1999 Conference Speaker's Texts

 

Achieving Spiritual Maturity: A Necessary Step in the Pursuit of Global Justice|
Presentation of John J.McNeill

In Memory of my Sister, Sister Mary Sheila, OSF.

A priest/theologian/psychotherapist, in 1976 McNeill published "the Church and the Homosexual," a theological reevaluation of homosexuality. Silenced by the Vatican, he obeyed for nine years, then spoke out against church homophobia and was expelled from the Jesuits after 40 years. He recent autobiography is "Both Feet Firmly Planted in Midair: A Spiritual Journey.")

Before I begin my talk on spiritual maturity I would like to express my gratitude to God for several gifts, the most important is the gift of my sister. When I was four years old my mother died. My sister Marion, who was two years older than me took over. She became my mother, my protector, my best friend. Sis was my protector. On the way to and from school at St. Nicholas on Utica Street in Buffalo, Sis would put both our geography books in her book bag and swing them to clear a path if anyone confronted us. Whenever my report card was particularly bad, Sis would fake our stepmother's signature to save me from a beating. During the second world war while I was a prisoner of war, the only news my family had was that I was "missing in action". Sis prayed continuously for my safe return and urged all her fellow sisters, friends and students to pray for me. I attribute my safe delivery from prison camp to Sis' prayers.

Sis had a bone disease that caused her to spend much of her life in hospitals and her convent's infirmary. Sis once told me that she offered all her sufferings and prayers for my perseverance in the priesthood. At the time of the publication of my first book on homosexual issues, The Church and the Homosexual, I first came out of the closet on the Today Show with Tom Brokaw. I was told that I would be asked if I myself were gay. The only person I called ahead of time to warn that I intended to acknowledge my gayness was my sister. Her response was, "I've known that all along!"

When I began my ministry to gays and lesbians with Dignity New York Sis had a beautiful rainbow stole made for me and requested that I wear the stole whenever I preached to a gay audience. She also requested that I call her and give her the exact time I would be preaching or giving a retreat to gays and she would gather a group of elderly nuns to pray continuously that the Holy Spirit would use me to bring the message of God's love to my gay audience. For close to thirty years Sis was my partner in my ministry, Her and her companions' prayers made the presence of the Holy Spirit frequently palpable.

When Sis learned that I was to be expelled from the Jesuits because of my decision to continue my ministry to lesbians and gays, she entered into a prayerful discernment of spirits and asked God to send her a sign if my decision was in accord with the will of God. Two events happened that convinced her that that was the case. The first occurred while she was on retreat at the Jesuit retreat house at Guelph in Canada. An Episcopal priest approached her and asked her if she was my sister. She asked her to thank me for my book, The Church and the Homosexual. It had proved an invaluable resource for her in her work as pastor and psychotherapist. On another occasion a member of Sis' order returned from a mission in Africa where she worked in a hospital. Most of her co-workers were gay men and the Sister told my sister that she found my book a great help in understanding and being able to work comfortably with gay men. Sis took these and other events as signs from God that she could continue to give my ministry complete support.

While on her annual retreat at Guelph in the late 1980s, Sis had a profound spiritual experience which I can only interpret as mystical. Sis was normally a very happy and positive person. On the first day of her retreat she found herself in a deep depression that felt like death itself. This depression lasted all day and no matter how hard she tried she could not lift it. Exhausted after spending the day in depressed suffering, she returned to her room and began to write in her diary the events, thoughts and feelings of that day. Suddenly she began to write rapidly, and she felt that someone else was using her hand to write. These were the words she read after the automatic writing ended:

Sheila, don't be afraid of death. I have freed you of many things, so you can prayerfully prepare for my kingdom. Have no fear because your goodness and love for me have far outweighed your faults and mistakes.
Continue to love me with your great love and the generosity of your life that you have given to me. You are beautiful to me. I love you with a deep love because you have accepted my will. I will continue to love and bless you. Do not be afraid. I will be with you always to give you the courage and strength you need,

My sister told me that, from that moment the depression lifted and she experienced a wonderful joy and lightness of heart and felt ready for anything that might come along. Not long after, Sis began a fight with cancer that would continue to her death in 1996. She told a spiritual friend that she understood the automatic writing event as her equivalent of the apostle's experience at the transfiguration. God was calling her to a special ministry of suffering in union with the sufferings of Jesus on the cross and through her sufferings she could bring God's grace down on those in need. Sis once shared with me a passage in her spiritual reading that meant a great deal to her:

Once we know that suffering has a purpose, or at least that we can believe that there is a meaning to it, we can endure much worse. This is the Gospel message--that suffering need not be a loss. People can grow better through suffering, and can also become beautiful, and the latter serves as a grace to others. Their suffering has made them transparent, more open, wise and gentle. In them we see the fruitfulness of the cross. Pain can glorify us, make us radiant and give a fruitfulness to our lives.

I had the blessing of being able to visit Sis in her infirmary just a few days before her death as I was on my way to the '96 Call to Actions national meeting in Detroit. Sis died the night before I gave my first talk and I was able to ask my audience to pray with me for the repose of her soul.
I am certain that Sis is still very much with all of us here today and requesting effectively that the Holy Spirit be with us in this room.

In Gratitude for Charlie:

The second special gift that I want to thank God for is the loving committed relation I have had with Charles Chiarelli for the past thirty four years. Thanks to the presence of Charlie in my life I can speak not just objectively about the goodness and holiness of gay love but out of a profound and beautiful experience of gay love. I met Charlie at the St. Charles bar in Toronto 34 years ago. His steady and committed love for me made me aware that I was lovable and allowed me to give up my relationship with God based on fear and began to experience my relationship with God as one of gratuitous love. I could not have carried on my ministry to gay and lesbians for the past thirty years without the constant support of Charlie's love.

Maturity and the Church of the Holy Spirit

Let me share my joyful enthusiasm for what I sense as the extraordinary outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the world and particularly on the Church over the past few decades in many different ways. A prophetic Cistertian Abbot in Italy named Joachim of Flores in the early thirteenth century foresaw the total transformation of the Catholic Church as it existed in his time. and the dawn of an extraordinary outpouring of the Holy Spirit. He prophesied that that there would be a new form of spiritual life.in which the Holy Spirit would speak directly to the human heart without ecclesiastical mediation. His believed that there is a sequence of historic stages in the Trinitarian God's self-revelation over time. The first stage of that self-revelation was the stage of the Father, the law of Moses and the people of Israel. The second was the stage of the Son, the New Testament and the Church. He said the third will be the age of the Holy Spirit, when the Church "becoming superfluous would in time dissolve."

I think that this third stage is what is going on in the Church today. I don't see the Church dissolving, but I do see it being transformed into a Church of the Holy Spirit, a purely democratic Church . The task of anyone who has a leadership position in the Church of the Holy Spirit is to listen, just listen to what the Holy Spirit is saying through the people of God.

During the years of my psychotherapy practice with gays and lesbians, I made the discovery that the Holy Spirit was most powerfully present with the twelve step groups working miracles there of healing and curing in the basement of the Church and very seldom did I find the Holy Spirit as effectively present upstairs in the sanctuary. Why is the Holy Spirit there? Because these people meet together as equals, men and women, gay and straight. There is no hierarchy. They share from the heart and they listen to each other with respect and act as total equals. They are a perfect example of what Elizabeth Johnson writes about in her book, Friends of God and Prophets; A Feminist Theological Reading of the Communion of Saints.

So what is the Holy Spirit up to in our lives and in our Church?

Every one of us is characterized by a ravenous spiritual hunger. There is a hunger for intimacy with God. We know that God is not there as an object but we are there for each other and it is in our reaching out in compassionate love to each other that we experience the presence of God as subject. Frequently, that hunger is a consciously felt need and for many of us it takes a religious form, a searching through prayer and loving action to achieve intimacy with the Holy Spirit. My favorite philosopher-theologian Maurice Blondel once wrote: "Our God dwells within us. The only way we can become one with that God is to become one with the authentic self." There is no other way. If you are gay or lesbian this is a liberating message. You have to be authentically a gay or a lesbian and then you can develop a spiritual life of intimacy with God. When I place an action that is authentic to me, my spirit becomes one with the Holy Spirit., especially if that action is one of genuine compassionate love. Then I am one with the Spirit and when I am one with the spirit, I am total and I will be filled with joy and peace.. And it through these feelings of joy and peace that God speaks to me.

The abbot of the Benedictine abbey in West Park, NY once used the image of a river of water and a stone in the river blocking and controlling the flow of the water as an image of the relationship of the Holy Spirit and the institutional church. The water over time builds up against the stone and eventually begins flowing over and around the stone. When that happens the institution picks itself up and moves further upstream to block the flow again.. This is what I like to call, using a football metaphor, the "end run" of the Spirit. As I see it we can discern the Spirit making innumerable end runs around the institutional church and these end runs give us insight into the future democratic Church of the Holy Spirit coming into being.

The first of these end runs has to do with the gradual disappearance of confession over the past twenty years and its gradual replacement with "spiritual direction." The traditional practice of going to confession on Saturday was frequently based in a pathological relation to God as a God of fear, shame and guilt. Whereas spiritual direction is based in an understanding of our relationship with God as one of love. Further, in my experience women frequently make the best spiritual directors and there is no need of clerical status. Any lay person can provide this service.

The second end run has to do with the disappearance of clergy in the Church. Because we have a stubborn Pope who refuses to ordain married men or women, clergy are rapidly dying out and very few young men are replacing them. The clerical state was a status symbol. It referred to those who could read and write which made them superior to the illiterate laymen and available for ordination. The Church in many areas of the world is rapidly becoming a lay church of equals, which, I believe, is what Christ intend it to be. I forsee that in the Church of the future the local community will select its pastor through a discernment process and bring that person the Spirit designates as their leader to the Bishop for ordination. That person could be a man or woman, married or single, gay or straight.

Still another end run has to do with dialogue as equals with all the major world religions. After centuries of claiming to be the only true religion, a statement in the documents of Vatican II that each of the world's major religions has their special share in the Spirit of God, has led theologians such as Jacque Dupuis in India to suggest a dialogue with the other religious traditions to share our mutual gifts of the Spirit. Of course the Vatican is investigating Dupuis' writings. Most major monastic centers in the West have entered into dialogue with their Eastern peers.

Another end run has to do with prayer life. That sharing of gifts has already begun. The Institutional Church always mistrusted and put down any form of mystical prayer as a threat to its control. A recent example of that was the Vatican critique of the writings of Anthony DeMello, S.J. on prayer life. About twenty-five years ago all the great Eastern spiritual traditions, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufiism, began to send missionaries to the West to teach us techniques of meditation leading to enlightenment. Now every major city and region has centers to train people in techniques of meditation that can lead into mystical experience.

And another end run. Just as the Church denied ordination to women, women's liberation took place. And since feminaphobia is the basic root of homophobia, women's liberation is the first major step to gay and lesbian liberation.. In the past twenty years we have seen an extraordinary development of feminine theology and spirituality, a body of work revealing the feminine side of God. This has opened up for all of us the possibility of being totally human in our spiritual life, totally in touch with all that is masculine and feminine in each one of us, male and female alike. Two books I read this summer and especially recommend are Joan Chittister's Heart of Flesh, A Feminist Spirituality for Women and Men and the Johnson book I mentioned earlier, Friends of God and Prophets: A Feminist Theological Reading of the Communion of Saints.

Finally, just as the institutional Church is emphasizing its condemnation and hostility to homosexuality, a gay spiritual movement has emerged all over the world, As Jacque Perotti, the founder of David and Jonathan for French speaking gay Catholic, expressed it: " There has been a declic, a special moment in history, a revelation of the slow emergence of a positive homosexual identity from the heart of the world. After so many ages of rejection, destruction and intimidation, a wind of freedom has begun to blow."

The Holy Spirit: Founder of a Democratic Church

What I see as the most important end run of the Holy Spirit in today's Church has to do with the development in the Church of mature spirituality based on freedom of conscience and discernment of Spirits. This insight is the primary fruit of over thirty years of ministry to lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered men and women. My initial years of work in gay ministry as a priest and psychotherapist, helping to found Dignity in New York City, made me keenly aware of the enormous amount of psychological trauma and potential emotional breakdown present in many Christian gays and lesbians. I became aware that most lesbian and gay people who came to me for counseling had interiorized Church teaching on homosexuality.

The result was deep psychic woundedness, self-hatred and the tendency to base their relationship with God on fear. Most gays see themselves created with their orientation by God. To tell them, then, as the Vatican has, that their God-given orientation is an "orientation to evil", they hear that as saying that God created them with their desire to reach out in love as a profound evil. We read in Scripture that God is love, and if anyone loves they know God. But the Church's message to gays and lesbians is: If you reach out in love to each other, you are guilty of serious sin. Gays and lesbians hear this as saying that God is sadistic. Such a God can be related to only out of fear and if perfect love casts out all fear, it is equally true that perfect fear casts out all love. So it quickly became apparent that what was so destructive psychologically had to be bad theology. If lesbians and gays are to have a healthy and holy life, they have to break off their dependence on the extrinsic authority of the Church and develop a mature spirituality.

I found my ministry as a gay man, priest and psychotherapist beautifully expressed in this Lenten collect: Lord, help us to embrace the world you have given us, and change the darkness of its pain into the life and joy of Easter. The world that God asked me to embrace was the gay world! I entered into psychotherapy to deal with my own psychic traumas and I dedicated my personal spiritual life to the task of developing that mature spirituality. In the course of my ministry I wrote three books attempting to spell out what that psychological and spiritual maturity meant and how to go about that growth, The Church and the Homosexual (1976), Taking a Chance on God: Liberating Theology for Gays, Lesbians, and their Lovers, Families and Friends(1988) and Freedom, Glorious Freedom: The Spiritual Journey to the Fullness of Life for Gays, Lesbians and Everybody Else.(1995). This past year, 1998, I published my autobiography: Both Feet Firmly Planted in Midair: My Spiritual Journey.

How can we develop a mature spiritual life? I want to put the emphasis on mature because as I see it the Church is twenty going on twenty one, which is the age of maturity. There is not just our individual growth to maturity; there is the development of humanity and the Church into a mature stage, and I believe that is happening. The possibility is opening up of a real spiritual maturity for every human being on the face of the earth.

It is very important for us to understand what that maturity is and what direction things have to move in. A healthy maturing process is one by which we separate off from all dependence on external authority and achieve genuine authenticity as autonomous self-directed human beings. We must make our own choices and take responsibility for those choices. None of us should any longer be what I call "Eichman Christians". You remember that in his trial, Eichman argued that he was brought up to be a good Lutheran and his primary responsibility as a good Lutheran was to obey authority. Legitimate authority ordered him to put all those Jews in the gas ovens. As a good Christian he obeyed. That was his defense.

The authentic Christian message is that God speaks to you directly and immediately in your own experience. You must discern what God is saying to you and take total responsibility for your own actions You can't put them off on any external authority. Mommy and Daddy told me! That's all right for children, but once you are an adult you have no excuse. You must discern carefully what action is in accord with the Spirit of God dwelling within you. Think of it. If this practice was widespread it would eliminate all dangers of atomic warfare, ethnic cleansing, etc. If Christians were mature, nobody could order them to do those things. But we are still at that immature stage of obeying external authority. So, how important it is for all of us to mature!

Saint Bernard of Clairveau made this beautiful observation about our spiritual life, "Spiritual life is like living water that springs up from the very depths of our own personal spiritual experience. In spiritual life everyone has to drink from his or her own well." The first mark then, of a healthy adult spiritual life is that it will be based primarily on personal experience. People use to live their spiritual lives in a community where every thing was decided for them from without and all they had to do was obey and conform. That is quickly disappearing and everyone is thrown back on his or her own life, choices, experience and sense of values. Viktor Frankl argues in his book, Flight From Freedom, that many people fear the responsibility of freedom and would gladly give up their freedom for the security of a provident leader. Paul in Galatians: 5:1 urges us: "For freedom Christ has set us free, Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery." More than 30 years ago, Karl Rahner wrote that all the normal supports of Christian faith are fast going away and unless Christians based their faith on personal experience, on a "mystical" experience of the presence of God there will be no Christians at all.

As children we had to obey mother and father. We were under authority and it was legitimate to obey it. But when we mature that is no longer legitimate. We can no longer base our lives on extrinsic authority.. We have to base them on our own personal experience.. We are intensely aware that if our parents had been infallible we could never have grown up and matured to become autonomous and responsible adults. We would never been able to develop our own capacity for independent judgment and, consequently, never feel personal responsibility for our actions... We had to take distance from their authority and make our own choices. This was part of our growing up. God blessed us with fallible parents so that we could mature.

Now God has blessed us Roman Catholics with fallible Church authority. There is the blessing of fallibility. In recent years, every time the Church tries to give an order to the whole Church, it frequently falls flat on its face. It refuses to listen and, as the saying goes, it just doesn't get it. The Holy Spirit, I believe, is very much involved in this, and the result is that fewer and fewer people listen to the Church. It has diminished its moral authority. For example, the Church authorities say that artificial birth control is a serious sin. A committee was set up and after listening to the laity the committee advised the Pope and the Vatican that they should change this teaching. Rome refused to listen to what the Holy Spirit was saying through the people of God, so now ninety to ninety five percent of the faithful practice artificial birth control in good conscience. Another example, when the American bishops decided to write a letter on the role of women in the Church, they set up listening sessions for women all over the USA. They produced an excellent letter continuing the results of those sessions. The Vatican returned the letter to the American hierarchy with the statement: You misunderstood your task! Your task is to teach and not to listen!

The same thing has happened in the gay and lesbian community which for the most part has already been liberated from extrinsic Church authority. The Church's message to the gay community is psychologically so bad that we knew that if we obeyed the Church's teaching we would destroy ourselves psychologically and spiritually and we know that God doesn't want us to destroy ourselves. What is bad psychology has to be bad theology. So we don't owe obedience to Church authority when we see it clearly in contradiction to God's will. Our primary authority is the will of God and the will of God manifests itself to us through our experience. If we prayerfully open up and ask the Holy Spirit to guide us and lead us, then we will understand what God wants from us through our own experience.

This whole theme of maturity and liberation was one of the primary themes of Jesus at the last supper. At one point he said, "It is necessary that I should go away in order for the Spirit to come." That statement always intrigued me. You can pass over that quickly and just see succession, Jesus dies and then Pentecost Sunday. No, Jesus is saying much more than that; there is some necessity here in relation to the maturing of his disciples, that he had to die and go away. Jesus was pointing out that his followers must detach themselves from their dependence on his external presence and prepare themselves to receive the Spirit of Christ who will dwell in their hearts. Again he said to them, "But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your hearts. Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth."(John 16:6-13)

Jesus is expressing his need to be a fallible parent in order for his followers to mature; he needed in some sense to fail in order for his disciples to mature and move on to the next stage of their spiritual life where their authority is no longer Jesus outside themselves but the Spirit dwelling in their hearts. A central Christian teaching attributed to Jesus himself is without doubt of utmost importance for all of us, especially those who are gay and lesbian. And that is the teaching on freedom of conscience. That teaching was expressed anew in a powerful way in the documents of Vatican II:

Every human being has in his or her heart a law written by God. To obey that law is the dignity of the human. According to that law we will be judged. There we are alone with God, whose voice echoes in our depths.(The Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World)

Listen to that carefully! Where do you turn to find out what God wants of you? You turn in prayer and you listen and you ask God, if you are about to make a choice, to give you that peace and joy if what you are about to do is in harmony with the Spirit of God. And you will know with a certitude because that comes from your direct communication with God. God speaks to us primarily through our emotions.( I earned seven different degrees before I found out that God speaks to us directly through our emotions. I found out the hard way.) Many of you, especially the women, seem to clue into that immediately and are aware that God speaks to them profoundly in their feelings and emotions and they can hear God at any time. You have to ask God to speak to you. God wants to be invited in. As soon as we turn in prayer to God and ask, "Lord grant me the grace to know your will and the courage be able to do it." God will give you that grace and courage. Then everyone of us is his or her own authority and legitimately so. This is how Christ intended it to be,

In fact, the Church of the Holy Spirit is a Church of equals. Paul sees the gift of the Holy Spirit as a fulfillment of this prophesy of Jeremiah: "This is the new covenant I will make after those days. I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts: and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, Know the Lord. For they shall all know me from the least to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquities and remember their sins no more."

Notice that Jeremiah foresees the new covenant where every human being from the least to the greatest will have direct access to a God who dwells in their heart. This access to God will not be the privilege of a few who are gifted with extraordinary intelligence, or ritual rank, or even special holiness. The Holy Spirit is a thoroughgoing respecter of democratic process.

In the Acts of the Apostles on Pentecost Sunday, Peter recalls these words of the prophet Joel: "In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters will prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit and they shall prophecy." (Acts 2:17-18).

With the death of Jesus, then, and the coming of the Spirit, the apostles received a challenge as well as an opportunity to mature. They had to give up the security of a provident leader, they had to find out what God wanted from them from within themselves and their own experience. It was only after the coming of the Holy Spirit that the apostles found the courage to leave the security of their closet (the upper room) and go out into the world as responsible adult agents of the Holy Spirit.

In like manner in our spiritual life we must grow out of a passive dependent role in the Church to an active and creative one.. We have a special need to become mature, self-motivated, autonomous people, no longer dependent on outside sources for a sense of our identity and well-being. We must not let our enemies outside ourselves define us; we must let the Spirit of love that dwells within our hearts define us. If we approach Church authorities, it should not be to get an approval which they cannot and frequently will not give us. Rather, it should be to bear witness to what the Holy Spirit is saying to us through our experience.

Liberation from injustice and oppression is a true value of the Gospel. However, we must become aware that Christian freedom comes from within through identity with the Spirit of God. We must realize that that freedom is something to be claimed, not something that is granted by external authority. We must listen to the Spirit within us, listen to the voice of the oppressed around us, and then act for human rights and equality.

First of all, any authority that exists in our spiritual community must be someone who is tuned in and listening. The Church has to become a listening Church. And it has to become a totally democratic Church with no caste system, no higher and lower. Everyone totally equal; everyone possessing the divine within themselves. Everyone an authority. For example, who knows what God wants from gays and lesbians? Obviously only gay and lesbians. So no one can tell us from outside; we are alone in knowing that our love for each other contains the divine Spirit and brings that kind of peace and joy that indicates the presence of the Spirit. We know when that's there and when it is not there. .Therefore, it is up to Church authorities to come to us and ask, "What is God saying to you?" Listen carefully and learn what the Holy Spirit is saying through the people of God. We must never go to Church authorities to ask them what God wants of us. We must listen to the Spirit dwelling in our hearts to learn what God wants of us! Go to Church authorities, then, to bear witness of what God is saying to you through your experience. This represents a total reversal of authority. Authority is with the individual and with groups that gather together and through prayer carefully discern what God is saying to them and bring that message back to the Church. and ask the Church to help in that discerning process. This is the new Church that is coming into being and it is coming into being very rapidly.

It is this understanding of the role of the Holy Spirit that gives me real consolation during these times when the institutional Church frequently reacts to its gay members in ignorance and downright hostility. I believe that the Holy Spirit is using the fallibility of our religious authorities to guide the entire Christian community into a new level of maturity and responsibility necessary for the spiritual growth of the human community in today's world.

There are two ways to relate to the Church that are both immature; that is to be in the Church as an uncritical lover or as an unloving critic. Either of these paths leads to the destruction of the Church. And there are two mature ways to belong to the democratic Church of the Spirit, as a critical lover or a loving critic. The primary responsibility of members of the democratic Church of the Spirit is to become people of deep prayer, seeking constantly to hear what the Spirit says to them through their experience. The primary responsibility of authority in the Church of the Spirit is to listen to what the Spirit is saying to them through the experience of the people of God. (This Church would call for a complete restructuring of all channels of authority).

Every time the present institutional Church tries to exercise what is popularly referred to as "creeping infallibility," it tends to issue authoritative statements that are out of touch with the experience of the people of God.. This is especially true in the area of sexual ethics. The hierarchy seems more concerned with preserving the authority of the institution and its traditions than with promoting the true happiness and well-being, both psychological and spiritual, of the faithful. The result is that the faithful, following the guidance of the Spirit within, are "non-receptive" of authoritarian Church teaching. A perfect example of this was the Church's teaching on artificial means of birth control. The most recent example of this was the reaction to the Vatican's silencing of the voices of Jeannine Gramick and Robert Nugent in New Ways Ministry.

We must learn then to drink from our own wells. We must learn to place our trust in our own direct experience of life and what those experiences reveal to us. We must trust that God speaks to us immediately and directly through our own experiences and that these experiences are the only "unpolluted water" from which we can drink This is the ancient Christian doctrine of "discernment of spirits" The way to know God and to become intimate with God is to listen prayerfully to what your own feelings are telling you. God speaks to us primarily not through our intellect but through our hearts, that is, through our emotions, and it is by listening with our hearts that we can hear what God is saying to us. The theologians of the middle ages had a saying: "You can grasp God with your mind, never! You can grasp God with your heart, ever!"

If your experience brings with it feelings of deep peace, quiet and joy, then you know that the message coming through your heart is God saying to you, "Right on! You are one with the Spirit of God and there is growth in intimacy between us". However, if you perform an action that contradicts the Spirit of God dwelling in your heart, then you will know turmoil, depression and sadness.

Vaclav Havel believes that the development of a free conscience is essential to the development of competent political and religious leaders in the future. These are the words he addressed he spoke to a joint session of the United States Congress:

Souls, individual spirituality, first hand personal insight into things, the courage to be yourself and go the way your conscience points, humility in the face of the mysterious order of being, confidence in its natural direction, and, above all, trust in your own subjectivity as your principle link with the subjectivity of the world--these are the qualities the politicians of the future must cultivate.

I would like to end with a special prayer to the Holy Spirit for a new Pentecost for the Church we love; that all of us authorities and faithful alike, may with God's grace be fully open to the message the Spirit is speaking in our hearts and be open to what the Spirit is saying through all the people of God and, especially, the outcasts.

Veni Creator Spiritus! Mentes tuorum visita! Imple superna gratia, quae tu creasti, pectora!
Come Holy Spirit and fill our hearts with the Spirit of divine love!