What is an Apostolically Oriented Spirituality?

This article was delivered at a Jesuit conference, “Jesuit Colleagues: Strengthening Our Bonds," on June 10, 2002, St. Joseph University, Philadelphia, PA.

An abbreviated version of this article was printed by America Magazine November 11, 2002, under the title "What Is Apostolic Spirituality?" and can be found at www.americamagazine.org.

I feel greatly honored to have been invited to speak with you about spirituality, specifically apostolic spirituality in the Ignatian tradition. This is a topic very dear to my heart, and to my life. Because “spirituality” embraces both theory and practice, I would like to address both dimensions, while trying to hold them close to each other, as well.

I. Christian Spirituality: A Basic View
The fundamental imperatives of the Christian vocation are two-fold, are they not?: love God with all your heart and mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. The two-fold commandment involves loving in three distinct directions: love of God, love of neighbor and love of self. Any Christian spirituality must be concerned with these three vectors. This may seem self-evident, but it has not been so for large swatches of church history when self-love held purely negative connotations. This despite the second commandment’s injunction to make the quality of one’s self-love the norm for the quality of one’s love of neighbor (according to one interpretation of the second commandment).

Christian spirituality in its most fundamental meaning refers to thinking, imagining, feeling, desiring, choosing and acting under the influence of the Holy Spirit of the Risen Jesus both as individuals and communities. Or, if this sounds too ideal, then striving to do all those activities under the sway of Jesus’ Spirit. If one so strives, then one is striving to live, act, die and be raised in the pattern of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, because the Spirit of Jesus is the divine power within us that can conform us to the pattern of Jesus’ mystery while respecting totally the uniqueness of our own life and identity.

II. Christian Spirituality that is Apostolically Oriented
A spirituality is apostolic when it gives pride of place to the experience of being sent (“apostolein”) by God to act and perhaps, at times, to suffer on behalf of the neighbor in imitation of the pattern of Jesus’ ministerial life. To put my whole presentation into a sentence: apostolic spirituality considers healthily self-giving love in service of the neighbor to be the sum and substance of the Christian life. (I say healthily self-giving love because feminism has taught me that we need to be discerning people about the quality of our self-giving, our self-donation. Not every form of self-giving is inspired by the Spirit of Jesus.)

An apostolic spirituality differs somewhat from a contemplative spirituality whose central image or metaphor at times is spousal union. In such a spirituality the union between God and the person that occurs in profound prayer is the point. Love of God, neighbor and self occur here in the surrender to the mystery of God through Christ in the Spirit in contemplative prayer. Apostolic spirituality views prayer (not prayerfulness, but prayer at particular times and places) as a means, an instrument (the musician’s not the carpenter’s!) to enable the individual to more discerningly and fully serve the neighbor.

I’m not interested here in playing off apostolic spirituality and spousal or unitive spirituality. The fundamental imperatives of the Christian vocation express themselves in both. But there are differences of nuance that are important, and these differences bear witness to the Spirit’s action in the church, action which brings about a variety of gifts and charisms.

A famous story about Ignatius makes the point about apostolic spirituality. Some Jesuit came up to him one day and starting talking in a very laudatory fashion about a third Jesuit. He told Ignatius that this individual prayed many hours a day and seemed to be graced in prayer in some striking ways. Ignatius patiently heard him out and then, looking very unimpressed, simply asked his interlocutor, “And how mortified is Father X?” Not, how “embarrassed unto death” is Father X, as we moderns would understand the word, but rather, how free is Father X from his false self, how free is he from disordered attachment to self, because only such freedom will allow him to be available to be sent to any part of the world at any time when service of the neighbor requires.

In this little incident we can find some of the principal features of an apostolic spirituality: prayers and “mortification” (taking measures, with God’s grace, to die to one’s false self) are instrumental, a means to something else: love of the neighbor is where it all comes together, and freedom to be sent, freedom to be available to the neighbor in need, is the fundamental disposition of this spiritual path.

Let me put this is a slightly different way. In an apostolic spirituality all the particular spiritual practices I engage in are for the sake of uniting me to God as the One who is engaged in a tremendous project in our world. The God I seek to be united with, by grace, is the God who is laboring in the world on behalf of the world, the God who is bent on the world, leaning into the world, laboring that it be transformed and brought to final union with God. All the projects and practices of an apostolic person, of a person seeking to live out an apostolically oriented spirituality, are projects and practices that seek to unite the person to God’s project, the kingdom of God, the reign of God, which is the profound dream and desire God bears for the world, and which God yearns to realize in the world, but not without our creative cooperation.

Next Page

Written and presented by Brian McDermott, SJ