Over the last fifty years, I have watched with great interest but much sorrow as I have seen how the Charismatic movement failed to develop as its first counterparts developed in the early Church. That the Holy Spirit called many people through this movement is quite evident to me as it would have been quite evident in the early Church, but unlike its predecessors, it has failed to deliver what was being asked of it.
After fifty years, most of the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistles had been written. Christianity was now well established and thriving in almost all the major cities in the Roman Empire. Ss. With many thousands of others, Ss. Peter and Paul had been martyred, and Pope Linus I ruled over a well-organised and continually growing Church. If you compare the impact of Charismatic renewal on the modern world in the last fifty years or more to its influence on the ancient pagan world in the same time span it is immediately evident that something is wrong.
In the same period since the Charismatic movement swept into the Church in the late 1960s, I have seen virtually no impact on the wider world outside the Church, where its influence has been negligible. It may well have been a help and inspiration to individuals for a time, but unless first enthusiasm is properly supported with appropriate theological teaching and directed by a wise and holy leadership, it will inevitably flounder. That theological and biblical knowledge was immediately available to the first Charismatics as we have seen.
But something else was vitally important that their modern contemporaries too easily forget. I am referring to the daily time they gave to personal prayer many times each day in the synagogue or in their own homes, a well-ingrained habit born of the Jewish spirituality that formed them.
The first Apostles led by example. The moment they received the Holy Spirit, they did not believe they were already prepared and equipped to change the world, so they retired into a prolonged retreat in Jerusalem, as did Saint Paul elsewhere. He spent ten years preparing to receive the fruits of the contemplation that he had received from His Risen Lord. Christ said that it would be by their fruits that you would know them, and it was by the fruits of the contemplation that they shared with Christ that the unprecedented growth and expansion of the early Church took place.
In my experience, large numbers of those who were caught up in Charismatic renewal in the late 1960s disappeared a decade later. When first fervour evaporated, many drifted away, not just from the Charismatic movement but even from their faith, or at least they became no more than the nominal Christians that they had been before. The vapours of emotional euphoria blinded them to the deep spiritual foundations that were in place in the early Church that guaranteed the growth of the first Charismatic Christians into the Church.
The Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR) began in 1967 at a retreat for college students from Duquesne University at The Ark and The Dove Retreat Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This movement emphasized a personal relationship with Jesus and the expression of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. It quickly spread to Catholic student organizations at universities like Notre Dame and Michigan State, and then into mainstream American Catholicism. By the 1970s, the movement had gained significant momentum, characterized by prayer meetings outside of Mass that featured faith healing, prophecy, and speaking in tongues. The first nationwide Catholic charismatic conference was held at Notre Dame University in 1967, marking the rapid expansion of CCR across America.
Although the Charismatic movement may like to point out that at the end of each decade or so, their numbers have remained constant or even increased, it is not because the members from the previous decade have all remained and welcomed new members. It is rather that new members continually come and go without a constant membership being led on to practice the daily prayer and meditation that leads to mystical contemplation.
It was this contemplation in which their heartbeats began to synchronize with those of Christ that was the spiritual foundation on which early Christianity was built. Many remained even though the spiritual feelings that fired them before had frozen over simply because they had no other home to go to or because they felt that their leadership was still important. Sadly, this conviction has not been proven by their ability to lead those in need to travel onward through mystical purification to the union for which they yearn. In fact, they have encouraged many who were ready for true God-given contemplation to accept its man-made counterfeit by generating psychological states of peace and tranquillity through the endless repetition of mantras.
The immediacy with which spiritual euphoria can envelop newcomers can lead to false conclusions. It can lead them to believe that their first fervour is not so much a means to union with God but an end in itself. This can lead to new Charismatics believing that they have arrived at the summit of the spiritual life. The same is true for those who, through personal prayer, come to the experience of first fervour through meditation. A good and early example of this can be seen in the Exercises of St Ignatius when meditation, or more precisely ‘Acquired Contemplation’ is seen as the high point of the spiritual life because a person is filled with the same sort of spiritual fervour that fires Charismatics. This misconception is exacerbated by calling this meditation contemplation, which no previous spiritual writers have ever done.
Once, therefore, a person experiences first fervor through meditation or what they mistakenly call contemplation, it is believed that contrary to the example of the apostles and the saints who followed them, it is the time to rush out to change the world through what they call ‘contemplation in action.’ Then they return again and again to be recharged with spiritual enthusiasm, at least until the well runs dry, as it inevitably does. That is why you find no teaching at all on the mystical theology that is either ignored as unnecessary or attacked as dangerous in official Jesuit spirituality and, for that matter, the spirituality of the modern Charismatic movement.
But thanks to the consequences of Quietism, the same could be said for the other older religious orders who have forgotten their origins, with only a few exceptions, from what was the norm in early Christian Spirituality. Please remember that the essence of mystical theology is to teach the selfless, sacrificial loving that can alone open us to the love of God. If this does not follow first fervour, then adolescent Christians will never grow up, and we will be condemned to be led, at best, by spiritual striplings and their volatile whims and wishes.
Without receiving the fruits of contemplation that enable them to practice the infused virtues, Christians have to act like stoics and try to practice the moral virtues for themselves without the grace given in true mystical contemplation. Failure is only a matter of time, but before this time, woe betide those who would oppose them, for spiritual pride does not countenance opposition. Without receiving the Wisdom that is one of the first fruits of contemplation, they have to practice what they call ‘discernment’ instead.
It is a man-made system of seeking the truth for non-contemplatives that is fraught with danger because it is practiced by human beings blissfully unaware that they are at the mercy of their own unpurified unconscious, or what Freud called the ‘Id.’ In the last fifty years, I have seen this discernment process devastate individuals and whole communities. But sadly, practitioners are immune to change. Emotional commitment to those who promote modern Christian humanism is too deeply embedded, preventing them from listening to the God-centred Spirituality introduced into early Christianity by Jesus Christ himself.
If they had the humility to do so, it would not be too late for the Charismatic movement to do what they did for the modern Church, which was what they did for the early Church. To do this, they need proper and ongoing theological instruction; they need to realize that they are only at the beginning of the spiritual journey despite experiencing eye-catching phenomena that can lead them to believe otherwise. Finally, they need good spiritual directors who know how to lead them onward into true mystical prayer, which was the foundation on which the early Christian Church was founded, and the daily commitment to personal prayer that was mandatory in the early Church.
