becomes an opportunity for me to address God personally. It also gives me a hint as to how God might speak to me. For the young woman on the retreat, that name was ‘you at whom I am looking lovingly and whom I am teaching to love’. But perhaps God’s name for me is shorter and more specific.

What is important at the beginning of a retreat on the streets is to enter into a prayerful dialogue, and to begin to get some idea of how I can enter into real communication with God, how God can call out to me and how I can call on God. If this prayer is in our hearts, we can then open ourselves up, and go out to look for the place where God is waiting for us in order to lead us into a deeper communion. There we can hope that prejudices and fears will be healed, so that we can see new paths of union with God and learn to walk along them—paths along which our longings will be taken seriously.

‘What I Desire’

Sylvia made a retreat on the streets of Fribourg, in French-speaking Switzerland. She has spoken of how a bronze statue of a weeping woman in the city centre helped her to confront her own experience.

Begging is forbidden in Fribourg, and the labour office claims that ‘everybody finds work; we have things under control; there is no poverty here’. So why is the statue weeping day and night in a city whose problems have all been solved? And why am I still crying, although there are no problems in my life?

In the days that followed the retreatant used these questions to uncover her own wounds.

Walking through the city she came to the brothel, and she approached it as though, like Moses, she was taking off her shoes in reverence. She saw that the women, who were mostly black, wanted to hide themselves from her; she saw their misery and pain at the fact that others did not respect them. Then she recognised her own wound: how her identity, her sense of self, had been violated when she was a child. A few days later she discovered a relief of the black Madonna in a church. This Madonna was just as beautiful as the women from the brothel who were at the mercy of greedy men. Indeed, she was one of them.

During her time with her guide, it became clear to the retreatant that she would be able to experience this healing solidarity all the more vividly if she expressed it with a gesture. On the last day she brought roses to the three places where she had been moved to tears, and she encountered another surprise. How could she give a rose to a statue and ignore the harmonica player in the wheelchair? She felt embarrassed, and gave the man a rose as well. He looked up and smiled at her, with tears in his eyes. ‘These ten days have saved me a year in therapy’, she commented that evening.

Sylvia’s roses were a way of acknowledging how what is at stake in this kind of process has nothing to do with one’s own achievement, but rather, very simply, about a readiness to be drawn into a gift—the gift that we receive as we recognise how people very different from us are nevertheless part of our primal wounds and longings. An openness to the demands which others’ needs place on me gives me a quite direct access to my own needs—needs that may have been repressed for years. The encounter with God does not depend on my repressing my dark sides; on the contrary, it is often through my wounds and scars that it happens at all. People are often called to attend to their wounds and change—even if they have been repressing them for many years, just as Moses, as he encountered God, became aware of his own experience of being uprooted and of his people’s misery (Exodus 2:11-15).

God surprises us in the unexpected, where we would never have thought God might be—and especially in what is completely other to us, like Moses by the thorn bush, or Sylvia when faced with the blind man playing his mouth organ. When we suddenly realise that we have far more in common with someone who seems quite foreign to us than we ever imagined, then a sense of solidarity grows, even a feeling of unity, and God is present. Or as the Jesuit journalist Luis Espinal put it, murdered in Bolivia in 1980:

Why look for God in the liturgical mystery, when he is so palpable in real life? Come, Lord Jesus. But you have already come and are coming daily. The only thing we need is to be able to see you …. Let us not just look at you on the crucifix, but in the crucifixion of men in slum areas and prisons …. The world is holy: the road is crammed full with Christ. We must preserve all the little ones with reverence, because you are among them, Jesus Christ. If we can really see this, then everything is ecstasy.

‘If God is not there where else is He supposed to be?’ That was the reflection of one participant after a retreat of this kind. She had discovered that God can be found even in the places that she could never have expected—and perhaps indeed especially there. In the end, the central objective of a retreat on the streets is to seek and find God in my own experience, including the raw social realities that are part of my life whether I like it or not.

If someone in the city asks retreatants on this kind of programme what they are looking for or whether they need help, the retreatants are encouraged not to get entangled in complicated explanations but to answer as directly as possible. They are told to say simply, ‘I am looking for God’. A retreatant said this once to a homeless person at the entrance of a shelter. The reply was simple, and said it all: ‘Yes, He’s here’.

From: Correspondence to the Ignatian spirituality
Number 2005

Translated by Philip Endean, Chief Editeur of 'The Way'

See also: RETREATS ON THE STREETS,
in: The Way April 2006 Volume 45, Number 2 page 11 -24

 

Christoph Albrecht
"They Too Are Part of Your Life"
Sacramental Experience on the Streets

It is not only when we remember god’s wonders through liturgical feasts and rituals that something sacramental happens. The sacramental happens also in spontaneous, inconspicuous encounters, and indeed in everything that happens to us. When we make a retreat on the streets, we experience the sacramental character of the world as sign of the greater reality that is God.

‘If God is not there where else is He supposed to be?’ That was the reflection of one participant after a week’s retreat. She had discovered that God can be found even in the places that she could never have expected—and perhaps indeed especially there. Like the other nine in the group, she spent the whole day seeking God on the streets, following her heart and pausing when she felt touched by something. The only goal they had was to seek God. In the end, this is the central objective of a retreat on the streets: to seek and find God in my own experience, including the raw social realities that are part of my life whether I like it or not. If someone asks them what they are looking for or whether they need help, retreatants are encouraged not to get entangled in complicated explanations about the retreat but to answer as directly as possible. They should say simply, ‘I am looking for God’. The retreatant in question had said this to a homeless person at the entrance of a shelter; he had replied quite simply, ‘Yes, He’s here’.

 

Making a Retreat on the Streets

Christian Herwartz SJ has been living with two other Jesuits in an open-house community in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin for 26 years, sharing his life with homeless people, asylum-seekers and drug-addicts. He discovered the possibility of making the Spiritual Exercises on the streets about ten years ago, when a fellow Jesuit wanted to make his retreat in the Kreuzberg community. During the day he prayed on the streets of Berlin, and in the evening he received guidance and discussed his experiences..{1}

Retreats in the tradition of Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises are a privileged time during which something can happen that no human being can organize, plan or manufacture: the conscious experience of God’s saving, healing presence. Among Ignatius’ other counsels is an encouragement to retreatants to keep on returning to the physical posture or place where they had most been helped (Exx 76){2}. The choice of places to pray is crucial in a retreat on the streets too. You should not try to make this choice purely rationally, but rather by listening to the heart. Retreatants are constantly reminded to go and spend time during the day where they find themselves inwardly touched by a particular situation.

During the retreat on the streets, the participants each follow their own inner, personal way. But they also, with their spiritual guides, form a community. They live simply—in temporary accommodation, in shelters or in basic guest rooms. Small groups of no more than five retreatants are guided in by a woman and a man. There are communal events each day, though it is only the individual direction sessions that are obligatory. But most retreatants find a regular daily framework helpful. The programme begins with breakfast at 8 o’clock, followed by morning prayers which are always led by a retreatant. During the day the retreatants organize themselves. At 5 pm, the group meets for liturgy, and then for dinner, which is prepared by one or two of the retreatants. The guidance sessions begin at 7 o’clock, and take place in two groups.

 

Seeing and Listening

The participants are gradually drawn into the movement of the retreat. First, they are encouraged to find their own completely personal name for God, a name which expresses their own longing for salvation and reconciliation. This echoes the Sufi tradition according to which God has a hundred names. 99 written names can be found in the Koran, but the hundredth is revealed by God to each individual personally. This is the name by which they can call on God.

Often someone finds their name for God by meditating on anger or pain, something that challenges them personally or socially. The story of Moses’ vocation is helpful here. Moses scraped a living in the desert of Midian as a foreign immigrant, having fled from oppression in Egypt. He named his first son Gershom, which means ‘a stranger there’ (Exodus 2:22). Moses must have felt doubly distant from God, since his people were in exile in Egypt, and he was further in exile from them. But the voice that spoke to him from the burning bush told him, ‘I have observed the misery of my people .... "I am who I am"’ (Exodus 3:7, 14).

The story of Moses also illustrates how we can recognise God in apparently insignificant things. When Moses saw the fire in the thorn bush he ran up to it. There he heard a voice which said to him, ‘Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground’ (Exodus 3:5). Wearing shoes was—and still is today in some parts of the world—the privilege of the relatively rich. When Moses took off his sandals he put aside his social position, his pride—and his ability to run away. It was as though he had gone into the temple, before the sanctuary, and removed his shoes out of reverence. But there was nothing there but a thorn bush in the desert, nothing that demanded reverence. This was not an important place, culturally, aesthetically, economically or spiritually. Thorn bushes were part of Moses’ everyday environment, no more than a nuisance. But this one attracted his attention: it was burning but was not burnt up by the fire. And because of his perceptiveness Moses heard once again about the enslavement of his people, and also about his own sorrow and his important role in the Israelites’ liberation.

 

A Story of Healing Today

Sylvia spoke about how a bronze statue of a crying woman in Fribourg helped her to confront her own experience.

Begging is forbidden in Fribourg, and the labour office claims that ‘everybody finds work; we have things under control; there is no poverty here’. So why is the statue weeping day and night in a city whose problems have all been solved? And why am I still crying, although there are no problems in my life?

In the days that followed the retreatant used these questions to uncover her own wounds.

Walking through the city she came to the brothel, and she approached it as though, like Moses, she was taking off her shoes in reverence. She saw that the women, who were mostly black, wanted to hide themselves from her; she saw their misery and pain at the fact that others did not respect them. Then she recognised her own wound: how her identity, her sense of self, had been violated when she was a child. A few days later she discovered a relief of the black Madonna in the church of Saint Thérèse. This Madonna was just as beautiful as the women from the brothel who were at the mercy of greedy men. Indeed, she was one of them.

During her time with her guide, it became clear to the retreatant that she would be able to experience this healing solidarity all the more vividly if she expressed it with a gesture. On the last day she brought roses to the three places where she had been moved to tears, and she encountered another surprise. How could she give a rose to a statue and ignore the harmonica player in the wheelchair? She felt embarrassed, and gave the man a rose as well. He looked up and smiled at her, with tears in his eyes.

That evening she said, ‘these ten days have saved me a year in therapy’.

 

Human Beings as a Sacrament of God

Retreats on the streets will succeed if retreatants are free to accept what is given to them, if they can look on themselves as beggars. They need to distance themselves from any achievement mentality. It is when I can sit lightly to my own spiritual effort and discipline, and allow my heart to be to be touched by surprises, that important things can happen. Let us listen to Peter:

Christmas seemed to me a good opportunity to visit the monastery. Beyond time A blind beggar sat at the foot of the ascent, and when I approached him to give him little money I heard him whimper, ‘Who will take me into the heart of God?’ I could not possibly go on. Who would take him into the heart of God? I sat down opposite him and held his hands. I said, ‘Together we will get into the heart of God’.{3}

In this story human beings are sacramental in two ways. For the spiritual searcher the blind beggar becomes a sacrament. In his openness to this man the searcher finds the path that he is seeking. But he too becomes a sacrament for the beggar—not because the seeker performs the external moral duty that the beggar represents to him, but because the seeker recognises that his own heart has been touched. Here the original sense of the word ‘sacrament’ appears: a commitment or holy obligation. Leonardo Boff writes of how ‘sacrament’ first meant ‘an attitude of feeling oneself to be taken up with a duty’.{4}

Sylvia too was answering this demand with her roses. She was giving expression to how what is at stake in this kind of process has nothing to do with one’s own achievement, but rather, very simply, about a readiness to be drawn into the gift that she receives as she recognises how people very different from her are nevertheless bound up with her primal wounds, her primal longings. An openness to the demands which others’ needs place on me gives me a quite direct access to my own needs—needs that may have been repressed for years. The encounter with God does not depend on my repressing my dark sides; on the contrary, it is often through my wounds and scars that it happens at all. The Buddhist Zen teacher Jack Kornfield explains that it are the fractures of our life by which the light comes in. {5} People are often called to attend to their wounds and change—even if they have been repressing them for many years, just as Moses, as he encountered God, became aware of his own experience of being uprooted and of his people’s misery (Exodus 2:11-15).

 

The Sacrament of the Road

Through the sacraments, the Church celebrates God’s blessed and healing presence in the key moments of human life. The sacramental feast is a special moment for remembering God’s covenant with humanity. ‘Sacrament’ originally meant ‘oath’ or ‘solemn obligation’. To celebrate the mystery of God’s turning to humanity is to remember also God’s commitment to humanity.{6}

It is no wonder that the poor are better at celebrating feasts than the rich, because it is precisely they who need the feasts as a way of remembering their hope in one who is wholly Other. At a feast when everything is shared, they can nourish their dream of a just world, where all can eat their fill. Dorothee Sölle reminds us tellingly of this basic pastoral principle that it is the poor who draw our attention to true life.

What then do the poor teach us? They are waiting for miracles …. They need the miracle whereby solidarity is stronger than the structural violence of the mighty. The poor have no need of reforms, aid programmes, placebos; what they need is the miracle of redistribution. A redistribution of working hours, income and leisure based on need—these are hopes without which the poor would not maintain their sense of worth.{7}

Feasting is the opposite of necessity. And the true hallmark of a genuine celebration is an abundance to which the very poorest too are invited, so that there is no longer either rich or poor.

The sacramental dimension of feasts, their power to call to mind God’s mighty deeds, is invested with ritual forms and therefore visible at familiar times. But the sacramental dimension of spontaneous, unplanned or inconspicuous encounters often presents itself much more discreetly. The moments of God’s marvellous saving feats are written into the life history of men and peoples: the fact that history is salvation history gives every religion a sacramental structure. The whole world, everything that is and happens, is sacramental for those who can understand it as an sign of a larger reality.{8}

God surprises us in the unexpected, where we would never have thought God might be—and especially in what is completely other to us, like Moses by the thorn-bush, or Sylvia when faced with the blind man playing his mouth organ. When we suddenly realise that we have far more in common with someone who seems quite foreign to us than we ever imagined, then a sense of solidarity grows, even a feeling of unity, and God is present. Or as the Jesuit journalist Luis Espinal put it, murdered in Bolivia in 1980:

Why look for God in the liturgical mystery, when he is so palpable in real life? Come, Lord Jesus. But you have already come and are coming daily. The only thing we need is to be able to see you …. Let us not just look at you on the crucifix, but in the crucifixion of men in slum areas and prisons …. The world is holy: the road is crammed full with Christ. We must preserve all the little ones with reverence, because you are among them, Jesus Christ. If we can really see this, then everything is ecstasy’.{9}

InterNet reference:

Offers and empiric reports to street retreats:

http://www.con-spiration.de/exerzitien

 

The article has been published in: "Diakonia", international magazine for the practice of the church, 36.Jg., Sept 05, 339-343

Notes

{1} cf. Christian Herwartz SJ, Betend die Wirklichkeit erkennen - Exerzitien auf der Straße, in: Korrespondenz zur Spiritualität der Exerzitien 55. Jg./Heft 89 (2005) 19-25.

{2} Ignatius von Loyola, Geistliche Übungen, Graz ³1988, Nr. 76.

{3} Theophan der Mönch, Das Kloster jenseits der Zeit. Verzauberte Geschichten zwischen Himmel und Erde, Freiburg i.Br. 1997, 7.

{4} Cf. Leonardo Boff, Kleine Sakramentenlehre, Düsseldorf 1976, 104f.

{5} Cf. Jack Kornfield, Frag den Buddha und geh den Weg des Herzens, München 1995, 67.

{6} Cf. Francisco Taborda, Sakramente: Praxis und Fest, Düsseldorf 1988, 98ff.

{7} Dorothee Sölle, Mutanfälle, Hamburg 1993, 159f.

{8} Vgl. Leonardo Boff, Die Kirche als Sakrament im Horizont der Welterfahrung, Paderborn 1972, 123-130.

{9} Luis Espinal, Deine Anwesenheit in der Tiefe des Alltags, in: Antonio Reiser/Paul Gerhard Schoenborn, Sehnsucht nach dem Fest der freien Menschen, Gebete aus Lateinamerika, Wuppertal 1982, 65.

Translated by Philip Endean,
Chief Editeur of 'The Way'

 

 

Christian Herwartz
The road to community
Theological Experiences and Reflections

The 32nd General Congregation declarations on the combined negotiation of faith and justice opened the way for the founding of our community. In the fall of 1975, after having finished my studies in Germany, I was sent to a Jesuit community of blue-collar worker-priests in France. I worked for various firms, as a driver, on pressed metals, and, after specific training, as a lathe operator. Later, Michael Waltz, another German brother, followed in my footsteps. He worked in a leather warehouse. Three years later, it was with him that I founded our small community in West Berlin, and both of us found work in the electricity business.

A double integration

As blue-collar workers we wished to be integrated with the culture of our work environment, and at the same time, we wanted to support people with serious material needs. For this reason we moved to the Kreuzberg district in West Berlin, a neighborhood where many residents from Turkey and many unemployed people live. Other residents of the neighbourhood include senior citizens marginalized in society because they were old and others owing to unlucky life circumstances. The neighbourhood is also home to artists and left-wing political activists from grassroots movements.

Our community grew. The first year we were joined by a Hungarian Jesuit who was a member of our community for many years before moving to Columbia to live with street children in that country. Later, more people from our own neighbourhood came to stay with us. When our community was in its third year, our order sent us a Swiss Jesuit, Franz Keller, who at the age of 55 was still able to find a job in an electrical company. He is now 83; for many years he and I were the only Jesuits in the community. Michael Waltzer died of brain cancer in 1987. At one time, when we had opened the doors of the community to the outside world, there were five of us Jesuits in the community. Over the following 30 years, approximately 400 people from 61 countries lived with us in a pretty reduced space. Coming from very different conditions, they would knock on our door, and each time, we laid out a new mattress so that all could find room to sleep in our midst. They were homeless for a variety of reasons: some were sick; others were refugees, some were adventurers, some unemployed, a few were former convicts, or folks just out of hospital. Thus the community gradually became like a pilgrim's refuge, in which some people stayed for over 10 years, until such time as they knew what further step to take in life. Others left earlier. Our rented apartment turned into a place providing hospitality in an international context. We were living close to the wall that divided the city into east and west. The contacts with people from the other side of this divide were very important to us.

The inner wealth in us all

In 1987, I was invited to an international Jesuit conference in France dealing with an issue called "Living with Muslims". A few things were clear in my mind there: not only do I live with people who deeply miss something ( native country, health, language skills, a job, personal relationships), but, far more important, I live with people who carry an inner wealth within themselves. I can live with people who speak different languages, follow different religions and have different perspectives on life. In the community, just like at the workplace, the welfare service aspect we provide has lost centre stage to the discovery of dignity in each and every one of our guests. To sum up, my life at work and in the neighborhood has been a road leading to an experience of incarnation. I have felt great joy in that and many changes have been possible.

The world community

International contacts are an important aspect of the community, as are links with other Jesuits across the whole world. This is made clear by the 34th General Congregation texts which frequently both confirm where we stand and what our search consists of, and at the same time encourage us to move to further developments. It explains why the orientation towards inter-cultural and inter-religious dialogue, the statement on the condition of women, and the special attention to be paid to Africans living amongst us. Living, as we do, with racism in our country, these orientations are a great gift.

Political prayers

Fourteen years ago, in conjunction with the group "Religious people against exclusion", we started holding prayers in front of the prison where people with no criminal charge were being held, arrested solely because they were bound to be expelled to other countries. As Berliners we have suffered the experiences of separation and walls. We are outraged at this denial of freedom. That is why we regularly stand in front of the prison wall, which is a symbol to us of the wall that surrounds Europe or other countries like the United States. During the prayer we overcome borders and our lives can expand.

Six years ago, together with Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, lay non-believers and occasionally people of other faiths, we started an inter-religious prayer for peace for which we meet once a month in a large square in the city centre.

Exercises on the street

Personal prayers at work and the community prayer in front of the prison wall have set the stage for seeing the Ignatian exercises in a new light. Surprisingly, in 2000 we were asked to provide "exercises on the street". This request changed our lives. The experiences we lived through during the first series of exercises were showcased in the 2002 yearly report of the Society of Jesus under the heading "The search for places to encounter God". Other series of exercises occurred in other cities, and our experiences seemed to us to be similar to the ones Ignatius had in Manresa. During these exercises that take place in the middle of a city, not isolated in a silent house, we focus on a single prayer: we tell the story of Moses who takes a herd of sheep in his care to graze among the bushes and discovers a bramble that burns without wasting away. Drawn by curiosity, Moses comes closer and understands that the bramble bush is on hallowed ground and that he must therefore take off his sandals. The fire of love that burns without wasting away makes Moses discover for the first time his people's despair, something that he may have felt inside but to which he never really gave a second thought. The voice from the bush calls Moses by his name and asks him to free the people from slavery (Ex 3).

The participants in the exercises let their own "bramble" be shown to them, and with it their own hallowed ground on which they have to take off in the most realistic way possible the sandals representing a know-it-all attitude, the possibility of a quick escape and the need to rid themselves of feelings of low self-esteem. Such hallowed ground can be found in casual and modest places; people on the road; controversial social and historical topics; the pain in one's own history… In many of these places God's voice lets itself be heard. The participants and those who accompany them are often surprised by the places of contemplation they discover and by the inner and external dialogues they have. The word "road" in the title emphasizes the focus on an open search for personal encounter. Ignatius' basic experience consists of looking for, and finding God in all places and encounters.

These encounters are the central drive to start an inner spiritual process, whether it be in a series lasting 10 days, or in just a few hours of exercises. It is the direct experience of Christ resurrected in our context and a direct experience of the Holy Spirit within us. This external and inner experience enables healing processes and decision-making. After such experiences, participants tell us their own biblical stories as authorized witnesses. They come from different conditions in life and various religious groups, or they may have no connection with the Church at all.

Some participants stay in our apartment. To others we offer a series of exercises in humble places. Information on this in various languages is available at www.con-spiration.de/exerzitien

The community life rhythm

Today, an average of 16 people as of now, four of them Jesuits, sleep in our apartment. I do not know how many of them actually consider that their vital centre is with us, that "they live with us". I am always surprised to see with whom I can live and how many people actually feel, in one way or the other, a part of the community.

Every Tuesday we offer the residents supper and give a talk on the week's events. Each person speaks about what he considers the week's most important events. After listening to each other for a couple of hours, we celebrate mass at the same table. Our daily biblical texts enable us to understand weekly events in new ways. Over and above this kind of "liturgy"-- which lasts approximately four hours, including supper, exchange of views and the Eucharist-- - we have, every Saturday, an equally long breakfast to which about 40 people usually come. Each participant speaks about the themes and issues we have previously discussed. The community lives to the rhythm of these two meals we share with all the residents we can host, just as we would on a road.

A spontaneous lifestyle

There is no stated plan for chores and cleaning, no plan for reception and consulting; there is however great faith in God's guidance and the hope of perceiving his will in painful situations. We have anarchist-type experiences, based on the value of each individual. After the people of Israel roamed in the desert, the prophets refused to name a king (Judg 9). Jesus also opposed the power structures that daily exclude so many people. "Kings dominate over their peoples and the powerful let themselves be called donors and philanthropists. Let it not be like that among you!" (Lk 22, 25ff.). We rediscover the freedom of hope, a common trait to all human beings. The conditions especially of the so-called people "without papers", folks who live in our society, some 100,000 souls in Berlin and up to a million in Germany, urge us to embrace this kind of freedom. The total absence of security in their lives challenges us. The trust of these people is a light we have to discover over and over again. They are like God's envoys to us from all over the world and we sometimes visit them. When that happens it is like a day of celebration in the very heart of the global migrations happening in our world today. To observe in one way or another, and not skip this day of celebration is a step on the road of life together with those who bring witness of their misery. The unifying strength of our community is rooted in the spontaneous link with these people and, through them, with the God-made man.

No professional support

From a political, inter-religious and ecumenical perspective, the community lives in a challenging context. We have not specialized in any area in which we can boast of a particular social competence. Professional help has to be sought elsewhere. We have very different kinds of people with whom we discover community and friendship. In this process we find different kinds of dependency and addiction. Not turning into a friendship-addict or a relationship-addict is another great challenge. We do not want the eyeshades of addiction to bar the sight of reality; we want to find our own answers, a "yes" or a "no"; we want to know what we give up and what we believe in, like in the liturgy of baptism. We are all hooked to addictions: with many others we are addicted to capitalism and to making more money. There is also a clerical addiction in some religious communities -whatever their outlook on the world- and that is a legalistic obsessions which blocks the sight of reality. In the field of sexual morality, principles become more important than the merciful understanding of the people involved, leading some to fall into situations of anguish. We feel that we are invited to take a step forward on the road to union with God and the freedom he has given us as a gift. The joy that surges when the evil spirits are weakened and reconciliation occurs is immeasurable.

Summing up

To conclude, I should attempt to define our "insertion community", which bears the name of our street: Naunynstrasse 60. I believe the community has become a pilgrim's refuge, full to spilling point, but peaceful, a place in which we offer hospitality within a broader society that continually introduces new techniques of control and surveillance, in which traditional religious communities do not make much sense anymore. Our community is rooted in the encounter with people in a small setting and, in a universal context, in the reality of God who wants to surprise us in all and everything.

 

top