I have always agreed with the Anglican priest and theologian Kenneth Leech who writes that an authentic spirituality is one that necessarily points people in the direction of reality and equips them in some way to move consciously and faithfully in that direction. We live in a culture that is almost pathologically designed to steer us away from reality, away from the big questions and lurking dangers within which meaning and maturity reside.

Religion, as it is practiced in our ecclesial communities, is also guilty at times of perpetuating the same harmful avoidance. Here the evasion is more pronounced, inexcusable, and unfortunate. Religion often serves to help persons in one way or another to dodge reality either by packaging and peddling easy answers to ineffable questions, by warding off the dangers (or if you prefer demons) inherent in any awakened, mature spiritual quest, or by refusing to let go of certain aspects of unquestioned codes and inherited heirlooms that each religious tradition has that do not resonate with our lived experience, connect us to mystery, or truly enliven. Lest organized religions be saddled alone with this indictment, many New Age movements whose practitioners pride themselves in not being bound to any creedal or organized religion are equally if not more prone to ways of being in the world that are in practice evasions from the dilemmas, struggles, injustices, and catastrophes included in daily life,

Whether you call it authentic religion or authentic spirituality, prayer is an essential dimension and so must be authentic itself. Mature prayer always directly or indirectly guides us toward facing and engaging in reality. This is what makes it both human and holy. Anything that is called prayer that helps people, personally or communally, to minimize, avoid, flee, reject, varnish, or cosmeticize reality is a poor imitation and an affront to the prayer of Jesus which was always an incarnational and conscious act of engagement with the actual, existential, and historical situations which confronted him.

The other day I was blessed by an experience of authentic communal prayer. I am still recovering from it (or hoping that I don’t). The liturgy was as powerful as it was understated. There were no bells and whistles, no flash, no platitudes that pain more than comfort. We didn’t gather in a chapel or church but in the room where the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange normally gather for their meals. The circumstance that quickly brought community members, friends, and coworkers together was the news that one of the pastoral caregivers to the sisters at the Regina Community (herself a sister from a Midwest religious community) had been diagnosed with stage 4 metastasized lung cancer. We were gathering to bless her, to acknowledge that she has blessed us by her wisdom and compassionate presence, to anoint her with oil, to say goodbye, and to pledge our care for her as she returned home to her community and as she took (in her words) the next steps in her dance with and toward God.

What moved me the most, what seemed so pronounced despite being so simple was the sheer honesty – the honesty of why we were there, the honesty of the prayers that expressed both love and sadness, the truthfulness only symbols like fragrant oil and tender touch can convey, and especially the candor of the woman herself who so nobly spoke of the shock and the all-too-real struggle and suffering that lay ahead for her.

Again, it wasn’t so much her composure that moved me as it was her courage — expressed in simple straightforward words — to face directly in our presence and on our behalf the unvarnished reality of her situation. In his book A Roman Catholic Theology of Pastoral Care, the late Franciscan priest Regis Duffy asserts that if we consciously or unconsciously assign a magical understanding of the anointing of the sick to some ninth inning attempt to save people from the fires of hell or a last ditch effort to wipe away a lifetime of misdeeds that we miss a fundamental reason for anointing the sick, especially those who are gravely ill: that is, to give them the courage to face into their deaths and to die well, to give them strength to offer their lives as an example to the rest of the community of how to die in faith (and here we have to be careful that this doesn’t translate into a caricature of saccharin peacefulness or the association of integrity or bravery with a stiff upper lip). Dying honestly is perhaps our final and most fecund prayer, and quite possibly our greatest testament of how to live.

When we come together like this, I thought, when we gather this honestly, this frightened, this hopefully, exposed to the unknown, vulnerable to the sadness, open to the love that permeates this room, and bring the maddening mystery of it all to the Mystery that connects us one to another – then the Christian community is being who it is called and intended to be.♦